John McCain: The Answer to Energy Worries is Nuclear Power

I happened to catch McCain on Letterman last night - although I generally ignore CBS these days since they bent over and spread it to the right wing on the whole Bush National Guard debacle where the lies still well outnumber any semblance of truth.

McCain insists the answer is nucular (his phrasing), that we just harbor unreasonable fears about it.

Well, here's my take on nuclear. Yes, it has much potential. The problem is that since the very beginning of our harnassing of it, we've done so blind. We have no good way to dispose of spent crap from nuclear energy (or weaponry), we have little protection for these plants that don't need to be attacked to cause problems (hello Three Mile Island!), and we still don't begin to understand its ramifications.

My partner, John, had a father who was, as a metallurgist, involved in a nuclear accident back in the '50s. A completely unnecessary accident that could have been prevented except that the company he worked for wanted results that could not be achieved safely. His boss ordered him to conduct an experiment that was guaranteed to blow up. It did.

That he survived at all was a miracle. But it cut his life much shorter. And, sadly, we're not much farther along in dealing with the ill effects of radiation as we were then. Quite honestly, I doubt we'll ever have a way to fully use nuclear power safely or a way to save people exposed to massive doses of it (a particularly gruesome death where those last 2-3-4 days put hell to shame).

Anyone recall Chernobyl? That site is still - about two decades later - so toxic and yet the sarcophagus literally built around it to contain it is disintegrating, land for miles and miles around it still a devastated wasteland, people still living with the horrible effects. That's how we deal with nuclear accidents; we hide them under a blanket and smile. Unfortunately, radiation permeates and penetrates through a LOT, including blankets.

So let John McCain move into a nuclear reactor and tell us how his cancer's doing a few months later. Then tell us nuclear power is the answer.