In some sense the public pays either way. It's a question of whether the cost is explicit, and included in the rate paid for the electricity, or hidden and deferred, in which case the public ends up paying in the form of higher taxes -- and does not get a choice about whether it was a good idea in the first place.
Should the public pay for cleaning up an oil spill, or should the oil company (and its investors and insurers) responsible for the problem bear the cost? Hint: if there are no consequences to a spill, the industry will operate unsafely, as it increases profit.
Oh, please. Coal and natural gas are widely used because they are low tech and relatively plentiful, and very profitable for the megacorporation lucky enough to own the lease. The downsides to using coal are well known. What are you going to do when coal and uranium run out? I'm sure you don't care, but the rest of humanity does.
You lack imagination. California now generates 1GW from rooftop solar. There's no magical fairies involved. That's without trying very hard, and we're at the beginning of the solar boom.
Transitioning to renewable is not a wishful alternative. Actually, it's absolutely necessary for our survival.
The question should also be broadened to include cost effectiveness. When you consider the incredibly high capital cost and long time to plan and build plants, the environmental impact of mining and long term spent fuel storage, large scale centralized industrial operations (which increases cost of transmission), and need for heightened security, nuclear starts to look a whole lot less attractive.
You make an incorrect inference. Past non-failure does not predict future failure. Past reasons for nuclear failure were unanticipated, or considered low risk; yet they happened.
As far as Fukushima, it also proved that humans often fail to understand what makes a good or a bad idea. You, however, have not shown that a similar error in judgement has not been made at other power plants.
In fact, the industry is well known for construction problems, cutting corners to save a few bucks, lax self-policing, insufficient training, and foisting the cost of cleanup and spent fuel storage on the public.
Um, you do benefit from the schooling for others that your taxes pay for, indirectly, in the form of a generally better economy. In fact those people your taxes helped educate will have higher income, which means they will pay more taxes than if they did not have that education, which means that they will (disproportionately to your contribution), help pay for roads you drive on, your retirement, your children's education (should you have any), and your common defense.
The same principle applies to elementary through high school education. You wouldn't seriously suggest that we the People shouldn't have a public education system? Maybe you would, if you're hard core libertarian, or religious conservative... in which case you're squarely and completely in the minority, which is as it should be.
Have you even been to collage? What idiot makes the implication that tuition is the expensive part? Thats the smallest part!
Ad hominem much? I have not been to collage [sic].
However, I went to, and graduated from, UC. And over in the fact based part of reality, tuition is indeed the most expensive part of education. Let's review the evidence...
- Stanford tuition at ~43K/year is much more than the $6K you'd pay for housing, the next highest cost.
Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.
Let's do an actual comparison: UC versus Stanford.... Undergrad tuition UC $13,200 for residents, $36,078 out of state, vs $13,350 quarterly for Stanford = $42,270 yearly. So the out-of-state tuition for UC is fairly comparable to Stanford. I don't see how Stanford is profiting heavily... although they are charging 9% more, we'd have to compare whether they provide a better education for the money, etc. However this does not demonstrate that government subsidies for student loans/pell grants inflate Stanford's pricing, nor that government is more efficient at providing a university education. You might then argue that state subsidy of the resident tuition causes out-of-state tuition to inflate, but you'd be hard pressed to actually prove that.
The unfortunate actual issue is that UC tuition has risen quickly over recent years as the state has been unwilling to fully fund it.
Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.
Let's do an actual comparison: UC versus Stanford.... Undergrad tuition UC $13,200 for residents, $36,078 out of state, vs $13,350 quarterly for Stanford = $42,270 yearly.
So the out-of-state tuition for UC is fairly comparable to Stanford. I don't see how Stanford is profiting heavily... although they are charging 9% more, we'd have to compare whether they provide a better education for the money, etc. However this does not demonstrate that government subsidies for student loans/pell grants inflate Stanford's pricing, nor that government is more efficient at providing a university education. You might then argue that state subsidy of the resident tuition causes out-of-state tuition to inflate, but you'd be hard pressed to actually prove that.
The unfortunate actual issue is that UC tuition has risen quickly over recent years as the state has been unwilling to fully fund it.
In some circumstances, an officer has a right to search your car/house/person/phone without a warrant if they have probable cause that you have broken a law. So it depends on the situation.
Bollocks. You are implying that the same dollar that the corporation made in profit is taxed twice. It is not. The corporation's dollar in profit stays in the corporation. The individual's capital gains dollar comes from whoever paid a dollar more for the stock once it is sold.
There is only an indirect relationship between corporate profits and individual capital gains. I can for example own stock in a corporation that made billions in profit yet paid $0 in corporate taxes, that stock may have gone up several hundred percent.
Sales tax is the most regressive form of taxation in the United States. If sales tax is 30%, that means the poorest of the poor are paying an effective tax rate of 30%, because they need to spend every penny they make in order to survive.
You are forgetting that not every item sold is taxable. Food, drugs, and items purchased with food stamps can be a large part of a poor person's budget, and they are not subject to sales tax.
> Democrats want less government spending as a percentage of GDP [1]. The TEA Party wants to destroy government [2], unions [3], and the US economy [4].
While human deaths are clearly bad, they are not the only metric with which we need to judge the scale of a catastrophe. There is the economic cost, directly due to the loss of electricity generation, and indirectly due to other countries recommending against visiting Japan. There is the continued risk management (read: people risking their lives to mitigate the disaster and the enormous expense of containment). There is the as yet unknown impact on the environment. Thousands of people may be permanently displaced (though sadly they have nothing to return to anyway). The effect on the rest of the world is real, many important Japanese products are in short supply or out of production.
Libya, in contrast, is a dusty outpost bombing themselves from the 9th century to the 8th century and has little effect on the world other than a slight disruption in oil supply. (Apologies to all free Libyans).
Fukushima will be a disaster for years to come. This is what the media is talking about.
The whole thing is a caution-outrage spiral; public concern creates the need for immensely cautious evacuation, which creates more public concern.
No. The concern is not over what has happened. It's over what might happen.... IF pumps to cool the core and spent rods fail, which they did, multiple times. IF containment fails, which it did. IF highly radioactive water leaks into the ocean, which we now learn did happen. All of these things were not supposed to happen, yet they did. People are risking their lives and improvising 24/7 to fix problems that were never anticipated. If any of those efforts fail, the disaster, already bad, gets much worse. And the plants are actually pretty close to major population centers. What's next? Nobody actually knows. Your precious safety record is preserved only by incredible effort applied to contain "problems" when they occur. What's the cost to clean all this up, in relation to the amount of benefit gained from the plants? How many years will Fukushima be a ghost town because of this incident?
One wonders, how safe would fossil fuels be if we spent real money to ensure their safety (as much regulation as nuclear, for example)? Requiring scrubbers, retiring dirty plants, etc.
Your previous post stated "Statistically, major incidents included, nuclear remains the safest form of electricity production known". You are drawing an incorrect conclusion from a statistically small sample. There aren't that many nuclear plants and they're relatively new. Most plants are well regulated, but there have been many near disasters in the past; we've been lucky. And your rosy outlook doesn't include a future where proliferation allows bad people to get ahold of nuclear material (Iran). Fast forward a few hundred years, and statistics shows there will be many more disasters, whose effects we cannot know because the failure modes will all be new. Fast forward a couple hundred thousand years, when the waste from existing plants still needs to be sequestered, at enormous cost. From that vantage point, nuclear doesn't look so good.
Engineering can only cope with the known. Airplanes are safe because we investigate and learn from past crashes. We cannot afford to go through this process with nuclear. If a nuclear plant is subjected to a natural disaster outside of its engineered ability to withstand the stress, what happens next? Experts in the field don't know, or their warnings are overridden by executives who don't want to pay the bills to mitigate "improbable" risks. Then when the disaster happens, they start by covering it up and minimizing the bad news. And that is what prompts evacuations, and concern about the use of nuclear power in general.
Since WWII, Federal revenue has been 18-19% of GDP, no matter what the tax rates were. This suggests that increasing taxes will not significantly increase the amount of money that the federal government collects. If increasing taxes will not increase the percentage of GDP that the federal government collects in revenue (which historical figures suggest is indeed the case), I do not see how increasing taxes will help reduce the deficit.
You are not being factual here. This shows federal revenue varying from 14.4% to 20.4% over that period. That's quite a bit different than 18-19%, which sounds flat. It was not flat.
The highest personal marginal tax rates did vary significantly, from 94% in 1945 to 35% today, but this does not shed light on the subject as it's only one of a large number of contributing variables.
Of particular note, the revenue as a % of gdp dropped from 20.6 in 2000 to 14.9 in 2009. That's quite a significant drop. Combine that with increased apparent spending, which went from 18% of gdp in 2000 to 24% of gdp in 2010 (primarily because of large drop in gdp in 2008-9 due to the recession), and you have a problem.
Back to your point. You were implying that there is a causal relationship between federal receipts and GDP, but your data was faulty. If no such link exists, then increasing taxes will indeed reduce the deficit. In fact, this is strongly suggested by the opposite case in the last decade: we have been cutting taxes, and federal revenue has fallen. Therefore, increasing taxes (within reason) will increase federal revenues, and won't affect GDP.
> Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh.
Please elaborate with facts. Unless otherwise proven, I would tend to assume that you are using statistics for the operational cycle of a reactor. This probably does not include the extensive amount of fossil fuel used to excavate and process nuclear fuel, build the actual plants, nor to deal with the resulting waste. It also does not account for what happens when the current set of extremely old 35 year+ reactors need to be shut down permanently.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am afraid you are tilting at windmills and to some extent burying your head in the sand.
A dam failure half a world away away from me does not have a significant probability of harming me or the ecosystem I depend upon. A major radioactive release half a world away from me does. At this point it is possible, though hopefully improbable, that I will be required to leave my home at some point in the future, even though I live thousands of miles away (you may dispute the chance of this, but the news remains ominous and certainties are hard to come by). All of this because of poor decisions made by corporate bureaucrats from a completely different country (over which my fellow citizens have absolutely no influence through voting) a couple decades ago. Perhaps you can see why I am extremely concerned.
Holding the world to a standard set by a totalitarian government cutting enormous corners without benefit of oversight or design standards, in comparison with one of the most technologically and knowledgeable advanced countries and corporations supposedly under extremely strict regulations, is completely unfair. Obviously a bunch of idiots will harm far more people than those who make at least a civilized attempt at preventing catastrophe. The question is simply, did those in charge take adequate precautions, and what lasting effects will the lack of planning will have now and in future generations.
Let us place the blame squarely for both items in question upon the source: insufficient engineering on points of failure whose catastrophic degradations outside of design parameters due to unforeseen natural disasters caused enormous unforeseen consequences. Let us also recognize that the effects of these have spheres of influence. The dam failure killed a lot of people and nobody will argue that. However, a level 7 nuclear catastrophe will have international effects that far exceed local and natural ones for perhaps hundreds of years.
You may deplore those responsible for the massive dam failure, and I concur, and we can debate who should be held accountable, although that is pretty clear. This should not in any way diminish your admonition of those responsible for today's failures by people who supposedly have superior know how, and due to a democratic government as well as historical situational fact, the serious *obligation* to not completely cock it up while involving extremely dangerous and incredibly toxic nuclear materials that have multiple generational consequences. And if the worst were to happen, say, right next to the Pacific Ocean, what exactly would those extremely long term effects be.... we just don't know yet, and I sincerely hope we both agree those will not come to pass.
There are 600 coal plants in the US, generating about 2000TW. A few recent projects for large scale solar range from 50MW to 700MW. It would only take a few hundred of these to make a significant dent in the need for US coal and nuclear generating capacity. What is lacking is determination, and money. The fossil fuel subsidy per year is about $70B and roughly $13B per Nuclear plant. That should pay for a whole lot of alternatives including solar.
Slashdot Mirror
In some sense the public pays either way. It's a question of whether the cost is explicit, and included in the rate paid for the electricity, or hidden and deferred, in which case the public ends up paying in the form of higher taxes -- and does not get a choice about whether it was a good idea in the first place.
Should the public pay for cleaning up an oil spill, or should the oil company (and its investors and insurers) responsible for the problem bear the cost? Hint: if there are no consequences to a spill, the industry will operate unsafely, as it increases profit.
Oh, please. Coal and natural gas are widely used because they are low tech and relatively plentiful, and very profitable for the megacorporation lucky enough to own the lease. The downsides to using coal are well known. What are you going to do when coal and uranium run out? I'm sure you don't care, but the rest of humanity does. You lack imagination. California now generates 1GW from rooftop solar. There's no magical fairies involved. That's without trying very hard, and we're at the beginning of the solar boom. Transitioning to renewable is not a wishful alternative. Actually, it's absolutely necessary for our survival.
The question should also be broadened to include cost effectiveness. When you consider the incredibly high capital cost and long time to plan and build plants, the environmental impact of mining and long term spent fuel storage, large scale centralized industrial operations (which increases cost of transmission), and need for heightened security, nuclear starts to look a whole lot less attractive.
You make an incorrect inference. Past non-failure does not predict future failure. Past reasons for nuclear failure were unanticipated, or considered low risk; yet they happened.
As far as Fukushima, it also proved that humans often fail to understand what makes a good or a bad idea. You, however, have not shown that a similar error in judgement has not been made at other power plants.
In fact, the industry is well known for construction problems, cutting corners to save a few bucks, lax self-policing, insufficient training, and foisting the cost of cleanup and spent fuel storage on the public.
You're proving that we should power our society by burning stupid people. It's an infinite resource.
Consider yourself off my list of potential employers, forever.
Um, you do benefit from the schooling for others that your taxes pay for, indirectly, in the form of a generally better economy. In fact those people your taxes helped educate will have higher income, which means they will pay more taxes than if they did not have that education, which means that they will (disproportionately to your contribution), help pay for roads you drive on, your retirement, your children's education (should you have any), and your common defense.
The same principle applies to elementary through high school education. You wouldn't seriously suggest that we the People shouldn't have a public education system? Maybe you would, if you're hard core libertarian, or religious conservative... in which case you're squarely and completely in the minority, which is as it should be.
Have you even been to collage? What idiot makes the implication that tuition is the expensive part? Thats the smallest part!
Ad hominem much? I have not been to collage [sic].
However, I went to, and graduated from, UC. And over in the fact based part of reality, tuition is indeed the most expensive part of education. Let's review the evidence...
- Stanford tuition at ~43K/year is much more than the $6K you'd pay for housing, the next highest cost.
- At UC Berkeley, versus the $13,200 resident tuition, you might pay $9,500 off campus, or ~7K/year for room AND board with the co-op.
Of course you can spend much more on housing, if you so choose.
Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.
Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.
Let's do an actual comparison: UC versus Stanford.... Undergrad tuition UC $13,200 for residents, $36,078 out of state, vs $13,350 quarterly for Stanford = $42,270 yearly. So the out-of-state tuition for UC is fairly comparable to Stanford. I don't see how Stanford is profiting heavily... although they are charging 9% more, we'd have to compare whether they provide a better education for the money, etc. However this does not demonstrate that government subsidies for student loans/pell grants inflate Stanford's pricing, nor that government is more efficient at providing a university education. You might then argue that state subsidy of the resident tuition causes out-of-state tuition to inflate, but you'd be hard pressed to actually prove that. The unfortunate actual issue is that UC tuition has risen quickly over recent years as the state has been unwilling to fully fund it.
Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.
Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.
Let's do an actual comparison: UC versus Stanford.... Undergrad tuition UC $13,200 for residents, $36,078 out of state, vs $13,350 quarterly for Stanford = $42,270 yearly. So the out-of-state tuition for UC is fairly comparable to Stanford. I don't see how Stanford is profiting heavily... although they are charging 9% more, we'd have to compare whether they provide a better education for the money, etc. However this does not demonstrate that government subsidies for student loans/pell grants inflate Stanford's pricing, nor that government is more efficient at providing a university education. You might then argue that state subsidy of the resident tuition causes out-of-state tuition to inflate, but you'd be hard pressed to actually prove that.
The unfortunate actual issue is that UC tuition has risen quickly over recent years as the state has been unwilling to fully fund it.
In some circumstances, an officer has a right to search your car/house/person/phone without a warrant if they have probable cause that you have broken a law. So it depends on the situation.
I fully support your right to bear breechloaders.
One of the main complaints seems to be that the #occupywallstreet hashtag is not trending on Twitter.
Bollocks. You are implying that the same dollar that the corporation made in profit is taxed twice. It is not. The corporation's dollar in profit stays in the corporation. The individual's capital gains dollar comes from whoever paid a dollar more for the stock once it is sold.
There is only an indirect relationship between corporate profits and individual capital gains. I can for example own stock in a corporation that made billions in profit yet paid $0 in corporate taxes, that stock may have gone up several hundred percent.
Some companies pay dividends, which are taxed as capital gains. But that is only a portion of the market. And there is actually no requirement that a dividend be paid on profits; a company could lose money and yet choose to pay a dividend in order to prop up its stock price.
Sales tax is the most regressive form of taxation in the United States. If sales tax is 30%, that means the poorest of the poor are paying an effective tax rate of 30%, because they need to spend every penny they make in order to survive.
You are forgetting that not every item sold is taxable. Food, drugs, and items purchased with food stamps can be a large part of a poor person's budget, and they are not subject to sales tax.
You really ought to try the internet.
For example: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
The other missing link from the original submission http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/us-rating-action/en/us/
> Democrats want less government spending as a percentage of GDP [1]. The TEA Party wants to destroy government [2], unions [3], and the US economy [4].
FTFY.
Sources: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent_of_GDP_by_President.jpg
[2] http://www.contractfromamerica.com/Idea.aspx
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
[4] http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/us-rating-action/en/us/
While human deaths are clearly bad, they are not the only metric with which we need to judge the scale of a catastrophe. There is the economic cost, directly due to the loss of electricity generation, and indirectly due to other countries recommending against visiting Japan. There is the continued risk management (read: people risking their lives to mitigate the disaster and the enormous expense of containment). There is the as yet unknown impact on the environment. Thousands of people may be permanently displaced (though sadly they have nothing to return to anyway). The effect on the rest of the world is real, many important Japanese products are in short supply or out of production.
Libya, in contrast, is a dusty outpost bombing themselves from the 9th century to the 8th century and has little effect on the world other than a slight disruption in oil supply. (Apologies to all free Libyans).
Fukushima will be a disaster for years to come. This is what the media is talking about.
The whole thing is a caution-outrage spiral; public concern creates the need for immensely cautious evacuation, which creates more public concern.
No. The concern is not over what has happened. It's over what might happen.... IF pumps to cool the core and spent rods fail, which they did, multiple times. IF containment fails, which it did. IF highly radioactive water leaks into the ocean, which we now learn did happen. All of these things were not supposed to happen, yet they did. People are risking their lives and improvising 24/7 to fix problems that were never anticipated. If any of those efforts fail, the disaster, already bad, gets much worse. And the plants are actually pretty close to major population centers. What's next? Nobody actually knows. Your precious safety record is preserved only by incredible effort applied to contain "problems" when they occur. What's the cost to clean all this up, in relation to the amount of benefit gained from the plants? How many years will Fukushima be a ghost town because of this incident?
One wonders, how safe would fossil fuels be if we spent real money to ensure their safety (as much regulation as nuclear, for example)? Requiring scrubbers, retiring dirty plants, etc.
Your previous post stated "Statistically, major incidents included, nuclear remains the safest form of electricity production known". You are drawing an incorrect conclusion from a statistically small sample. There aren't that many nuclear plants and they're relatively new. Most plants are well regulated, but there have been many near disasters in the past; we've been lucky. And your rosy outlook doesn't include a future where proliferation allows bad people to get ahold of nuclear material (Iran). Fast forward a few hundred years, and statistics shows there will be many more disasters, whose effects we cannot know because the failure modes will all be new. Fast forward a couple hundred thousand years, when the waste from existing plants still needs to be sequestered, at enormous cost. From that vantage point, nuclear doesn't look so good.
Engineering can only cope with the known. Airplanes are safe because we investigate and learn from past crashes. We cannot afford to go through this process with nuclear. If a nuclear plant is subjected to a natural disaster outside of its engineered ability to withstand the stress, what happens next? Experts in the field don't know, or their warnings are overridden by executives who don't want to pay the bills to mitigate "improbable" risks. Then when the disaster happens, they start by covering it up and minimizing the bad news. And that is what prompts evacuations, and concern about the use of nuclear power in general.
Since WWII, Federal revenue has been 18-19% of GDP, no matter what the tax rates were. This suggests that increasing taxes will not significantly increase the amount of money that the federal government collects. If increasing taxes will not increase the percentage of GDP that the federal government collects in revenue (which historical figures suggest is indeed the case), I do not see how increasing taxes will help reduce the deficit.
You are not being factual here. This shows federal revenue varying from 14.4% to 20.4% over that period. That's quite a bit different than 18-19%, which sounds flat. It was not flat.
The highest personal marginal tax rates did vary significantly, from 94% in 1945 to 35% today, but this does not shed light on the subject as it's only one of a large number of contributing variables.
Of particular note, the revenue as a % of gdp dropped from 20.6 in 2000 to 14.9 in 2009. That's quite a significant drop. Combine that with increased apparent spending, which went from 18% of gdp in 2000 to 24% of gdp in 2010 (primarily because of large drop in gdp in 2008-9 due to the recession), and you have a problem.
Back to your point. You were implying that there is a causal relationship between federal receipts and GDP, but your data was faulty. If no such link exists, then increasing taxes will indeed reduce the deficit. In fact, this is strongly suggested by the opposite case in the last decade: we have been cutting taxes, and federal revenue has fallen. Therefore, increasing taxes (within reason) will increase federal revenues, and won't affect GDP.
It might also be that the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quite small by today's standards.
> Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh. Please elaborate with facts. Unless otherwise proven, I would tend to assume that you are using statistics for the operational cycle of a reactor. This probably does not include the extensive amount of fossil fuel used to excavate and process nuclear fuel, build the actual plants, nor to deal with the resulting waste. It also does not account for what happens when the current set of extremely old 35 year+ reactors need to be shut down permanently.
Dear Sir or Madam, I am afraid you are tilting at windmills and to some extent burying your head in the sand. A dam failure half a world away away from me does not have a significant probability of harming me or the ecosystem I depend upon. A major radioactive release half a world away from me does. At this point it is possible, though hopefully improbable, that I will be required to leave my home at some point in the future, even though I live thousands of miles away (you may dispute the chance of this, but the news remains ominous and certainties are hard to come by). All of this because of poor decisions made by corporate bureaucrats from a completely different country (over which my fellow citizens have absolutely no influence through voting) a couple decades ago. Perhaps you can see why I am extremely concerned. Holding the world to a standard set by a totalitarian government cutting enormous corners without benefit of oversight or design standards, in comparison with one of the most technologically and knowledgeable advanced countries and corporations supposedly under extremely strict regulations, is completely unfair. Obviously a bunch of idiots will harm far more people than those who make at least a civilized attempt at preventing catastrophe. The question is simply, did those in charge take adequate precautions, and what lasting effects will the lack of planning will have now and in future generations. Let us place the blame squarely for both items in question upon the source: insufficient engineering on points of failure whose catastrophic degradations outside of design parameters due to unforeseen natural disasters caused enormous unforeseen consequences. Let us also recognize that the effects of these have spheres of influence. The dam failure killed a lot of people and nobody will argue that. However, a level 7 nuclear catastrophe will have international effects that far exceed local and natural ones for perhaps hundreds of years. You may deplore those responsible for the massive dam failure, and I concur, and we can debate who should be held accountable, although that is pretty clear. This should not in any way diminish your admonition of those responsible for today's failures by people who supposedly have superior know how, and due to a democratic government as well as historical situational fact, the serious *obligation* to not completely cock it up while involving extremely dangerous and incredibly toxic nuclear materials that have multiple generational consequences. And if the worst were to happen, say, right next to the Pacific Ocean, what exactly would those extremely long term effects be.... we just don't know yet, and I sincerely hope we both agree those will not come to pass.
There are 600 coal plants in the US, generating about 2000TW. A few recent projects for large scale solar range from 50MW to 700MW. It would only take a few hundred of these to make a significant dent in the need for US coal and nuclear generating capacity. What is lacking is determination, and money. The fossil fuel subsidy per year is about $70B and roughly $13B per Nuclear plant. That should pay for a whole lot of alternatives including solar.