Jed writes: >Mark Mills is a consummate idiot. Be fair; he's not an idiot, just a shill for the nuclear industry. He says what they want to hear, and no doubt if you looked into the funding of his think-tank you'll find GE and all the usual suspects. I could find no list of donors on the institutes website; shouldn't they be proud of their supporters???
Consider just this one howler from the linked article. "The Chernobyl disaster seven years later drove the final nail into the nuclear coffin. It didn�t matter that the Three Mile Island containment vessel had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors operated within a system that couldn�t build a safe toaster oven." Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was due to some major fault in the reactor design and implementation, carefully ignoring the fact that the real accident, as it occurred in the real world that you and I live in, was due to technicians shutting off all of the fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor to failure. Could the reactor have been designed better? Sure. In fact, the current reactor could be redesigned so it is impossible to override the failsafe systems. You could weld the switches closed, although eventually someone would dig under the control panel and cut the switches open with a pair of side cutters. Here in the real world, humans do these things. In the idealized world of Mark Mills, they are a sort of Nietzcheian supermen who never screw up or do stupid things. How do I get a ticket to this amazing world he lives in???? Presumably some special Kool-Aid is involved... The author also claims that, opposed to the former SU, we _can_ build a safe toaster oven. I have a toaster oven in my kitchen, produced by the American company Black and Decker. It was recalled due to the design being inherently unsafe; the heating element is placed right below the door so when you reach in for your toast, you can burn the top of your hand. I'm careful now with the oven, and never got around to returning it, but just about everyone who uses it gets burned at some point. In the UberAmerica of Mark Mills, my toaster has never existed. All products here work perfectly, as do our power generation equipment. Perhaps Mark was out of town last summer when the grid failed and a few million New Yorkers had to walk back to Brooklyn in the dark. Maybe he was on a GE funded junket to Thailand??? If the author thinks that nuclear power is safe, he should open an insurance company immediately and start insuring new plants. No other insurance firm will do this, because unlike the mighty statiticians of the Manhattan Institute, they feel the risk far outweights the potential revenue. You would think someone who pays so much lip service to the free market would actually listen to what that free market has to say. But hey, if he did, his funding would dry up. K.
