[RP TownTalk] how do you feel about raytheon?

[cranky old coot]

When you say 'We would all be against ____' you could just as soon poke 
a stick in to Old Coot's eye!

Read this before you turn off your computer, disconnect your 
refrigerator, tell Pepco to shut off you electricity and ask Washington 
Gas to disconnect your stove and furnace.

20% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by nuclear plants.  The 
other, almost 80% of the electricity you are using to read this is 
generated by fossil fuel or hydro-electric generators. Yes there is some 
electricity generated by wind farms and some solar.

So the question is which downside do you want, and who's backyard do you 
want to put it in?

A solution to the nuclear wast issue in the U.S. has been blocked in 
part by money from the oil companies that have a vested interest in not 
having an answer to the nuclear problem. Europe, (France and Germany 
mainly) have implemented a long term answer to the problem.

Do we even need to list the issues with fossil fuel plants? Greenhouse 
gases, fly-ash, coal mines, black lung...

All through the Northwest they are retro-fitting hydro-electric dams to 
save the fish. Dams on the Colorado River are being "flushed" to save 
the environment in the Grand Canyon. The lakes behind all the dams are 
filling up with silt. When the lakes fill up there will be no more power 
and there are no more rivers to dam. Well there was the Three Rivers 
Gorge in China but that is someone else's backyard.

Wind farms kill birds and bats. It seems that the NIMBYs are the ones 
not getting paid to have a tower put in their fields. Farmers seem to 
like them. West Texas seems to like them. The folks on Cape Code don't 
like looking at them, but I don't think they are getting paid. Yes, 
farmers are being paid several thousand dollars per year per tower.

Solar cells are a good example of transfered hazard. Solar cells are one 
of the dirtiest products now in production. The mining of rare earths 
needed and the manufacturing process creates more byproducts that making 
computer chips. I believe at the the current cost it requires 15-20 
years to recover the cost of solar cells if you want to get off the grid.

There is also the issue of matching the time and place of the need with 
the time and place of the source. The wind doesn't blow all the time and 
the sun don't shine all the time. = This not being the British Empire, 
the sun does set. =

Electricity is just a means of moving energy from one place to an 
other.  The other half of that movement, the dirt from here to there as 
the energy moves from there to here, is only lately being realized as an 
issue. And even more resonantly that movement should include the path 
clear back to/through the manufacturing process. 

So the question I ask in the beginning was where and into who's backyard 
do you want to move the "dirt" so you can use some electricity?

My answer to that rhetorical question is nuclear.  Because the cost are 
less and can be controlled. In France over 80% of their electricity is 
generated by nuclear plants. They addressed the nuclear wast issue by 
developing the skills and tools to process the wast which reduces the 
wast storage problem. They have also developed, with the Germans, 
storage facilities.  There have both long term and short term storage 
facilities. They process what they know how to and store for latter 
processing what they don't know how to process. Some wast is stored for 
what they expect to be thousands of years. One of the products of this 
processing is additional nuclear fuel. The value of this "by-product" is 
enough that it pays to processing of the spent fuel cells (They process 
wast from Germany, France, Sweden (I think) and Russia).

In the future, I suggest you be more selective in who you include in the 
royal we. Some may not agree with you as to which "dangers/lethal 
products" represent a real current danger and which represent a 
controllable potential danger. If ever one (or just a majority) agreed 
on a solution to some of todays problems, it would be nice. However...  
Oh that wasn't a "royal we." You meant we as a first person plural 
pronoun. Then disregard all of this and turn your computer back on.

Now what were we talking about? Oh ya Raytheon. Well we I think... no, 
lets not be redundant.

Cranky as always,
Coot

catarina correia wrote:
>
> What if a nuclear plant were moving in?  We would all be against it 
> because of the potentially dangerous/lethal products being produced 
> that might contaminate our community and affect our children.  I guess 
> as long as the company is manufacturing products that kill other 
> people's children then its ok?
>
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