Many have declared the dubious “Cap and Trade” scheme dead, so Obama went ahead and had the EPA suggest they were going to impose it under their own regulations. The truth is, they’re not likely to do that. They want the “Climate Bill” to pass because it’s designed to gouge the energy and manufacturing sector out of $646 billion in tax dollars over ten years. All to finance his crypto-socialist programs.

The Democrats see the climate bill as a cash cow, but Republicans aren’t buying it. So in his State of the Union address, the president didn’t mention cap and trade. He mentioned the “green jobs” that would be created by the “Climate bill.”

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

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Doesn’t that sound swell? Except nuclear power plants are already safe and sound in the US and have been for over 50 years.

The 104 nuclear reactors in operation in 31 states provide only 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. But they are responsible for 70 percent of the power from pollution-free sources, including wind, solar and hydroelectric dams.

Nuclear power is only eclipsed by fossil fuels as a source of power as this chart reveals. But unlike fossil fuels, it’s a clean source of energy. And we’re evolving the technology to better and even safer versions.

The only real issue with nuclear power is nuclear waste. The plants themselves do not emit any significant radiation. You receive more exposure to radiation flying in a plane than you do if you lived next to a nuclear power plant. And the French, who embraced nuclear power far more than we have, developed excellent means of waste processing that we also use. The United States government spent $38 billion on the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada, after years of environmental and feasibility studies.

But green ideologues and their political vassals like Harry Reid have finally managed to get the place killed, using specious arguments like, “What if an earthquake makes all the waste (stored hundreds of feet below the ground) come to the surface?

Aside from the absurdity of such an argument (that sized quake would make radioactive waste the lease of people’s concerns), the site is over 80 miles from Las Vegas, in a very desolate place in the desert.  But now, as the Times on Line in Britain reports:

One of the most extraordinary engineering feats undertaken in postwar America is to lie unused inside a mountain unless someone thinks of a new purpose for it.

The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, chosen by Congress in 1987 and opposed by environmentalists ever since, is to be shut before receiving a single barrel of spent fuel, thanks to a line in this week’s budget that eliminates federal funding for the project.

The move comes despite President Obama’s backing for new nuclear plants.

And if you think that’s not enough to show he’s not serious about nuclear power, Obama’s also scuttling Bush’s plan to recycle the reactor rods. We used to have a facility to do that, but President Jimmy Carter shut that down. He was another anti-nuclear ideologue. And despite myths to the contrary, Carter was never a nuclear engineer in the Navy.

If we had embraced nuclear power in the ’70s instead of trying to kill it off, a large part of our carbon output in the last three decades would have never happened. It’s the so called “greens” who are responsible for that. We wouldn’t have needed coal burning plants. We would have had plenty of energy to supply our cities instead of energy problems like the California shortages a few years back.

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We certainly wouldn’t have needed the calls to cut back on our energy use that we’re seeing from this administration.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been criticized for his slow rollout of $18.5 billion in loan guarantees to spur investment in new nuclear power plants. But then, like Obama, Chu is a green ideologue with radical ideas not grounded in any science or rationality.

Obama’s push for nuclear power is just a ploy to try to get Republicans to vote for cap and trade. He knows a direct approach won’t work, but if he appeals to voters with the idea that the “Climate Bill” will provide new jobs, they might pressure their representatives to vote for it.

That’s as unlikely as Obama actually embracing nuclear power.