I'm curious on your position on electric cars. I have seen articles where the safety of electric cars is in question due to the hazardous materials aspect of our current battery technology. Do you think we should shoot for safer battery technology prior to making a move to mainstream electric vehicles? I'm especially curious due to your tragic experience being near a nuclear power plant, and ask you this with all due respect.

A little background on batteries, which are the biggest tech problem in electric cars:

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Interesting is the capacitor/battery combo. Have see some discussion of the idea and it may have promise.

Good stuff there.... I had been wondering how much cell phone battery technology was helping electric car battery technology. I suppose there was never really a reason to doubt using that technology across the board. Clearly we need to get away from a lead-acid type battery as a primary source for power. That or they'd have to be built so tough to survive crashes, the weight would create huge inefficiencies. That said, I know that lithium batteries can occasionally have a problem with thermal runaway if allowed to be drained too much- enough to melt a hole in a commercial jet.

LT is the wrong person to consult on this issue. She reminds me of the folks who claimed the horse and buggy could not be replaced by the auto. It's time to move forward in spite of the cries from the LT's of the world that we should live in darkness.

C'mon dude, give her a break. She's been through a lot with the nuclear thing. I'm with you though, we should develop nuclear. I am honestly just curious as to how her experience shapes her opinion on a more politically correct alternative energy source.

Right or left, people who play into the hands of the oil company need to be called out.

what the hell did she go through?

The batteries and a lot of the technology on present gas powered cars aren't exactly environmentally friendly to dispose of or make. Neither they, nor their electric car counterparts are like radioactivity, though. Radioactive material stays dangerous for centuries and does cumulative damage and we have no way cleaning it up properly. We can take apart and recycle the batteries and put safeguards in place to clean up the manufacturing process (even more efficiently than we presently do with car batteries). The batteries aren't made up of things that generate harmful rays on a continuous basis.

I lived near Hanford nuclear plant. The story is long and not fun to tell, though I have told some of it on here. RS, in particular, has been less than understanding. Nuclear is not the way to go, and he is a proponent of it. I, sadly, am a victim of it. I realize some garbage must be created by generating power in all the means presently available and practicable. That doesn't mean we have to generate crap we don't even have a safe way to clean up and just keep stockpiling the crap underground pretending that is equivalent to safely disposing of it while we also keep making releases of it that damage the health of all surrounding life for a large distance and then pretend we didn't.

While I know carbon based fuels generate CO and CO2 and such, I don't find those as damaging as ionizing radiation that causes genetic damage and mutation. We have at least a shot of corraling and cleaning up the Carbon products. Not so much so the radiation.

Sorry LT. The north pole is melting. Expect climate change on a mass scale thanks to hand wringers like yourself. You'll have the blood of billions of people on your hands and you could care less. No more burning fossil fuels. The debate is over. I have zero tolerance for the mouth pieces of oil companies.

RScommon:

Right or left, people who play into the hands of the oil company need to be called out.

Since it's call out time, you strike me as a Westinghouse Whore, a sock puppet for old style nuke.

Some new nuclear technology shows promise, but the pro-nuke types just want to build more old style water cooled plants with high costs, taxpayers shouldering the risks from accidents, and people 5,000 generations in the future living with our waste. I posted a good piece for you on the wall to wall subsidies of the plants, so no need for me to repeat my research.

If nukes are commercially viable, private industry will build them, finance them, and absorb all risks for them.

I missed the link. Feel free to repost. Reality is, the 104 plants we have are cash cows producing 20% of our electricity. I'm all for developing new and improved. Unfortunately, all the capital investment has been removed from the industry thanks to big oil's propaganda blitz. Like I said, if the industry hadn't been crap canned in the early 70's, we would already have technology to recycle this waste. All the while you whine about the small amount of radioactive waste whilst we pump tens of millions tons of garbage into the air each and EVERY day.

I'm not a hand wringer, RS. I wanted the gas guzzlers off the road and never understood why any of the fool companies made them as soon as they came out with the SUV. I have never owned a car that got less than 35 mi. / gal. EVER. The rest of my family is the same. If everyone had done as I have and not bought those pieces of crap, our infrastructure would be in better shape, our emmissions and consumption would have been lower and global warming slowed a bit already. I own a Prius, not an H2.

Doesn't matter LT. Much more needs to be done. That includes prying the combustible engine from the hands of the rabid masses. The only way we do that is through the electric auto and increased electricity production. Coal adds to the problem so our choices are limited at this point in time. A massive government windmill project could realistically get us to 40% by 2015. Nuclear could deliver the remaining 60%. This isn't pie in the sky stuff. We need to do this.