Las Vegas Review-Journal: Been to Vegas lately, Harry?

posted at 11:49 am on July 7, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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When the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls Harry Reid a “YouTube sensation”, they don’t mean it as a compliment.  Given that the city runs on a tremendous amount of coal-based electricity and depends on oil-based transportation to bring gamblers and tourists to the desert oasis, they find Reid’s latest comments sickening in their own right.  Far from making the world sick, the industrialization spurred by fossil fuels has made the world and its residents healthier than ever:

By Thursday afternoon, the video clip had close to 400,000 hits on YouTube. Like an “American Idol” reject who has no idea he can’t sing, Sen. Reid serves up speechification that crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Doesn’t the Democratic Party have its own Simon Cowell, someone with enough common sense to cut off the Slipup from Searchlight before he finds all new ways to embarrass his home state?

Funny thing about coal and oil. Before they began transforming Americans’ everyday lives by providing electricity and transport that didn’t require a horse, average citizens trudged though life with mouths half-full of teeth, fortunate to live past age 40. Far from making us sick, they’ve powered advances that have extended the country’s collective life expectancy to about 80, helped eliminate hard-core poverty and made us the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet.

Today, coal still provides half the country’s electricity — power that allows Las Vegas air conditioners to run 24 hours per day during the soul-searing heat of July, power that lets partygoers enjoy the city’s luxuries at all times. And how did they — and the foodstuffs they ate for breakfast — get to this otherwise uninhabitable tourist outpost? They drove or flew here on a tank of fossil fuel.

The longer clip extends the silliness from Reid. There is a vast difference between water use and water consumption. Both are higher in nuclear plants, even in closed systems, but the difference is not anywhere near as large as Reid implies. Closed nuclear systems consume about 30% more water than fossil fuel or biomass systems, about 13 megaliters for each megawatt produced, as opposed to 10 megaliters for the traditional energy production systems. Moreover, this applies to existing technologies; design advances may reduce this difference as research continues. The vast portion of water used in the nuclear cycle gets returned, either to the system itself or to the environment, in once-through processes — just as it does in other traditional energy production.

That doesn’t make water a non-issue in the debate, but it’s silly to exclaim on one hand that traditional energy production makes us sick while hyperbolically screeching about the water consumption of the nuclear cycle. Of course, Reid does silly better than anyone else in the Senate, and he does hyperbole even better. It’s part of an effort to force energy production and use into a heavy federal bureaucracy that would hamstring industry and kneecap the American economy — and Las Vegas would likely be one of the first victims of Reid’s Chicken Little routine.

The Review-Journal shows that Reid’s antics have made him few friends back home. The “Slip-Up from Searchlight” may find a severe power shortage when it comes time for his re-election campaign in 2010.

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