I tend not to weigh in to much on commodities at the risk of getting sucked into a rathole, but -- while I don't disagree there are a ton of things the US could have done/be doing differently/better, the immediate term issues have FAR more to due with China, falling field productivity and increased demand in the local oil generating markets than anything else. Oil exports worldwide went DOWN last year. That kind of says it all right there, and number 2 field corn prices have had a much lower impact on worldwide food prices than the devastation of the rice crops and what's been hapening in wheat. Ethanol is still a Muggs game, however.

I've always been on the nuclear power bandwagon, which isn't hard once you understand that a nuclear powerplant is not going to explode like a nuclear bomb. That said, every now and then a disturbing study pops up (such as the one I posted in Everything Else recently showing the wild mutations of insects living near power plants) which makes me wonder if they're really as harmless and benign as we think. Given the oil industry's history it also seems if we shift to a nuclear-based energy economy we WILL have some serious nuclear accidents. Corners get cut. It happens in every large industry. One educated look at Chernobyl TODAY, nevermind the actual disaster, should give us pause about building too many nuclear power plants without very strict regulations that are strongly enforced.

There's also the matter of the waste. The stuff remains much more dangerous for far longer than an oil spill or oil fire. If we suddenly lost the manpower or funding to maintain waste storage facilities, those buildings would turn into dirty bombs once their cooling systems failed. I'm not talking about the vaults full of the old stuff deep underground, I'm talking about where they put the waste from the core to cool off before storing it long-term.

I also have this feeling that in 5,000 years, future humans will find one of those vaults and think the same about our warnings of an invisible deadly force the same way we regard warnings of evil spirits on ancient tombs.

I'm not saying that nuclear power is not a good solution, just that we'd need to be a little more careful than is optimally profitable.

As well as the electric car.

Don't forget public transit.

That's the root of a lot of the things on that list, I think. Things that should be done for the public good, or as long-term investments, take a backseat to the things that have more potential short-term profit, or that are politically expedient.

Yea, the design of Chernobyl was batsh*t crazy, even back then.

I imagine arguing the safety of nuclear power is probably unneeded. Electricity demand is unlikely to wane (and indeed, if electric cars become popular, will grow) and thus I think people will turn to any form of power generation, no matter how unsafe, in the coming years, particularly if oil and coal production is phased out.

Lobster about #23: It's not that Conservatives are against CFLs, it's that they are against the mandatory useage of CFLs that pisses them off. I mean I know absolutely noone would buy those more efficient bulbs if the government didn't force them (like look at the hybrid cars, absolutely noone is driving one of those things(note:sacrasm)).

Citing Chermnobyl in reference to Nuclear is almost like citing the Nazis in reference to almost anything, its pandering and not entirely relevant, Chernobyl was a massive f*ck up, almost a text book case of here's what happens if you f*ck everything up (although it has made a quite interesting case study for "what happens if humans were to go extinct", wildlife takes back over fairly quickly, its one of the few places certain wolves and mooses(elk, or whatever, big furry thing looks like a moose) species are thriving because humans wont go live there.)

To this day, I still cannot wrap my head around why a falling US dollar is impacting world oil prices, particularly in non-US countries like mine which produce a ton of oil on our own. Maybe someone here can explain it to me. I'm paying almost $1.40/litre for gas right now and the current source of blame is that the falling US dollar is raising world oil prices. I can understand how it would affect prices in the US but what does it have to do with what any other country pays for gas?

I'm not an economist but I didn't think China was growing rapidly enough to account for skyrocketing oil prices. Are they really consuming THAT much more than in late 2000 when oil skyrocketed to a record high of $35/barrel?

Pandering to who, exactly?

Chernobyl was a massive f*ck up but it's dangerously arrogant to think it couldn't possibly happen here. If we adopt nuclear power on a wide scale, there will be accidents. There already have been and no industry has a perfect safety record, and the oil industry in particular has a history of catastrophic f*ck ups caused by a convergence of laziness, malfunction, and stupid policy. There was a refinery explosion in Utah earlier this month for instance, and you can read this for an example on how complacency ends up costing lives. It's naive not to consider the consequences of something going terribly wrong. Your "Nazi" argument is a stretch at best, lazy at worst. The Nazi argument is weak because it's overused and an exaggeration, not because it couldn't happen again.

It is simply inexcusable to implement a policy of this order when one of your contingencies is, "that won't happen." Again, I'm in favor of an increase in nuclear energy. I just think we need to be very careful. Forgive me if that's an alarmist and liberal stance akin to screaming Nazi at the drop of a USA PATRIOT Act.

LobsterMobster:
Pandering wasn't the word I wanted, it's early for me... Demagogue is probably closer to what I was going for at the time. Like citing the nazis it evokes an emotional response, and rarely is it used in a manor that is unemotional in it's appeal. With nuclear power those systems are designed with backups for the backups that backup the backup. Nuclear power plants aren't soemthing you can write off easily, even the power company (especially them) has a vested interest in keeping the thing safely running for as long as possible.

Or you could just have heavy government regulations and supervision like in France where 70% of electric comes from nuclear and has for decades without any major incidents that I know of. Of course thats just socialist nonsense.

US reactors are all light water reactors. Chernobyl used graphite as the neutron moderator. These designs are fundamentally different. Loss of coolant in a graphite reactor can result in an increase in power output. Loss of coolant and moderator in a LWR results in a decrease in power output. While nuclear meltdowns could certainly happen in the US (Three Mile Island), they can't result in the sort of catastrophic explosion and fire that happened at Chernobyl.

Even though no new nuke plants have been built in 20 years, the technology and safety has still been advancing. New designs have passive safety features that withstand or prevent loss of coolant accidents. The biggest dangers from any new reactors would be from someone flying a plane into the reactor containment building.

That said, I'll be moving within 10 miles of a plant next week, and I'll be picking up my potassium iodide pills, thankyouverymuch.

That last bit is the scary part. The price of oil DOUBLED last year, but demand only dropped 2.5%. My old econ prof would say that makes the price of oil pretty inelastic.

Remember that the power plant of just about every US Submarine and Aircraft Carrier is nuclear. It amazes me that after all this time we have had electric generators we still need to use (take your pick) nuclear, coal, diesel, Nat Gas, whatevs to heat water to generate steam to turn turbines to move a magnetic field through wire to generate an electron flow.

So much energy is lost in conversion and transmission to your house you would figure we would have had a tech break through by now.
I want my portable fusion generator and I want it NOW!!!

By the way the answer to the question at the beginning of the thread is supply and demand. Also subsidies. You see India and China ( the most fastest growing energy users and buyers of oil kick in some money and artificially keep the price low in their countries but high everywhere else. You see they got all OUR dollars from the outsourcing binge of American corps (India) and all the cheap.., sorry economical electronic goods from China. Nearly all electronics is made in Asia or PacRim (check your PC mobo, hard drive and memory )

Since oil in such demand the Futures Traders (which are getting all the blame these days) are bidding the price up (and down) as conditions warrant. All the futures market does is promise oil to a buyer at a certain price in the future. If you are a fuel dependent business, like say an airline or FedEx and if you can lock in the price of fuel 6 months before you need it for a price then you will do it.

The demand is not going to stop until the price reaches the breaking point. As the price gets higher people will change their behavior to save money. The prices will fall slightly unless India and China pick up the slack.

But if you really want to get futures prices to go down. Start a massive drilling campaign right here in the US of A to develop our own resources. Its time to stop tying our hands and use what is already here. Drill Now

Thus spake PCMAN

Excluding Chernobyl, which was built and run poorly, it's worth pointing out that the entire, worldwide loss of life to nuclear power, for the three or so generations we've been doing it, is less than the death toll of just one year at a typical US coal mine in the 60s.

The worldwide release of radiation from the nuclear power industry, again over its entire lifespan, is significantly less than the radiation released from one typical coal plant in one year. Not in the 1960s, but TODAY.

Even if you INCLUDE Chernobyl, those numbers aren't that much worse. Coal plants killed a LOT of people and still release a LOT of radiation into the environment.

The thing about radiation is this: we understand it. Very well. We can measure it, we can track it, and we know how to clean it up. We know how to store the waste, too, although our attempts to do so are being fought vigorously by people who really don't have anything to lose.

Only humans pay the price for radiation leaks; we are uniquely vulnerable to the stuff. Nearly all animal species have latent radiation resistance genes, and they're quickly reactivated in its presence; two or three generations is enough to breed very hardy creatures, able to withstand much, much higher levels than their grandparents could. The Earth was once a far more radioactive place, and life has already developed ways to cope.

As long as we don't do something remarkably stupid, like coating the world in cobalt-60 bombs, no nuclear accident is going to have much in the way of long-term deleterious effects on anything but human beings themselves, which is exactly as it should be. Bikini Atoll, the site of so many atomic tests, is now a tropical paradise. This is because humans can't live there anymore. Human presence is far, far more damaging to the environment than radiation is.

With the way we do things now, just dumping exhaust into the air and hoping, we're taking on enormous hidden costs, far in excess of anything nuclear power would have cost us. The costs of nuclear power are direct; we can measure them, we can quantify them, we can ameliorate them. The costs of coal and oil are indirect, and we have no idea what they're really doing to us.

If we want to keep human civilization at anything like the level it's at now, we will need to embrace nuclear power. (That won't last forever, either, and we'll have to use it as a transition into solar and fusion.) If we try to stay with fossil fuels for our main energy needs, it looks entirely likely that we'll climate-change ourselves into vast economic disruption and massive starvation.

We can maintain something like our present standards of living, even for everyone in the world, if the power source is nuclear. If it's coal or oil, trying to do so will be a disaster.

I'll have to blaspheme here and ask would the US drop its love affair with the Dodge Rams and Ford F-series (heavy, 6 litre engines with automatic gear boxes) to lighter, 1.6-2.0 litre engines with stick shifts? I know that is extreme example but even the average size of the engine difference between European and American cars is quite large. Even European cars sold over in the US tend to be the larger engine size. For example, the BMW 316 is very popular in Europe however you will only see the 326 or 336 in the US. Also, Automatics aren't popular over here because they are perceived to be less efficient.

Well could you see it? More importantly, do you see that it might well have to happen in the short term? Will Japanese and European car manufacturers see a huge boom in sales in the US in the next few years. Hell, Ford are American and their Focus and Mondeo cars are very popular here, perhaps they are the better placed?

Oh and I agree with MikeMac, nuclear is great and all but we are swapping one finite resource for another. Solar is the answer and while nuclear could be a great short gap, I'm not some tree-huger automatically against them, we need to pump money into solar research. Ireland has the massive oceanic currents off our coast and the gulf stream, surely we have harness that somehow.

Also claiming that loss of life and damage from Chernobyl was minimal is disingenuous and doesn't help your arguement at all. The IAEA report certainly doesn't agree with that viewpoint either. If you want people to accept nuclear power deal with the facts and not the industry lobbyists sound bites.