Archive for March, 2009
Nuclear Waste Is Really A Small Issue
Posted by Tom in Energy Facts & Policies on March 14, 2009
As BHO killed Yucca, environmentalist cheered and Greenpeace called for an end to nuclear plant commissioning. More rational types wondered where our base load energy would come from as BHO taxes hydrocarbons out of use. Tucker’s op-ed in the Friday WSJ gives the latter folks some hope.
The repository at Yucca Mountain was only made necessary by our failure to understand a fundamental fact about nuclear power: There is no such thing as nuclear waste.
A nuclear fuel rod is made up of two types of uranium: U-235, the fissionable isotope whose breakdown provides the energy; and U-238, which does not fission and serves basically as packing material. Uranium-235 makes up only 0.7% of the natural ore. In order to reach “reactor grade,” it must be “enriched” up to 3% — an extremely difficult industrial process. (To become bomb material, it must be enriched to 90%, another ballgame altogether.)
After being loaded in a nuclear reactor, the fuel rods sit for five years before being removed. At this point, about 12 ounces of U-235 will have been completely transformed into energy. But that’s enough to power San Francisco for five years. There are no chemical transformations in the process and no carbon-dioxide emissions.
When they emerge, the fuel rods are intensely radioactive — about twice the exposure you would get standing at ground zero at Hiroshima after the bomb went off. But because the amount of material is so small — it would fit comfortably in a tractor-trailer — it can be handled remotely through well established industrial processes. The spent rods are first submerged in storage pools, where a few yards of water block the radioactivity. After a few years, they can be moved to lead-lined casks about the size of a gazebo, where they can sit for the better part of a century until the next step is decided.
So is this material “waste”? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth’s crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 — which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains — from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy — beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
via There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste – WSJ.com.
To throw some cold water on that scintilla of hope, just remember the Environmental Impact Report hoops that will need to be jumped through, and what the courts can do with those. Unfortunately the Yucca Mountain NIMBYs will pale in significance to the NIMBYs to come.
A small consolation for Nevadans though is that the state coffers will no longer be wasted on the anti-Yucca efforts. We can think of many more things on which those coffers can be wasted!
Tom Motherway
Economic Policy Search-HELP!
Posted by Tom in Obama Budget & State of the Nation on March 6, 2009
This is by far the best statement of our dire straights that I have seen: Francis Cianfrocca’s take on our current situation correctly states, in my opinion, that the Fed is shooting in the dark. The question is whether shooting is better than not shooting. In issues of “systemic risk” of collapse of the financial system there is no question that the Fed must shoot and shoot BIG. In other instances, doing something for the sake of “don’t just stand there, do something,” is not necessarily the correct course. “Standing there” in the market sense may be just what the economy needs. The point is that “non-systemic” failure must be PUNISHED, NOT REWARDED! Just as success should be rewarded.
The basic point we all must believe in is that WE MUST DELEVERAGE (reduce debt), AND INCREASE SAVINGS. Nothing should be done to interfere with this process, already in process.
What I’m saying is that the world economy got far ahead of itself in the last several years. Why that happened is a subject for a book (maybe a shelf full of books). But it’s unwinding rapidly now, and this is the deflationary pressure we see everywhere. We don’t need as many autoworkers or factories, because people won’t be spending as much on new cars as they once did. And people still need to adjust to lower housing values in many parts of the country.
This process is plain, simple reality. The deleveraging and rebalancing simply has to happen. It’s a fast, disruptive process but ultimately a very healthy one. To be blunt, it’s like a big dog walking into your kitchen out of the rain. He plants his feet and shakes all the water off. It’s smelly and disgusting and you have to clean off your kitchen and yourself, but then it’s done and you move on. That’s how we’re shaking off the debt overhang caused by years of underpriced capital.
The government is flailing because they don’t want to allow this process to proceed at its own pace. So they’re doing a whole raft of desperate things, like the stimulus package, the desultory bank half-nationalizations, and the exceptionally dangerous attempts to prevent mortgage foreclosures.
Bernanke’s approach is to try anything, as long as it’s different from what was tried in the past. The Administration’s approach is to assume that we can get back to partying like it was 2006 as long as we push enough extra money into the system. It would be far better for everyone if they stepped back, got out of the way, let everyone rebuild her personal balance sheet, and let the housing markets find their own level.
What could we be doing that would really have a positive effect? There’s nothing we can do to stem the reduction of debt and the increase in personal savings. (Repeat: there’s nothing we can, or should, do about that.)
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What we could be doing is to encourage the eventual return of business and consumer confidence. That’s because a good shot of economic growth would provide the resources to make all the other problems less bad. But here, the Administration is doing its worst job of all.
The recently-announced budget would be radical and damaging to business confidence in the best of times. But these are the worst of times, and the budget is nothing short of disastrous. We’re being told to expect tax increases on high earners, business income and capital, increases in business regulation, a new energy tax on the whole economy (“cap and trade”), and the biggest expansion in government spending since World War II.
via RealClearPolitics – Articles – Print Article
Tom Motherway
Evan Bayh -A Democratic with Fiscal Credibility
Posted by Tom in Obama Budget & State of the Nation on March 6, 2009
A rare Democratic in the Senate, Evan Bayh of Indiana, says no to the waste in the Omnibus Bill. Bravo Senator Bayh!
The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.
The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it.
The omnibus increases discretionary spending by 8% over last fiscal year’s levels, dwarfing the rate of inflation across a broad swath of issues including agriculture, financial services, foreign relations, energy and water programs, and legislative branch operations. Such increases might be appropriate for a nation flush with cash or unconcerned with fiscal prudence, but America is neither.
Obama’s Deception-More Outrageous Than Most
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 5, 2009
All politicians lie, but our president has raised the deception bar to heights heretofore unseen. He doesn’t believe in bigger government. 95% of Americans will see their taxes cut. He will veto any bill with earmarks. In the new era of responsibility only the wealthiest 2% of Americans will pay for the sweeping changes in health care, green energy and education. The sad thing is that it may be too late to do anything about his failure to “walk the talk.”
Is our president’s penchant for falsehood intentional or just a series of innocent mistakes?Charles Krauthammer’s column in Real Clear Politics pretty well sets it out. Obama is following Rahm Emanuel’s rule one, “you never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.” He and his Reid-Pelosi team are intentionally lying to the American public. The consequences will likely be horrific.
The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:
“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
via RealClearPolitics – Articles – Deception at Core of Obama Plans.
Milton Friedman-Still Fresh Today
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 5, 2009
This 1979 Friedman education of Phil Donahue is certainly on point given the liberal blather our socialist president is foisting on the American public:
Whose Side Is He On Anyway?
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 4, 2009
NRO’s editorial today is titled “Intelligence Failure.” The reference is to intelligence in the security sense; it could just as easily be to intelligence in the IQ sense. Seems that our President will appoint Charles Freeman, a career diplomat, Saudi apologist, and avid critic of Israel who happens to believe that Beijing did not repress the Tiananmen Square protesters fast enough. Freeman will be appointed to head the National Intelligence Council. As such he will decide the specific intelligence briefed to the president on a daily basis.
Three of the major foreign-policy challenges the United States faces today involve the survival of Israel, the Saudis’ promotion of radical Islam, and the ambitions of China. To navigate them, Obama has chosen a fierce critic of Israel — our only reliable ally in the region where threats to the United States are most immediate — whose track record is one of kowtowing to our enemies in the Mideast and our rivals in Beijing.
Freeman has an irrepressible instinct for the appalling. In a public forum in 2002, Freeman decried “America’s lack of introspection about September 11.” What commanded Freeman’s attention was not the jihadist ideology that brought about the murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, but what he described as “an ugly mood of chauvinism” in the United States. Americans, he maintained, “should examine ourselves” as we consider “what might have caused the attack.”
via Intelligence Failure by The Editors on National Review Online.
Perhaps our new president has forgotten that one of his duties is commander in chief.
Tom Motherway
Making the Mortgage Mess Worse
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 3, 2009
Well, the same folks who got us–hell, got the world–into this mess are at it again. House Majority Leader Hoyer announced today that the “cram-down” bill may be headed for a vote this week. That’ the bill that allows bankruptcy judges to change mortgage promissory note terms; yes, that’s right, lengthen terms, cut principal payments and lower interest rates. In essence, secured lenders holding the first trust deed would no longer be able to foreclose and sell the property to pay off the defaulted loan. The rule of law which the lender relied on in making the loan would be abrogated. The rule of law is at the very core of our republic. If the Democrats can abrogate the rule in this instance, what will be next?
Let’s try to understand the effects of this: From a real estate market perspective, there has been no “market clearing” price established for the collateral; the price that would have been established through foreclosure is barred by law. So, similar homes in the same subdivision being valued for sale, resale or refinance will need to be valued on some proxy basis. Sellers, and borrowers refinancing will likely get less because those proxy evaluations will of necessity be conservative.
Looked at from the real estate lending perspective, the government will become the lender of first resort and the lender of last resort. Private capital will no longer enter into secured lending where the security can be stripped at the discretion of some bankruptcy judge, a judge most likely to have been appointed by Obama! If lenders did engage in mortgage lending, it would be on severely restrictive terms, including high interest rates and additional security.
So when Barney Frank, Maxine Waters and Chris Dodd rebuffed warnings several years ago that Fannie and Freddie were out of control they were keeping the government spigot turned on full blast. They continued to foster the sub-prime loans that were highly leveraged into the world markets as mortgage backed securities. Alan Greenspan provided the liquidity, Barney Frank provided the device that brought the world to its knees.
Each step that the Democrats take on the mortgage crisis drives us farther away from a market economy, farther away from the rule of law, and closer to the centrally planned socialism that they so desperately want.
Why our president today decided to add “investment advisor” to his job description:
“What you’re now seeing is profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal, if you’ve got a long-term perspective on it,” Obama said at the White House today while meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on battling the global recession.
Let’s see, is he a value investor or a momentum guy? One thing for sure, he’s a pretty savvy analyst, since those earnings ratios are on a steep spiral downward and likely to stay there, he was wise to qualify his recommendation to those with a “long-term” perspective. Very long term! But, then again, he should have cautioned against anything having to do with mortgage backed securities! Ironically this is the very thing the Democrats profess to fix!
Tom M.
Rare Republican Bright Spot-Paul Ryan
Posted by Tom in Uncategorized on March 3, 2009
Here’s an articulate up and comer for the Republicans. He’s telegenic, conservative and a winner. He bested his Democratic opponent 64% to 35% in Wisconsin’s 1st District in the 2008 election. His article in yesterday’s WSJ shows that he recognizes the problem and provides intelligent solutions.
The budget the president released last week, however, does provide some certainty about where we are headed: higher taxes on small businesses, work and capital investment.
Add to this the costly burdens of a cap-and-trade carbon emissions scheme and an effective nationalization of health care, and it is clear that the government is going to grow while the economy will shrink. In a nutshell, the president’s budget seemingly seeks to replace the American political idea of equalizing opportunity with the European notion of equalizing results.