Since I work as an engineer doing nothing but air emissions work (along with some hazmat/hazwaste), I know quite a bit a/b the power industry. Just to clarify, I'm a consultant, not and environmentalist.... the difference? I'm in it to get paid. ;-)

The fun thing about this is that we can blame the tree hugging enviro-nazi's for a large portion of our air quality woes.

Back when nukes were coming on-line, the enviros said, "NO NUKES" and wanted coal plants. Now, 80% of our "carbon" emissions are produced from industrial sources. I don't know the exact numbers, but a SUBSTANTIAL portion of that is from COAL plants which the enviro nuts pushed for. Well, now they want, "NO coal!!"... well, we need power...

So, the gov decides to build a storage facility for the nuke waste in the US (Yucca Mtn). The DOE said, "no more nuke plants till we have a centralized storage facility". Well, our friend the enviro wackos don't like Yucca Mtn. The governor of the state of NV said he was going to kill the project. Hmmm... no more nukes till we get Yucca and people want to kill it. Do you know how much and where our current nuke waste stock pile is? If consolidated, it would cover a foot ball field, three meters deep. Not a lot of waste given how many years we've been generating it. Right now it's stored individually all over the country. There have been several releases to the environment, causing health and safety issues.

Or, we can think about the quantity of emissions that have gone into the air from coal plants. I worked at an 1,100 mega Watt facility while in college for a summer. We burned ~110 railroad cars of coal PER DAY!!! Think about that on the grand scale of the whole US!! Do you know how much NOx, CO, SOx, PM, Metals, etc that is?!?!?! OR... we could have built nuke plants, put the waste in drums and kept the air a lot cleaner. Nothing like having people who say they want to protect the environment be the same ones who are causing it's destruction.

P.S. man-made global warming is BS. 100ppm (0.01%)... causing our climate to change!?!? it's not that delicate of a system!! Also, the dem's who like to say they are strong on environmental issues... ask a/b ole' Ted Kennedy and the wind farm up in his neck of the woods.... or D.S. Al Gore and his "carbon foot print"... only 20x the national average energy consumption in ONE of his houses... doh, I'm up on my soap box again.....