I’m judging debate today, where South Dakota’s brightest and bravest students regularly display a keen grasp of evidence, logic, and rhetoric. I will thus miss the crackerbarrels, where our Republican legislators usually struggle to rise to the same standards.
But if you are going to your local crackerbarrel today, here are some questions you can pose to your legislators:
- On IM22 aftermath: Many so-called “replacement” bills for IM22 seem to focus more on restraining initiative and referendum rather than putting any new limits on legislators, their behavior, and their campaign finance. Can you give examples of ways that your “replacement” bills limit the power and privilege of legislators?
- Related: Do you believe the Legislature should make it harder for citizens to exercise their Constitutional right to legislate through initiative and referendum? If so, do you believe citizens should make it harder for the Legislature to pass laws?
- On the budget: What taxes will your raise and/or what programs will you cut to balance this year’s budget?
- On HB 1156: Why do you or any other non-law-enforcement personnel need to carry a pistol in the Capitol?
- On SB 149: Why does the state need to allow religious discrimination in the adoption process?
- Related: Please give specific examples of situations in which adoption agencies would invoke SB 149.
- On SB 176: Does giving the Governor the power to declare everything within a mile of a protest site threaten South Dakotans’ free speech and property rights?
- Related: SB 176 supposedly targets lawbreaking protestors, but don’t police already have enough laws to arrest lawbreaking protestors and break up illegal demonstrations?
- To legislators who served last term in the House: What did you know about former Representative Mathew Wollmann’s ethical violations, when did you know about them, and what action did you take in response to that knowledge?
I welcome more suggestions for questions, as well as your report on the answers you get from your legislators. Bring your cameras, and get your legislators on the record!
The majority in Pierre seems obsessed with concealing things. Sex with interns, EB-5 scandals, invalid emergency clauses, unlimited gifts in exchange for political favors, calling “free speech oppression” protection for the protesters, roadblocks to citizen involvement on ballot issues. Why not guns? What’s the worst that could happen?
Repealing and replacing seems to be a common theme, IM22 included.
Democrats want to repeal the use of oil from pipelines, but there is no replacement strategy for transportation without oil that is ready to go.
Republicans want to repeal the ACA, but there is no replacement strategy for affordable insurance that is ready to go.
Sounds like there needs to be more problem-solving, collaboration, and continual progress than a “I’m quitting and taking my ball home” strategy in either case.
The debate students I know are much more capable of understanding and solving our contemporary problems than our current crop of Republican legislators.
Doc- OT for actual scientists.
http://www.alaskacommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Elements.jpg
Saw this first thing this morning and I’m still chuckling.
Someone needs to “repeal and replace” that particular link on the internet ;^).
I visit a particular blog where one commenter claims to be an evolutionary biologist with 2 degrees and zero sense of humor. Stuff like this I use to needle his tender butt endlessly.
Wind and solar and better hydroelectric systems combined with light rail electric trains, and more electric cars are all possible right now and would all stimulate the economy and make relying on uranium-based electricity and fossil fuels nearly unnecessary or greatly reduce use. Throwing up your hands and claiming there is no solution is not an answer to anything. It is also not just liberals and Democrats who are concerned about water pollution from oil lines. Some of the most conservative Republicans around here are also interested in conserving good drinking water.
SB 176 is one of those “shells” – a “vehicle” for avoiding the inconvenience of the legislature’s rules. Not only does it trample on 1st Amendment rights of assembly and free speech, it is a blatant abuse of the legislative process. Rules are in place for a reason.
Mr. Curt I understand they followed the rules with this law bill #176. And I am told it is no longer a shell, but a fully formed and meaty nut. It will be interesting to see what happens when it crosses to the other side of the ballroom and starts another dance. I, for one, predict more changes. And grudznick does not predict lightly.
Wind/solar/hydro + electric cars is great, but I haven’t seen it yet.
A back of the envelope calculation shows that if you wanted to replace all of the registered vehicles in South Dakota (1.2 million) with electric cars similar to a Ford Fusion (electric), you would need to generate about 60% more electricity than we do today. And charging electric cars (or making hydrogen) will not be the only new use of electricity either.
Load-following nuclear would help generate the amount of energy we need while complementing wind and solar when they are not enough or not available. Without nuclear you will continue to emit ever more carbon as the requirements for natural gas back-up increase.
I take your point about Republicans wanting clean air. There are also plenty of Democrats who just want to fix ACA, not get rid of it.
Thank you friend Cory Allen Heidelberger for these great suggestions.
Some nice plots for you about how we are falling behind even though more solar and wind is coming on-line. Carbon dioxide is going up…and electricity prices are going up?
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/02/less-nuclear-energy-has-meant-higher.html
One of the issues is that when you shut down a safe, operating nuclear plant, you also eliminate low costs of operation, high paying jobs, and carbon-free electricity. The large upfront costs of an existing plant have already been paid for.
New nuclear needs to be cheaper to build and should load-follow more to be profitable. One of the hurdles is that we have lost some expertise in the construction of nuclear plants in America, and our regulatory structure does not encourage such construction to make more carbon-free power.
The real surprise to me is that hydro is increasing, and DOE forecasts that hydropower will increase by some 50% by 2050. However, a good chunk of that increase will come from pumped hydro storage.
https://energy.gov/articles/energy-department-releases-new-hydropower-vision-report-and-98-million-funding-support
It appears that article omits the reduction in pollution when coal plants are replaced with natural gas and puts all the benefits on nuclear. I don’t understand why existing nuclear plants are shut down if still operating safely however.
The same site linked also has links to the benefits of molten salt reactors. Run these with Thorium and the nuclear option becomes less distasteful.
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/molten-salt-reactor-about-50-times.html
Total carbon is total carbon. The numbers are what they are.
Natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide that coal does when consumed for electricity, but whatever methane escapes is like 25 times worse than carbon dioxide!!! We don’t get the full carbon reduction from replacing a coal plant with more wind and solar because natural gas back up emits carbon.
If we use more natural gas for heating (which scales with new home construction) or for brand-new electricity demand, the carbon levels go up.
Mr. Wiken, you make unusual sense today.
Some of this discussion is focused on California nuclear plants going away. It looks like they have a lot of natural gas.
Thorium-based molten salt reactors would be great, but you have to get the Congress to approve a brand-new regulatory structure for them (they are looking into that right now).
The uranium-based small reactor designs use off-the-shelf light-water reactor technology, can load-follow, and are walk-away safe. Those will be easier to get approved in the near term (we’ll start to see them mid/late 2020’s).
Dr. McTaggart, are these small reactors with light-water technology sort of the on-demand-waterheater model, as opposed to the old 50-gallon drum filled with bog-water sitting on a couple of cinder-blocks over a good pile of coals?
Dr. McTaggart, are these small reactors with light-water technology sort of the on-demand-waterheater model, as opposed to the old 50-gallon drum filled with bog-water sitting on a couple of cinder-blocks over a good pile of coals?
Huh, I did not type that twice.
Huh, I did not type that twice.
Grudznick, believe it or not, your posts do not usually improve with age or when duplicated multipie times. Have your fun anyway.
Escaping methane is not good. Seems like escaping radioactive gases and isotopes might also be mentioned as not so good.
South Dakota, Montana, etc should be pushing for Thorium salt reactors since Montana has a lot of Thorium.
I am guessing that these are more of the on-demand water heater type of reactor.
The NuScale reactor design doesn’t use any pumps or valves to move water around…it is all convection/gravity. So if you lose external power…big whoop. Can’t have a failure due to a pump/valve, because there are not any.
It sounds that they deal with load-following by either shutting down a module (days), adjusting reactor power (hours), or adjusting steam output to the turbines (seconds/minutes).
Nuclear can account for its radioactivity. While you cannot see radioactivity, you can detect it with electronics.
Although fossil fuels move naturally-occurring radioisotopes (NORMs) around, they do have to account for those. To some degree agriculture does not either. Phosphate-based fertilizers are mined, and can transfer some of those NORMs around.
Nevertheless, when compared with natural backgrounds those NORM releases are small…if anything other than zero occurs with nuclear, there is an investigation.
The nice thing about Thorium is that 100% of it is Thorium-232, so no enrichment is necessary, and it is more plentiful than Uranium. You still need to convert it into Uranium-233, and deal with different chemistries than U-235 reactors deal with. Those are the sticking points.
Sorry…I meant to say fossil fuels do NOT account for those radioisotopes.
Bilden’s withdrawal leaves Mattis with just Air Force Secretary nominee Heather Wilson, a former New Mexico Republican congresswoman, in line for a top political post
Did anyone hear know Wilson was in line for a top job in the military?
Yes, they sounded like one of the in-line more efficient water heater types, with no valves and such. But they can get really hot. But still way better and safer than the old kind that were like the barrel on a campfire type. They still use the barrel on a campfire method to steam up water and burn coal and oil, so people need to decide if they want smoke and pollution and pipelines and trains that wreck, or they want small, clean, nuclear things.
How does this impact South Dakota?
I believe that if you want to process various types of chemicals, including for the production of biofuels, that the heat from the upcoming nuclear plants will be valuable.
If we are a net exporter of energy, long-term that should boost our state budgets.
Dr. McTaggart is right, we should be a net exporter but we cannot whine about windmills and dandylions growing in the wind and sunshine baking the dirt into brownies. We need to deal with how we could export this energy, and clean, safe, nuclear options are our best bet.
Sorry. Grudzie. No one gets to move to South Dakota and nothing gets exported. Now, back in the basement, turn off the lights and stay scared. Heh heh HO
Yeah, you’re right, Mr. Lansing, righter than right. Here’s a goat, albeit a scrawny Iowa one that now I’m sending to Colorado. Keep an eye on this one, for it will gnaw all your funny little cigarettes from your man purse while you are refilling your latte.