A Good Rant Requires A Fact Or Three

Sorry, but just no.

Here’s a classic case of media slant:

Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

This is what we non-journalists call “complete bullshit”.  In the first place, neither Germany or California “bet” on anything.  Germany closed all their nukes in a panicked reaction to the Fukishima disaster in Japan, and California deliberately closed their existing nukes and prevented new ones from being built because Californians are a bunch of fucking Green morons (as, by the way, are the Krauts).  There was no “gamble”, because everybody already knew that Green “technology” would be totally incapable of completely filling anybody’s power needs except maybe for the average sub-Saharan African country north of the Limpopo River.  For Germany and California?  Not even close.  And when even Al Gore is calling California foolish…

Natzsofast, Guido. While the origin of the headline slant may be exactly as described, this is what we sane people call it when kneejerk rant is faster than neurological processing speed. This is a classic case of letting your prejudices write your article before engaging your common sense, let alone 30 seconds of research.

Japan got into trouble with nukes (reactors, not the matching bookened gifts from Paul Tibbets, Curtis Lemay & Co.) because of...why, cupcakes?

Oh, right, that little 9.0 earthquake on a faultline right off the coast made a wee little tsunami thingie.

Maybe some of you read about it; I think it was in most of the papers.

Fortunately, there are no such seismic problems anywhere in California.
Oh wait, turns out there are.
Just a wee bit.

For the benefit of those who flunked or skipped basic geography and geology, California has a coastal mountain range running the entire length of the state, and the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range well inland of that, because the Pacific Ocean Plate is grinding against the North American Plate, to the point that the highest mountains in the Lower 48 of North America, i.e. not including Alaska, are not the piddly-ass Rockies, but Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevadas. (Sorry, Coloradoans, but facts and reality are harsh. If it makes you feel better, the Rockies are probably prettier.)

There are a bit fewer faultlines in NE California, because Mt. Shasta and surrounds are only fucking dormant volcanos!

"Dormant"? Here's how geologists define that term.
Mt. St. Helens ring any bells??



"Dormant" volcano, Oregonian version. Note the missing real estate.

Because when they speak of dormancy, they're expressing it in terms of geological time, which makes dog years shorter than the teenage years of fruit flies.

Now look, I know how tempting it is to bash our succession of Califrutopian moonbat leaders, and the Birkenstock-wearing tofu-slurping soyboi minions from West Hollyweird and San Franshitsco who elect them, even though 75% of them are actually the expat cousins of your own toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk in Bugfuck and Pigknuckle, transplanted here so they can pick a gender and save the whales. If you want to bash them, go ahead on. Take a number. The line just on this blog, is four miles in length, and 50 persons abreast.

Look, I've even got quite a sense of humor when it comes to bashing TPTB here in Califrutopia (as that name itself should suggest). But if you have an IQ higher than fungus, and two neurons to rub together, we should probably be able to agree without too much difficulty that the last goddam place to put more nuclear plants is next to an ocean, in a state with 100-something active faults (and that's just the ones we know about, now), all overdue for a huge seismic relocation event, and most in exactly the coastal zone such plants would be built upon, and half a dozen "dormant" volcanos in the vicinity of most larger rivers and water supplies. The best place to put California's nuclear plants would be in eastern Arizona, or Utah, or Texas, or maybe Kansas. Give a holler when they're interested in that. Last I looked, we can't even get Nevadans to agree that their desert mines are the best place for nuclear waste, even when they are.

And let's remember that the entire nuclear industry was touting the near impossibility of a nuclear plant malfunction ("a one in a BILLION likelihood"), and the safety of the industry,

President Peanut Brain's photo op did more for nuclear power in the Western
world than the Hindenburg crash did for airship travel.

right up until the evening news had shots of POTUS wading around in hazmat boot covers inside Three Mile Island, the same month that The China Syndrome opened. So you can thank Metropolitan Edison not just for a nuclear power debacle, but also for reviving middle-aged Hanoi Jane Fonda's flagging movie career. Thanks a pantload, guys.

Thus attempting to pin the anti-nuclear power urge purely on deranged Greenophilia is flatly silly, and descending into Fred Reed territory, and last I looked, you had to move to Mexico, sell your soul, and lose your mind to do that on a blog. Best not undertaken.

California does have solar energy in abundance. Not, nota bene, as a primary source, nor ever could be, but taken advantage of properly, it would make enough of a difference in total use to both cut demand on the deliberately antiquated grid, making mandatory brownouts unnecessary, and oh, BTW, make the average person with a wee bit of foresight and a few spare bucks completely independent of both random seismic events and the whims of the morons in Sacramento.

It's not good because it's cheaper (which it absolutely isn't) it's better because it's priceless when the grid falters or fails.  

We've also had morons in charge hereabouts who halted all offshore drilling since the series of spills in the late 1960s ruined miles of beaches. Goddamned tree-hugging hippies.

That can be fixed with a few penstrokes (and will, someday, when people get desperate enough). Because people aren't going to freeze, or sweat their jingly bits, or pass up literal billions of dollars just sitting there a couple of miles off the coast, especially if it mainly pisses off Barbra Streisand and her ilk.

And BTW, the San Onofre nuclear plant was shuttered, not because of "green" concerns, but rather because of critical parts failures, and the revelation that the whole thing was waiting for one jiggle to shatter miles of obsolescent and about-to-fracture piping, and the cost to replace/repair it would have bankrupted Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Just the thing you want, in a plant next to millions of people, and $M homes, right next to an ocean, and a key military base, is a nuke plant with pipes made of glass. Or just old, rusted, and ready to shatter, spewing nuclear contamination into the atmosphere and offshore.
As Casey Stengel used to say, "you could look it up".

So if we're going to stick to actual common sense energy policy, let's try it from that tack, and save the kneejerks for when the doctor is doing your annual physical.

Just a humble suggestion.