Obama's Nuclear Ambitions Spot on... For a Soviet

Donklephant wrote recently that "Obama’s Nuclear Energy Ambitions Are Spot On". Donklephant is buying into the hopeandchange rhetoric that has come to characterize the Obama Presidency.

The news that prompts this comment is the news that President Barack Obama next week will announce a loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the United States in almost three decades. Let's repeat that- the President of the United States, who has no personal experience in loans, investments, or running energy companies, is going to be using your taxpayer money to give to a politically connected company in Georgia in order to build two new nuclear reactors. This loan guarantee is fully intended to be a bribe in order to get Republicans to sign on to a larger cap-and-tax plan that will destroy America. The government will afterwards continue to play a large role in this nuclear reactor, as it will have been paid for by state money.

Building nuclear reactors is fine, and needed, and welcome. But Obama's ambitions are not 'spot on'- we don't need more government-financed business interests, given away to politically connected people, run by the government, for the purposes of scoring political points. This isn't freaking Russia, this is America, and Obama's ambitions fit better there then they do here.

In America, the way the government supports nuclear energy is by getting out of the freaking way. It repeals all of its stifling regulations. It gets rid of its stinking taxes and fees. It puts in place proper private property rights and then protects them. In America, the way the government supports nuclear energy is by getting out of the way and letting the American people unleash their full intelligence, insight, creativity, and hard work on this issue.

I've already talked about Obama's policies with regards to nuclear energy in my post "Yucca Mountain":

The shutting down of the Yucca Mountain project (by Obama, in defiance of what Congress ordered) will cost jobs (already thousands are being laid off in Nevada because of this policy decision), will cost energy companies money (they paid billions of their own money for this project and now will have to pay billions more for unsafe temporary storage of spent nuclear waste), and will lead to lower investment in clean and safe nuclear energy (because there is no place to store the waste).

Obama's ambitions, like everything else he does, fit better in Russia than they do here. They are not 'spot on.'