The American Spectator : The Greeening of Thomas Friedman

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The Greeening of Thomas Friedman

By William Tucker on 10.6.08 @ 12:08AM

He's trying hard to save the Earth, but he doesn't much know what he's talking about.

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p> SO DOES NUCLEAR enter Friedman's field of vision? Tolerant fellow that he is, Friedman is not ready to condemn nuclear to outer darkness. He even mentions it once or twice as a "clean alternative," although with no visible enthusiasm. br> /p>

To build a new nuclear plant costs a minimum of $7 billion today, and would take probably eight years from conception to completion. Most CEOs have about eight years in office, and there are not a lot of utility CEOs who would bet $7 million -- which might be more than half the company's market cap -- on one nuclear project.

br> Nevertheless, there are now more than a dozen license applications for new reactors before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Whether or not these proposals go anywhere will depend entirely on whether the general public achieves a better understanding of the technology. Concerned as he is with petrodictators, global warming, and world energy shortages, you'd think Friedman would spend more of his own time learning how "abundant, clean, reliable and cheap" nuclear technology can be.

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topics:
Business, Environment, Global Warming, Law, Energy, Oil

About the Author

William Tucker is the author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (1) | Leave a comment

Mort| 1.26.09 @ 10:56PM

http://spectator.org/archives/2008/10/06/the-greeening-of-thomas-friedm

Mr. Tucker -

Your condemnation of green, clean, and renewable energies may sound good for a short-term perspective, but you're missing the point. The energy revolution has to be the next big one. If we don't have an administration that gets serious about this, we're going to continue to wallow in greed and short-term profit objectives. We haven't put the incentives in place to attract adequate resources ($ and innovation) to be devoted to making clean, green, and renewable energies work on a large scale, and I'm including nuclear in this. The two minor details that you fail to address in you comments about nuclear energy are what do we do with the waste and how do we prevent terrorists from targeting these plants or stealing the energy for weapons. Your IQ doesn't have to be much higher than 70 to realize that our current energy model is inadvertently impoverishing us and the rest of the world. I'm not sure why you would want to fight an administration that wants to seriously encourage investments and innovations in these areas. Maybe we should wait for China or India to leapfrog us in these areas, while we maximize the ROI on our fossil-fuel based energy model.