Some Political Considerations

Well, the Old Amigo generally steers clear of overtly political observations, but there are a couple of things I've read and heard lately that bear passing along.  So if politics bothers you or makes you upset, maybe you might want to skip this post.

Maybe next time I'll write about the flock of birds that enjoyed searching for tasty morsels in the area I cleared at the north end of the property.  Or gardening.

But today, I've got two things that I want to mention.  They're political things.

First of all, yesterday I read a New York Times article about the economy.  Buried well down in the article was something that everybody ought to know.  Everybody ought to realize that in the last 8 years -- even though there was an "Economic Expansion" -- the median family income in the United States actually fell.  The numbers?  $50,600 in 2000 to $50,200 in 2008.  Just in case you missed it, let me repeat that this 8 year period was marked by economic expansion.  What does that mean?  Well, I am pretty sure that it means that the top 5% of the monied interests in our country got a whole lot richer while the rest of us just hung on as best as we could.  Sobering isn't it?

Now often when someone has the audacity to bring this up, someone else flings the "Class Warfare" epithet at him, sniffs derisively, and changes the subject.  I ask why it is not class warfare for the richest 5% to accumulate ever greater wealth on the backs of everyone else's labor when working people are seeing their real earnings erode?

Next, I want to flog a horse that ought to be dead but seems somehow to be on taxpayer-funded life support: nuclear power.  In last evening's debate, Senator McCain once again flung his nuclear sound-byte onto the air-waves: We should build 45 nuclear power plants right away.  Now I guess the Senator is counting on us to be unable to do 6th grade math -- or perhaps he is counting on a certain intellectual laziness.  Let's examine this campaign rhetoric masquerading as a proposal to help our country.

It costs about $9B (Billion: with a "B") to build a nuclear power plant.  45 of them would cost in the neighborhood of $405B USD.  That doesn't count the cost of the enriched uranium fuel, either the extraction or the processing costs.  That doesn't count the cost of infrastructure upgrades: nuclear power plants are, after all, centralized facilities that produce lots of power that must be fed into the grid.  That $405B certainly doesn't count any disposal, reprocessing, or security costs associated with spent fuel.  But let's leave ALL THAT OUT of the calculations for the moment.

Now in sunny parts of the country, you can build a pretty decent little rooftop PV system for about $20K (Thousand).  This will be a "grid-tied" system, meaning that it'll automatically feed any excess electricity into the local power grid and automatically pull power from the grid when you need more than the PV panels can supply.  

Properly installed, these systems are safe, reliable, and last for, oh, twenty or thirty years with no more maintenance than occasionally washing them down to keep them free of dust and bird droppings.  When the sun shines, they produce about 3.5kW of electricity.  In a reasonably efficient home, this will be a significant fraction of the electrical needs of the household.  In a mild climate, such as we have across much of our "sun belt" this could easily contribute a third of household electrical needs.  You could probably do better if people were willing to conserve (see my blog posting about sacrifice).

So how many such systems could we buy for $405B?  Oh, we could build a little more than 20 Million of these.  That's right.  20 Million households could cut their electrical use by about a third. And if we funded 20 Million grid-tied PV systems, their cost would probably come down due to economies of scale.

I am pretty confident about these numbers.  I live north of the 48th parallel and am producing about this amount with a 4kW system.  Yes.  Up here in the gray, cloudy Pacific Northwest, such a system produces well over 40% of our *total* power needs in an all-electric home during the months between April and September.  Imagine how the system would perform in Fresno.

Funding this would produce lots of jobs.  It would not require mining, refining, and processing uranium.  It would not require big investments in grid infrastructure.  It certainly wouldn't require storage or reprocessing some of the most dangerous stuff humanity has ever produced.

"But," say the red-herring bringers, the detractors of solar energy.

"But, PV systems don't generate any power at night or when the sky is dark and cloudy!"

Yes, we know that.  That's why we favor grid-tied systems.  When the system is not producing electricity from the shining sun, the house automatically draws power from the electrical utility in the conventional way.  And since we use most of our power in the day time -- especially on hot, summer days -- this works out beautifully.  So grid-tied PV systems produce power when we need it the most.

So why is the nuclear power horse not well-and-truly DEAD?  Why?

It is still on taxpayer funded life support because of the nuclear power industry and the pathetic cretins in Congress who work for it.  It continues to be proposed because the the people who build nukes want that money, and they're powerful and well connected.

Nuclear power has nothing to do with energy security and everything to do with funneling money into the same old network that's been running things for a long, long time. It is all about funneling my money and your money into the well lined pockets of that top 1% of the population who are ever-thirsty, ever desirous of even more wealth to prop up their empty lives.