Jed Rothwell wrote:
Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
AFAIK Iran is building several reactors. The big power reactor
(approx. 1 GW) is
at Bushehr see
(http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/bushehr-intro.htm).
This is an informative article. Iran wants to produce 20% of its
electricity from nuclear power. The Russians are building a ~1 GWe unit,
as noted.
Honestly, I do not see how the US or any what other country can object
to this.
Perhaps the fact that the president of Iran asserted that their goal is
to erase Israel from the map has something to do with it.
The actual phrase, reported in LeMonde IIRC, was something like "rayer
Israel de la carte" -- the word "rayer" stuck in my mind; it's pretty
dramatic when applied to an entire country. AFAIK LeMonde doesn't take
orders from Bush so, even though I haven't seen the original speech, I
expect the French translation was not too far off base.
Since this went hand in hand with Ahmednejad's bellicose assertions that
Iran has every right to pursue their nuclear program without outside
intervention or oversight, and with his rejection (or disregard) of
Russia's offer to provide the pre-enriched fuel for their reactors in
order to avoid the need for (weapons-convertible) enrichment facilities
in Iran, it made a lot of people understandably nervous about what the
future might hold if Iran's course is not changed.
According to at least one apologist for Iran found on the Internet, the
literal phrase used meant "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must
vanish from the page of time.” That doesn't sound a whole lot better to
me than the French version, frankly, and in this case, I'm inclined to
trust the translators who most likely knew what the Persian idiom meant
when they translated it to "rayer de la carte" -- which, by the way,
means exactly what it sounds like it means.
The world needs clean energy. The argument that Iran should use
natural gas generators because they have lots of gas makes no sense to
me. This is like saying they should not use nuclear or wind power in
North and South Dakota because they have so much coal up there. Every
joule of electric power produced by nuclear fission in Iran reduces
global warming or frees up natural gas for export. We should encourage
them to buy more nuclear plants.
Unfortunately, in North Dakota they use almost exclusively electricity
from coal, even though they have enough wind to power half of the U.S.A.
See:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=ND
South Dakota has more hydroelectric, and a higher percent of wind power:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=SD
- Jed
