Short Term

I’ve got to won­der whether the peo­ple in charge of the planet (both the busi­ness and polit­i­cal rulers) have ever tried plan­ning a route more than 3 inches from their face. Specifically, the Bush administration’s plan to build more nuclear plants to ease gaso­line prices.

From North America – The Energy Picture There are two (major) issues and one big ques­tion with the administration’s plans as I under­stand them: firstly, as of 2000, only 5% of the elec­tri­cal power in the U.S. comes from oil, and uses “rel­a­tively lit­tle petro­leum com­pared with the trans­porta­tion and indus­trial sec­tors” (7.3% of total use in 1998), which means that even if every oil-fired power plant was shut down tomor­row, it would at best trans­late into a $0.15 decrease in gaso­line prices.

The sec­ond issue is nuclear waste. Aside from the fact that nuclear waste as a sub­stance is only slightly less evil than con­cen­trated small­pox (since small­pox can repro­duce), it is esti­mated that it will cost $40,000,000 to move the cur­rent nuclear waste from the 101 nuclear plants around the U.S. to the Yucca Mountain facil­ity. This esti­mate, of course, was made pre-9/11, so dou­bling that cost just for added secu­rity is prob­a­bly being con­ser­v­a­tive. Since it’s a DOE project, add about 50% for over­runs and that brings the grand total up to $100bn just to move the nuclear waste we have right now. The way these guys are act­ing, it’s almost as though they’ve decided that the future of the American econ­omy is just a quasi-militarized clean­ing up of the messes that mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions have left behind.

The other part of Bush’s plan is to build refiner­ies on old mil­i­tary bases. I won­der if he’ll push through the mil­i­tary envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tion exemp­tions he wanted to a cou­ple years ago first, and then lease the land to Bechtel & friends, sans those pesky envi­ron­men­tal regulations.

But, of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that Bush’s energy “plans” will turn out roughly the same way his “Mars, Bitches!” plans did: more pie-in-the-sky dis­trac­tions for the con­tin­u­ing down­ward spi­ral of a dying empire. For exam­ple: no main­stream (i.e. non-financial-oriented) news orga­ni­za­tions are talk­ing about the fact that the balance-of-payments prob­lems are still wildly out of con­trol and noth­ing is being done to fix them.