I appreciate your thinking about the multiple motivations here, of which NIMByism plays a major part.
My experience with all executives is that they usually suffer from a great deal of isolated thinking, encouraged by the limited vision of people around them. Besides the destructive effects of NIMBYism, such leaders also have to deal with the severe volatility of energy markets. Prediction in this field has been depressingly inaccurate, as to supplies and prices. Energy companies got caught holding expensive oil when prices fell some years ago. While some may believe in Peak Oil, others may hold confidence in alternative oil supplies derived from coal, shale, tar sands or garbage. Far from pessimism about this, I see 60+ oil as a godsend for alternative development. -----Original Message----- From: Stephen A. Lawrence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 11:54 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: Do we have peak uranium, too? Zell, Chris wrote: > We haven't had any new nuclear power plants built in many years. > Since any notion of NIMBYism is to be rejected You are misconstruing a lot of things here. Peak oil was predicted quite a long time back, as a result of modeling available oil in the ground, and is not a conclusion based on watching oil company behavior regarding new refineries. In fact, it's the other way around -- we watch oil company behavior, and say, "Oh, we can explain what they're doing by assuming they've seen the peak-oil estimates too". Maybe that's right and maybe it's wrong; it's an attempt at figuring out what's going on inside oil company executives's heads and is therefore on far shakier ground than the peak-oil conclusion itself. There are obviously a number of reasons why people in many parts of the world are opposed to nuclear plants, not least of which is the waste problem, which appears to me to have been exacerbated by proliferation fears, which make spent-fuel reprocessing and research into breeder reactors much trickier political issues than they would be otherwise. Another issue, which feeds into NIMBY-ism, is that trust in government and industry is pretty low in a lot of quarters, and a lot of people at the grass-roots level just don't believe they're safe when industry plays with hazardous materials near their homes. Interesting side note: Do you remember glow-in-the-dark digital watches? They were really useful -- more convenient than the push-the-button-to-turn-on-the-light things we've got now, IMHO. But they vanished from the market right after Three Mile Island. Once people get scared of something it's hard to get them to accept it again, in any form.
