Politics...Really!?

The other night I was out cruising the blogosphere and started reading an article on my favorite blog, "Atomic Insights."  Rod Adams, the author of blog, is a very out spoken pro-nuclear advocate who brings up a lot of interesting issues on the nuclear debate.  If you are interested in getting a very pointed view of the debate, I recommend checking out what he writes.  His article that I read the other night though got me thinking.

Mr. Adams discusses an interesting point in the article (well actually he discusses many, but I will try to stick to just a few of them).  He starts by wondering why it is that oil has increased in price so much without ever bettering the product.  When he was a kid, gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon and was the same gasoline that we buy today at nearly three dollars a gallon.  Gasoline actually has less bang for the buck today than it did then due to the addition of ethanol to it.  Prices of things such as houses have also gone up, but the houses that we are buying today are a much better product than when he was a kid as well.  Air conditioners, better insulation, etc...  Nuclear power has also increased its efficiency over the years.  Today we are producing more power than we have in the past while using the same amount of fuel.  The thing about nuclear power is that the cost has actually decreased!  What?  A better product and the price goes down?

What Mr. Adams is getting at is that we have such an abundant and almost miracle power source here already and yet we continue to fight over whether we should use it or not.  He refers to nuclear power as "a terrestrial process that converts tiny amounts of mass into large amounts of energy."  We don't have to depend on solar power which only works part of the time or on crude oils and coal which took millions of years to form and which we use now much faster than it is being replaced.  We have our own power of the sun right here in nuclear fuels, which is abundant, clean, and reliable.

He definitely gives a convincing argument here, which is the best that I have seen him give for nuclear power.  Going to school for nuclear engineering, I obviously like the technical arguments which he presents and which give solid proof as to why we need more nuclear power, but I don't think that this type of argument will be the one that convinces the normal person.  I like the argument presented in this article because it is more of an argument of need.  It doesn't just give the facts of why to the reader, but it makes them feel that nuclear power is a God given miracle to power our future.  This is a better argument.  We all know that facts never are the cause of victory in a political debate.  We need to get to the basic human need.  We have to make people think that this is why uranium is on the Earth.  It is not just another metal, but a terrestrial miracle given to us for energy.