Quote of the day

[LA Ute]

"Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the 'Zero-Infinity Dilemma.' The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable -- but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn't be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn't melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that's a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion"

-- Peter Huber, writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. It's a good read; I recommend it.

[RobinFinderson]

Nuclear power has long been debated among greens. The debate has always measured the potentially catastrophic outcome of a meltdown against the guaranteed damage of carbon emissions. Convention is shifting toward the use of nuclear power (I have been a long-time supporter of nuclear) as models demonstrate that even a worst case scenario can be managed better than the guaranteed harm of carbon emissions. But the worst case scenario (a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl) still doesn't take into account an organized terrorist attack against multiple reactors.

Anyhow, nuclear power can be very green and it gets my support as a viable stopgap while we switch to Hydrogen and Wind/Solar/Geothermal/Hydro/Wave/Tidal/Bio.

[il Padrino Ute]

Freaking hippies.