HB 1790, SB 1138: Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium

Virginia House Bill 1790, which proposes to authorize a group of acclaimed scientists as a "Nuclear Energy Consortium" to oversee use of nuclear energy in Virginia, has been passed by the House of Delegates and the Senate, and is currently "on calendar." It's on the verge of becoming law. Senate Bill 1138 is virtually identical:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+HB1790S1

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+SB1138S1
Oh, right! Just what we need! Given that the Cold War didn't really end, that the world refuses to learn anything from the collapse of one socialist regime after another, that a critical number of people inside and outside the United States continue to place blind religious faith in Big Government's ability to do whatever God refuses to do about their emotional "needs," maybe we do need more nukes.

I'll bet half of you out there in cyberspace don't even remember Life With Nukes. Mutual Assured Destruction. The Russians hated us, to the extent they loved and hated what they were told to love and hate, and to a similar extent we hated them, and the only thing keeping us from war with what really was once our military and economic match was that each side had the nuclear technology to destroy the other. World War III was likely to break out any day; when it did break out the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would, like the Kilkenny cats, have destroyed each other, so instead of two powerful countries with nuclear bombs there wouldn't be any. Oh, and the rest of the world wouldn't be a very pleasant place any more, either.

"Nobody wants to go back to that! This Consortium will be using nuclear energy to, well, replace coal, to power electric lights and Metrorail trains and other things everybody likes."

Oh, right. Everybody has liked those things, and no doubt everybody will still like them, until the next earthquake and nuclear, er, uh, accident. So it won't be the Russians who blow us up; it'll be our own beloved Mod. Con. This is so reassuring and makes such a difference.

Actually, as I read the bills that e-friends have identified as "Agenda 21," I am seriously starting to miss the nukes. What people like George H. Bush, who signed a lot of "Agenda 21" documents while President, and Barbara Kingsolver, who emoted about how just plain mean of us it was not to have taken those documents more seriously, understood "Agenda 21" to be about was a commitment for the United States to pollute less. That would have been fine. And everybody's been trying to pollute less; the cars have filters--walking behind a car hardly ever makes you feel sick, the way it used to do--and the industrial plants have "scrubbers" and so on. That, however, is not what "Agenda 21" was all about. It was also a commitment for the United States to become less affluent, to appease the envy of other people around the world. Hence the craziness of its more recent manifestations, the "Even giving up cars wouldn't be enough, Americans must give up horses and private land ownership and any individual control over their own homes, Americans must become huddled disease-plagued masses like the rest of the world!" fanaticism. And as long as the rest of the world is at that level of unenlightenment, maybe we the United States do need to be the nation with the most and the biggest and the baddest nuclear devices, and we need to point some of them at the nations from which the demands that we join the failed socialist economies of the world are coming at any given time.

I can't believe I said that. No good liberal child of the 1960s would ever have said that. Not without reading proposed legislation that takes the hate and envy embodied in "Agenda 21" seriously, as a rule for us to live by, anyway.