In Wikipedia, under the general title: "Corruption", is a sublink to a phenomenon known as "Rent Seeking". Originally coined to describe government officials in corrupt countries, who would demand illegal gratuities on any transaction, it was broadened over time to describe any public official seeking his own betterment at the expense of people in general. As such it would include senators who vote earmarks to cronies, committee chairmen who stall legislation to increase their own personal power, and officials who propose lawsuits detrimental to the public, to increase their standing with specific lobbying groups.
The article opened my eyes. I understood at one fell swoop, the main chance that NYS Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was taking, with his attempt to kickstart a PR blitz to harrass the NRC in regard to Indian Point relicensing. Cuomo is a rent seeker. A Luddite Rent-Seeker.
His avowed tactic is to attack the process that provides us with emission-free electric power, with a media-based intimidation campaign aimed at whatever judge eventually hears his amicus brief to artificially tamper with NRC relicensing parameters. By doing this, he hopes to gain media capital, national exposure, and the guaranteed future support of the highly organized antinuclear lobby. He is carpeting his future rise to national prominence, by screwing the public in the New York State region, without a single mention of alternative power sources, or alternative money sources (to pay for rebuilding lost infrastructure).
In this, he fits the classic description of the Luddite Rent Seeker, a corrupt government functionary, squelching public good for his own gain.
As a rate payer, a taxpayer, and a user of household energy, I myself, along with millions of other concerned citizens, .... wish only that every available resource be preserved in keeping life financially viable, and our civilization's infrastructure physically viable, without the self-imposed disasters of blackouts, ballooning rates, witless hairshirt crusades, or other trendy media-grabs.
Whatever worries I may have had about terror after 9-11, most people will agree with me here, half a decade later, that those concerns were exaggerated by deluded Republicans hewing to a war agenda, and are largely imaginary. I'm just not worried about domestic terror attacks. I don't think they are credible as a phenomenon, and so I'm not willing to impoverish my family to avoid them. Sorry, if that sounds offensive to some, but I just don't think its going to happen.
As far as the professionalism and basic soundness of the nuclear industry, the facts are on the record books. Removing the world's nuclear plants would kill a million people a year worldwide immediately, via the introduction of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen sulfide, mercury, lead, and radioactive coal ash into the atmosphere.The 6000 coal mining deaths every year in China would be replicated many times over worldwide, and the estimated 750,000 Chinese citizen deaths due to air pollution recently published by the World Bank (and suppressed by Beijing) would likewise be replicated across the globe.
This is a crime much too large to contemplate.
So why contemplate it?
The Rent-Seeker's compact.
Cuomo,.. beholden to a fringe activist cabal lost in NIMBY concerns from the 1970's, suggests we go "NIMBY" in New York, and get on the air pollution bandwagon , just like the evasive Beijing regime. Morally speaking, we must oppose the man, or re-educate him. Should he mobilize a national campaign to deny America the saving benefits of nuclear energy, he and his father would go down in the history books as a deluded dynasty of NIMBY despots, who witlessly killed millions , out of the pure hubris of the Rent-Seeking Luddite,...in the end, sort of a Green Pol Pot & son.
