tanstaafl:
It was the government of Alaska, under Sarah Palin, that redistributed revenues from oil company profits to Alaska’s citizens.
NO, it was the government of Alaska, in negotiations with Big Oil and the Feds 30 years ago, that set up a direct distribution of royalties to Alaskan citizens rather than a Democrat “general government fund” to be divvied out to cronies.
Sarah Palin’s role was a corporate shakedown -extorting higher royalty payments into the Fund – after the system has been chugging along for decades.
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ProMeister – You can open up ANWR and the OCS tomorrow, full bore no restrictions on anything, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference for YEARS; E&P takes time, and beyond that, we don’t even have the available equipment to drill in the first place. The largest drilling company in the world, Transocean, has nine deepwater rigs coming online in the next year and every one of them is already on long-term contract.
The commentor doesn’t realize that once you create a good investment climate and rein in the lawyers for the good of the country – you can move fast. Very fast.
E&P delays can be cut 70%. Steel for all the new rigs we want and drilling tools from Schlumberger & Hughes can be cranked up. We know this because we ramped up during other booms and for other projects like WWII material production and quadrupling our concrete and steel output for new concrete-rebar construction of the Interstates and the modern city.
As was, barred by lawyers and special interests from offshore drilling, we don’t build new oil rigs. Or set up financing and regulatory confidence needed to create new McDermott, Transglobal capacity or new firms. Instead, we sent our scrap steel to India to make cheap rebar to build Shanghai or new high tech factories in Guangdzhou (including all the steel of the WTC save a few chunks of rusty crap set aside for “Heroes” monuments and growingly disinterested museums).
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Rotwang – an otherwise well-informed discussion of nuclear power and Gen I nuke plant problems undermined in the end by this statement:
Plus, after billions and billions in research, we still don’t know what to do with the spent reactor fuel…although we’ve learned a hell of a lot about how to make glass.
We do, recycling and reprocessing as the French, Russians, and Asians do. A closed loop system killed where it was invented, in America, by the Idiot. Namely Jimmy Carter. Unfissioned uranium (98%) of original mass that goes into a reactor is recycled into new fuel. Almost all the long-lived activity comes from transuranics like plutonium and americium – and that is separated out from the intensely radioactive but shorter-lived fission product mass (150 pounds or so from a 3,0000 MW thermal reactor fuel cycle). Then the longer lived transuranics are not long-lived waste but added to new fuel for extra energy and burnup.
The other reason we haven’t pushed the issue is that for decades it was cheaper to go with open cycle fuel made with cheap uranium and surplus military stores of weapons grade plutonium & HEU reblended into fuel and burned to keep it safe from diversion and proliferation.
Overruling The Idiot’s folly is critical if nuke power is to make a sustained comeback as a clean, CO2-free fuel and as a critical adjunct fuel that can make fusion plants more likely (fusion neutrons can not only make heat, but breed new fissile fuel).
Without recycling&reprocessing, we have uranium sources adequate for 50-100 years. With it, over 10,000 years of supply from not treating such a scarce valuable metal as 98% waste and opening up newly economical additional uranium deposits.
