User profile: coltakashi

Is Barack Obama telling the people of New York city that he wants the Indian Point nuclear power plant, upstream from Manhattan on the Hudson, to hang onto its spent nuclear fuel for all eternity, and take the risk that some terrorist or an industrial accident will poison the Hudson? Why shouldn't it be placed in a deep repository a half mile underground where the only threat it would pose is to groundwater that is so deep that almost no one uses it, and which is going to be contaminated long before that by the hundred nuclear bomb holes that sit next door?

The New York Times has come out again and again in favor of moving Indian Point's spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain. Are Nevadans writing to the Times and telling people in New York that they need to keep the waste in above ground storage for a million years, rather than put it into the ground 90 miles from las Vegas?

The notion some politicians have that spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed at every nuclear power plant shows an abysmal ignorance of science and law. Reprocessing is feasible, but it is a potentially hazardous business that needs to be done at remote sites that are not next to major rivers and populations. And there is not enough spent fuel at any single power plant to justify the cost of building a reprocessing facility.

If Nevada weren't consuming vast amounts of electricity to light up the desert for its 24-hour gaming culture, it might be a little less hypocritical about the power it concumes. If Las Vegas were not gobbling up more and more water for the primary purpose of creating golf courses and lawns for its hotels, it might be less hyprocritical in its claims that it worries about affecting someone else's groundwater.

If all the nation's tourists were as risk averse as Nevada is about Yucca Mountain, the gaming industry would dry up. Nevada's gaming industry impoverishes thousands and therefore kills dozens of bankrupt people every year. The Yucca Mountain Site might kill one person in a million years. By refusing to let Yucca Mountain open, hypocritical Nevada's politicians are playing Russian roulette with the lives of millions of people in New York and other states.

The article skips over a lot of history. For most of the 20th century, the two major parties were well balanced in Utah politics, alternating dominance of the legislature, of statewide offices like the governor, the single Representative, and the two Senate seats. However, when the national Democratic Party was radicalized by the left wing in the 1972 elections, embraced abortion, and attacked the armed forces, taking positions opposing the views of many religious people around the USA, not just Mormons, the Democrats lost their natural majority and became a permanent minority party in states like Utah and Idaho and the South, which had been dominated by the Democratic Party for a century. The Democratic Party wins national elections for president by downplaying its left wing policies (as Clinton did). The Democrat left wing sees itself as on a holy war to transform America, which is always seen as imperfect and flawed in its fundamental moral values, which do not embrace gay marriage, unlimited abortion, or unlimited tolerance for people like Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro who also hate America. They know they cannot achieve the changes they seek through persuasion of the majority of Americans, so they seek to accomplish it by misdirection, by executive orders, and by packing courts with left wingers like themselves who believe it is more important that the law be "politically correct" than that it reflect the judgment of the majority. It is an anti-democratic, elitist program.