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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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As former President Jimmy Carter enters hospice care, we are likely to soon see a huge number of stories concerning what an honorable person he was. But keep in mind that in 1971 Carter, then Governor of Georgia "proclaimed ‘American Fighting Men's Day" likely in support of First Lieutenant William L. Calley who had recently been convicted for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre. The massacre involved the rape and murder of Vietnamese men, women, and even children.

My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).

If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.

It's not a surprise that France, the only country that continued to basically directly control nuke reactors via the gov't were the only ones to continue to really build them. Ironically, in a situation where a New Dealer like Hubert Humphrey was POTUS, nukes might've been better off.

Didn’t we just have high interests rates which could admittedly be a problem.

But our economy funds many long term projects in deregulated industries. I’d like to see what your actually referring to but the best I’m guessing it’s based on receiving variable pricing.

Here's a Twitter thread to peruse - https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1625095305694789632

Ok so this isn’t deregulation bad. It’s nuclear was not economical unless government gave them pricing power.

And ignore that a big reason why nuclear got super expensive is excessive regulation after 3 mile/Chernobyl.