Maggie's Farm

The truth is that nuclear energy has a remarkably consistent uptime, generates remarkably little waste that is fairly easy to manage, and a very manageable safety culture, with the right oversight. We've treated it like a 2-headed Boogey man since Three Mile Island, to which no deaths or injuries were ever attributed.

Green energy concepts are an interesting research effort but will probably never compete on scale, because they are intermittent by design. They will probably continue to develop to become nifty portable energy sources for places far from infrastructure. The research very much needs to continue though, even past when popularity wanes.

Ethanol subsidies should just be phased out, to allow subsidies to peter out with mandates for no further industry growth - it ought to be considered some kind of sin to raise crops in order to power transport - that's just being stupid with resources. Cropland is a resource that is susceptible to depletion, too.

Somebody smarter than me will, I think, ultimately start to make it a common practice to work an energy balance into every energy product, so that the life cycle cost - and life cycle consequences - are fairly presented in a standardized way, instead of being broken down and compartmentalized by profit / market forces and regulatory hurdles to be overcome.

People have been saying that hydrocarbons are going to run out in 'just a few years' since the 1920s. They're not. Global demand will keep rising until cheap nuclear power is available safely worldwide, which probably isn't ever going to happen, because most governments and cultures just can't be trusted to be responsible, and the safeguards don't exist at this time to circumvent that sad fact. But the fact is, hydrocarbons are the least common denominator that runs through our world economy, our quality of life, our commercial products, our food supply.