Mike Mulligan's US Government Renaissance

First published as comments in the NYT's in: The Nurture of Nuclear Power

I always thought the problem with nuclear power was ideology not technology. The dominant control ideology of the industry has been increasingly the hard right wing conservatives and this ideology is dominant at every plant. There are very few democrats at any of these plants and certainly even less as you go up the management ranks.

The model has defaulted into a autocratic and a decentralized form...every plant is a one off. We serve profits and self interest, and not the greater good of our nation.

The true benefits of nuclear industry has never been shown. I propose a government take-over of the 25 Fukushima plants in the USA. As a national security issue, we should replace those plants with brand new identical models. Lets begin another grand experiment. They would be large plants and centrally controlled in the initial construction and early operation phase. Imagine the efficiency if these plants were built to one set of codes from both the regulator and the designer/builder stand point. It should be a government controlled and modeled like the TVA project.

What if we woke up one day and we discovered government could be more efficient and 'just' than any corporation...or at least could complete with them.

President Obama could say these plants are a dire threat to the USA and the only way out is to replace them. We just about got negative interest rates with QE2 and why couldn't we come up with a revolutionary borrowing mechanism. It would be a giant jobs and public works project. It would split the Republicans this fall and who knows the size of the political coalition we could create for the nation?

There is more value than the traditional economic benefits than cheap and reliable electricity over a project like this. We should value a project like this for how much advanced education and advance managerial experience it drives into our nation. How much advanced intellectual experienced it drives into all the employees who are associated with this voyage. This is, and always was, the real wealth of our nation!