Quote:
Originally Posted by DGthe3
my turn to play devils advocate . . .
Nuclear is great, but what do you do with the waste? Sure its alot less than the ash comming from coal, but America doesn't have a solution to store the waste it currently produces. Increase that by 5x and you will have more serious problems than greenpeace protesting ANWR. Speaking of which, the public opinion of nuclear isn't that high (however misguided). Those who know about nuclear power know its extremely safe, but the public typically cares about what happens when something goes wrong not how likely that event is.
As far as drilling your own reserves, what do you do when they run low after a couple decades of fueling America?
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LOL...well, we seem to be pretty good at hitting Mars, so why not barrel it up, and launch one shot a month or so towards Mars? If it misses, it's headed further out anyway....
Or, since either McCain or Obama will be letting all the Mexicans in here legally, how about we just ship the waste down to Mexico and bury it or stack the barrels up on their southern border to keep the central americans from coming in....
Sure, there are issues dealing with the waste, I won't deny that, but we don't really have to worry about them. We also don't have to worry about the environmental issues that come up when talking about drilling our own oil. The tree-huggers and our own government won't ever let any of that happen.
And, you want to talk about costs? With all the survey requirements, permits, studies, etc that the government makes a company go through, they will be $10B into it before they ever get to pump a barrel of oil to a refinery. Who knows what a new nuclear plant costs now. Our own government has done a fantastic job of blocking our own progress (no, not the Bush administration, our government as a whole....this has been going on for over 30 years).
If they could just get out of the way of progress (of course, what's the opposite of "pro"..."con", so what's the opposite of "progress"...), maybe the brilliant people and the hard working people of this country could get some shit done.
Why won't we drill our own oil? Crap, we're letting Cuba drill our oil for themselves, why shouldn't we do it? Cuba is drilling less than 3 miles off the coast of Florida and taking the oil and the profits with them. That's our oil, but our own regulations won't let us go after it.
Does drilling our own oil get us foreign oil independent forever? No. It does however suddenly make their oil worth less. If we would start drilling our own, prices would come down just so they could sell it. Oh, and if we stopped buying so much of it from them, it wouldn't take long before they were knocking on our doors begging us to buy it. Sure China's buying a lot now....but, that won't continue forever (even less time if we would start taxing their imported crap properly...different topic for a different thread). Their economies would crumble. They wouldn't be able to support terrorists either. See, drilling our own oil has national security implications as well.