Yesterday, I wrote that any new nuclear plants in the US would likely be shoddy. "Take an industry that needs government assistance to survive, add government spending cuts, mix in a whole bunch of deregulation, and you've got a half-assed nuclear facility," I wrote. "This is the way we do things in the new Republican reality -- half-assed, all the way, every time."We have a Republican party fixated on spending cuts -- to the point where they want to cut funding for tsunami preparedness and have mocked volcano monitoring as an absurd waste of money. They've got deregulation fever, meaning a hands-off approach to industry. And it'd be tough to find one who gave a crap about the environment. So a half-assed nuclear industry it would be, if Republicans had their way.
Over at ThinkProgress, Jeff Spross posts a video demonstrating the GOP's rhetoric on nuclear safety prior to the events in Japan. Not only is it enlightening, but it backs up my argument -- that, for Republicans, "half-assed" and "adequate" are synonymous.
McCain comes out the worst here. In a debate, he dismisses concerns about nuclear safety as an "extreme environmentalist" position. At a campaign event, he portrays it as gibberish, summing up safety concerns as "blah, blah, blah." Like it or not, Republicans are always going to be in American politics and Republicans are sometimes going to be in power. The very existence of the GOP in America is reason enough to believe that safe nuclear power is completely impossible here...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
