A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches/videos on current issues that may be of interest.

Despite Congress making nearly $20 billions in construction loan guarantees available since 2005, and the Obama Administration and Congress proposing to add up to $36 billion more, those funds are going begging for applicants, Wald reports. And the few utilities that have applied are backing off.

What is it about our species that sees the earth and its oceans not as our shared home to be cherished and guarded as though our existence depended on it, but as our unlimited garbage dump? We should be ashamed. Our governments should be ashamed. Our corporations and their dishonest executives should be ashamed. All of us.

Have you heard anyone in America begging the president to reassure them that the future of our nuclear power industry is sound?

Me neither.

Officials at Fukushima Daiichi concede that they will have to release radioactive steam for as long as a year as a result of the operations failure at the plant, and that the 200,000 evacuated may not be able to return for years to their homes. It’s not that this wasn’t a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. It’s that, when such events strike, the long-lasting effects for nuclear plants that fail are far greater than other energy sources. And the PR machine can’t spin their way out of that.

Things continue to develop at the Daiichi and Daini nuclear power stations in Japan today. As you have already heard, a second reactor building exploded at Daiichi, it was the Unit 3 which had been experiencing the same problems as Unit 1, which also exploded.

What is believed to have happened is that hydrogen gas which was released along with the steam to reduce the pressure in the reactor vessel built up in the generation building and then a random spark ignited it. The building is seen to have the same kinds of damage that the Unit 1 building had.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems that a somewhat coercive but nevertheless voluntary monitoring of cybersecurity via a program like “Perfect Citizen” for things like a nuclear generating plant isn’t such a bad thing.

I was in college in the Spring of 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had its meltdown. Without Twitter, Blogs or Facebook we actually had to sit around and hyperventilate with each other face-to-face, it was terrible. One thing we did have is Reagan Administration officials on television telling us that non-commie nuclear reactors [...]

Last week, Pew released a survey with the headline ‘Support for Alternative Energy and Offshore Drilling.’ The piece begins, “The public continues to favor a wide range of government policies to address the nation’s energy supply…”

That is accurate, but it doesn’t get at the most striking data. The most important finding in the survey is the fact that clean energy and mass transit investments are vastly more popular than nuclear investments and offshore drilling.

Speaker Pelosi, the spoiled boys in the Senate left a big mess to clean up: they’ve bagged up more than 50 billion stimulus dollars the addicts from coal and nukes can delay withdrawal from their Treasury subsidies. Like addicts everywhere, the coal and nuke junkies will starve families and steal from strangers to keep the fixes going. Like dealers everywhere, their Senate dealers will sell out the rest of us to keep the fixes coming: they’re planning to sell the junkies over 55 billion of the Treasury’s finest. Speaker Pelosi, how can we help you stop the deal from going down?