Word: winded
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Last weekend, tornadoes swept through Cook County, which includes Chicago. As a barbecue began on this city's North Side Saturday afternoon, the sky turned the color of charcoal and the wind quickened. One man burst through a door announcing that a tornado had been reported nearby. "Whatever," another man said dismissively, holding a Corona, before adding, "We can't get tornadoes here." Not so. Major cities with skyscrapers aren't less vulnerable to tornadoes than rural, flat areas. Consider the tornadoes that swept through downtown Atlanta and parts of New Orleans earlier this year, and the series of deadly...
...economics. Lovins, an environmentalist who is unusually comfortable with numbers, argues in a report released last week that a massive new push for nuclear power doesn't make dollars or cents. In his study, titled "The Nuclear Illusion," he points out that while the red-hot renewable industry - including wind and solar - last year attracted $71 billion in private investment, the nuclear industry attracted nothing. "Wall Street has spoken - nuclear power isn't worth it," he says...
...mention the huge liability risk of an accident - the insurance industry won't cover a nuclear plant, so it's up to government to do so. Conservatives like Republican presidential candidate John McCain tend to promote nuclear power because they don't think carbon-free alternatives like wind or solar could be scaled up sufficiently to meet rising power demand, but McCain's idea of a crash construction program to build hundreds of new nuclear plants in near future seems just as unrealistic...
...nuclear, then which carbon-free energy source will power our post-climate change future? Lovins favors a diverse mix of renewables, integrated to compensate for individual faults - solar for when the wind doesn't blow, and vice versa. He also wants to focus on energy efficiency and micropower, shifting away from the old model of the massive central plant sending out electricity - i.e., your local nuke - in favor of smaller plants, even residence-scale ones, built close to population centers. Reducing carbon emissions, he argues, will be cheaper and safer if we turn away from nuclear in favor of alternatives...
...sheer size of the problem facing the global energy industry demands that no solution can be dismissed out of hand. On June 6 the International Energy Agency released a study calling for $45 trillion in energy investments between now and 2050, including both a vast expansion in wind power and the construction of some 1,400 new nuclear plants. The conservatives are wrong to argue that nuclear deserves special treatment - it should live and die on the private market like any other technology - but we may not be done with the atom...