For those interested in energy news and the facts about solar, wind, and nuclear energy here is a great site:

The Nuclear Green Revolution

Also if anyone wants to see the reprint of anti-nuclear advocate Amory Lovins' 1976 paper published by the Council on Foreign Relations' magazine called Foreign Affairs

The Road Not Taken

That link is on Amory Lovins' organization Rocky Mountain Institute. In it he advocates coal and thereby set the fight against global warming back 30 years. The huge influence of the Council on Foreign Relations in all positions of government was I think instrumental in pushing the fossil fuel industry's agenda of increasing the USA's reliance on coal and thereby made the US one of the largest polluting nations today. Looks like the same scams are being perputrated now with solar and wind turbine energy plants.

To Brad and Des, I suggest you give up the "Green News Report" unless you do a better job of reporting good reliable stories cause it's making you look very biased and is tainting your excellent reporting on voting news and your credibility. If you really want to be objective you would digg into the facts and give people real numbers or find site and reports that do give people the facts.

Hello Brad,

Could I embed one of these within my own podcast, which is much longer (and about climate change)?

S.T.

Dear Brad and Desi,
Here's the latest link to Jeffrey Smith's--Spilling the Beans newsletter. Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception which I believe is the definitive book on GMOs in our food supply. Great book. Reads sorta like a detective novel. This latest newsletter is about the nightmare appointment Obama is making to the position of the nation's new Food Czar. You'll be horrified. The integrity of our food supply is something we should all be able to get behind.
love,
Dave
http://us.mc560.mail.yah...c589&.jsrand=2540021

Shelly - Absolutely. We'd be honored to be featured in your podcast! Spread the word, make all the noise ya can. And thanks for asking!

P.S. Let us know where we can find your podcasts!

Dear Konstantin #1,
At your suggestion I read the Lovins' article. From what I can make out you wildly misunderstood his position on coal. Did you read that article yourself? He advocates a specific kind of coal based energy use on a limited basis for a very short period and only as a bridge to his soft energies path.
You are guilty of exactly what you are accusing Brad and Desi of:unreliable reporting. Please show me where Lovins is a big coal advocate.
David Lasagna

David,

Rod Adams does a much better job than I could in debunking that charlatan Amory lovins. Please read his blog about it at the following link

http://atomicinsights.bl...ast-from-clean-coal.html

David you may also be interested in this post by Rod Adams:

"Salon.com February 26, 2009 discussion about nuclear power"
http://atomicinsights.bl...ary-2009-discussion.html

And this letter/comment to Salon:
"Amory Lovins admits he works for oil companies"
http://letters.salon.com...17a15b5b131b8fed213.html

Okay Konstantin,
Strike three, your out. I've checked your links. The 1st Rod Adams link is 90% a quote from the Lovins article. It conveniently omits the two short preceding paragraphs in that article which present Lovins' context for ANY use of coal which is for a very short time in a limited way as a transition technology. The only debunking Adams does is to call Lovins a charlatan. That's not debunking. That's name calling. That's typical.
Your second Adams' link quotes Lovins again taking one sentence(out of an entire interview) in which he says he's worked for oil companies. I believe he's a consultant who works and talks to many people and groups. I'll believe Amory Lovins is a shill for the oil industry when I believe Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are secretly working for Acorn.
You did not answer my request. I asked YOU to show me evidence from that article(or anywhere) that Lovins is a big coal advocate. You refer me to someone else who is clearly misrepresenting Lovins' position. This suggests to me that you yourself are not understanding the issues here or what Lovins is saying. I'm not playing anymore. There's a world to change.
David Lasagna

David,

You are in denial. Look around you. It's 30 years later and we are supposed to have transitioned to soft power? I guess now in 2009 we have "eliminated" our dependence on coal cause we followed Amory Lovins' and the CFR's advice and stopped those nasty zero-carbon emitting nuclear reactors.

Yep we don't depend on coal anymore in 2009 just like Amory Lovins planned. Just think of all the gigatons on CO2 we avoided emitting into the atmosphere cause we opted for the "soft power" route.

You're right David. I thought we "doubled our dependence on coal" but clearly as you pointed out I was wrong. We don't use coal do we.

To all concerned about global warming and our future you may be interested in the following two video presentations.

The first is a new talk given at Google's headquateres by Kirk Sorensen. It's about LiFTR nuclear power plants

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

The second is a TED Talk given by Stewart Brand

http://www.ted.com/index...ironmental_heresies.html

Konstantin #10,
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'll deconstruct your first few sentences then gotta go.
David,

You are in denial. Look around you. It's 30 years later and we are supposed to have transitioned to soft power?

No idea what you mean here. "..supposed to have transitioned to soft power?" In that article from over thirty years ago Amory Lovins offered two possible energy paths for this country. One, the hard one, was sort of a continuation of the one we were one and I think is basically the one we've followed. Hence our current mess, much as he predicted. The other, his soft path, was a new dramatically different alternative. We didn't follow that one. We did not follow that one. That wasn't the one we followed.
To blame him for our current predicament makes about as much sense as blaming the Iraq War on Gandhi, Professor Gates getting busted on Martin Luther King, or our sycophantic media on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0JsdSDa_bM

Great link, 99! Thanks! I'll be spreading that one around.
Dave

David Lasagna #12

You make no sense on the subject. Not replying anymore to you posts, which appear to be trolling.

Oh, fer crapsakes! Konstantin! You keep posting all this pro-nukes, pro-coal crap on THE GREEN NEWS REPORT, and you're calling DL a troll? Now I've seen it all.

Agwnt 99 I never post anything pro-coal. You must have me confused with someone else. I only post the pro-nuclear links because people believe the crap the fossil fuel industry promotes which are solar and wind turbines cause since they can never provide enough power the FF industry is shaping the energy future to their benefit as the only other alternative to solar and wind.

Please point out where I have posted anything pro-coal and if you have the time please tell me why you don't believe nuclear energy is the cure for global warming, assuming you that's your position.

Pardon me... posting about coal in furtherance of your pro-nukes thing. Radioactivity is not clean, and we can't make it clean... and probably won't ever be able to make it clean. While it does not give off greenhouse gasses, it emits lethal radiation and when the fuel is spent, it gets ground up with the depleted uranium to make bullets and missiles and tank plating to kill the people killing as well as everyone in the area of where they were killing and being killed... for MILLIONS of years... since spent fuel is just lying around not making anyone any money, and it's so handy in enhancing our weapons' penetration and our tanks' impenetrability.

We have a bunch of sub-human profit-crazed "corporatists" running everything, and there is no way to make them behave even at this already way too unsafe level we have going now.

So I would appreciate it if you just get off the nukes subject altogether. You only piss people off and you aren't going to convert a single soul here.

And if you don't believe me about them mixing it with the already too radioactive depleted uranium, go here and follow the links and watch the videos.

Agent 99,

you are misinformed about nuclear energy. It's late here so I'll just suggest you watch that video presentation by NASA scientist Kirk Sorensen given at Google headquaters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

Watch that video and it will answer many of the misinformation you learned about nuclear power. Then you would be in a better position to evaluate the potential of nuclear power as the world's energy source for all the world not just rich western nations that can afford to build inefficient wasteful solar and win power plants.

Regarding depleted uranium being used in bullets, etc the people that are doing that are no different than terrorists and they must be psychopaths to do that to other people.

Konstantin,
I am not a troll. I am an elf. Lasagna is not a troll name. Italian elf. Get with the program.
Thanks for catching my back 99.

Konstantin said:

"nuclear energy is the cure for global warming"

True. The way nuclear war is a cure for over-population.

Brad I'm assuming that was a joke. Even anti-nuclear environmental groups know. IF it wasn't a joke, and I can't imagine it wasn't, you need to be better informed.

Do yourself a favor and watch that video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

Here are the slides pdf from the talk

http://www.ece.iastate.e...Sorensen_Google_LFTR.pdf

typo * Even anti-nuclear environmental groups know better.

Why Nuclear Energy Is Not The Answer To Climate Change

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/26-8

Konstantin, like everyone else you are welcome to post your links and comments for the edification of our readers as long as you stay within the very few rules we have here.

That said, every single comment you have posted on this site has single-mindedly pushed one agenda and one agenda only --- the expansion of nuclear power.

As we've said to other commenters who relentlessly push a single agenda, if you're looking for someone to help you grind your particular axe or advance your particular agenda, this is not the place. That's not what we do here.

Our readers are very smart and very discerning and are perfectly capable of evaluating information from a wide variety of sources for themselves. If they remain unconvinced by your arguments, perhaps you should consider crafting different arguments.

Calling other commenters "trolls" is unlikely to help your agenda. Mr. Lasagna is a long-time commenter here, and most definitely is NOT a "troll".

Des I didn't mean to suggest a "legitimate" commenter, whether longtime or not, is a troll. I said it cause at the very least his first reply to my comment was basically an ad hominem attack that didn't address the issue I made.

David in reply to #25,

If you are paying attention and have seen the video or even did some research, these LiFTR nuclear power plants use thorium as their fuel. Nothing in the article applies to Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

There is no additional mining required since in the US we have enough already to last a few centuries, probably one thousand years. Even if there was the CO2 accounting should be attached to the mining machines not the nuclear reactors because after some time the energy required for mining would be provided by nuclear power plants. By your same logic, assuming it's the same as the article you advocated, we shouldn't build any solar or wind turbines because the process of manufacturing them would use CO2 especially since they are likely to be manufactured in China with energy provided by coal.

Some facts since you won't read the link or see the video:
* 6 kilograms of thorium can provide the same energy as 230 train cars of bituminous coal or 600 train cars of brown coal or 440 million cubic feet of natural gas
* In 2007 the world used 5.3 billion tons of coal, 31.1 billion barrels of oil, and 2.92 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. All that can be replaced by 6,600 tons of thorium.

* All the energy a person would use in their entire lifetime can be provided by 100 grams of thorium.

This is one of the comments int he article David linked to:

"pjd412 July 27th, 2009 12:15 pm

Thank-you for the excellent response. You last paragraph certainly drives home the point. I for one have no connection to nuclear industry either (But sadly, I do the coal mining industry).

Attitudes toward nuclear power, notably nuclear waste, do seem to be strictly based visceral "feelings" as if 50's b-movies of atomac mutants play in many people's heads.

But, if we want to appeal to feelings, we can do that to. Near where I live, on the Ohio River, there is the 3-unit 2500 megawatt coal-burning Bruce Mansfield power plant - consuming 7 million tons of coal a year, producing 625,000 tons of dirty ash per year, about 25 million tons of CO2 per year, a couple hundred pounds of mercury, visible sulfurous-smelling smoke when there is temperature inversion, and is in general noisy and dirty. Oh, and those mercury and arsenic compounds emitted from burning coal have a half life of infinity.

Right next door, is the Beaver Valley Nuclear Plant. Producing a bit less installed power, but recently set a record for reliability. What does it do? It just sort of sits there and hums a bit. All the waste it has ever, or will ever produced is in a few water-filled pools on site.

I know which one I'd like to see shut down.
"

Dear Everyone,
Now I see that Konstantin IS talking about a subject of which I know nothing. I didn't know there was a NEW kind of nuclear reactor, the thorium kind. So I just read some of the many enthusiastic opinions of this technology on the internet.
I do not have a good enough understanding of this technology to have an informed opinion. And there is precious little on the other side of this new nuclear debate, that I could find anyway, to help inform me. But I'm extremely wary. I'm wary because when the original nuclear power was getting started every single goddamn thing that was said to enlist public and government support turned out to be false. Egregioulsy false. Now this "new" technology is being touted again as the perfectly safe, sustainable answer to all our energy problems. I'm not buying it. Not after all the lies the first time around. Not after the unsolvable mess we've been left with from the first nuclear energy go round. And not with the proliferation problems associated with it that are only getting worse. And not with all the great reasons to go lower tech environmentally benign sustainable that I DO understand. I think the painful truth is that we're going to have to change the way we live. These nuclear advocates all sound like high use energy addict technophiles to me. Is that ad hominem? That's how they sound.
Until someone can give me some legitimate reasons/evidence that show Amory Lovins to be wildy off the mark and biased on this subject, I gotta go with him. Audited a few classes he was teaching decades ago. I found him to be smart, well-informed, calm, funny, and credible.