November 2 Leg Act News
Thank you to all who have participated in the democratic process of free and fair elections.
Whatever you accomplished during this campaign season testified to your dedication to our democracy. It is greatly appreciated!
Leg Act News Highlights
Energy: All Sources Considered by Mark Norton
We have been living with warnings for more than thirty years: global Industrialization is changing the climate of our planet. Average temperatures are steadily climbing contributing to a host of problems. Extreme weather events, insect-borne diseases and desertification, and the process by which fertile land becomes desert due to drought, deforestation or inappropriate agriculture are but a few examples. The per capita consumption of energy has steadily grown as industry brought us mechanized farming, mass and personal transportation, and urban sprawl. The surge of AI Data Centers only highlights the problems that have been with us for a long time. All that energy we create has to go somewhere after we use it to power our cell phones (etc.). It’s simple physics: heat is generated and diffuses into the environment.
Power generation is central to our civilization. Rolling back is not an option, but (perhaps) sustainability is. The rise of industry in the Western World is a direct result of the use of oil and its derivatives. Again, no coincidence. Oil is a very energy-dense material that’s relatively easy to acquire and use. However, burning it introduces carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and drastically accelerates climate change.
We have known since at least the 1970s that other sources of energy were needed to replace oil. Considerable progress has been made in solar and wind technology, though using them to replace oil has been a long, uphill battle. That said, I believe that we should consider ALL of our options ranging from improved architecture to make heating and cooling more efficient, mass transportation, electric powered vehicles, etc.
Let me raise one possibility usually rejected out of hand: nuclear power. Nuclear power plants have some big advantages. Once fueled, they can run for 40 years and, if optimal, up to 100 years. They have (relatively) few moving parts to wear out. And nuclear fuel produces two million times more energy than oil.
Nuclear power (obviously) has some major problems. Radioactive materials are extremely toxic – far more deadly to handle than oil. Waste products (spent uranium) require extreme measures to store them safely. Some of us are old enough to recall the disasters: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three-mile Island, and others. Those kinds of ghosts are difficult to put to rest, but fear of change isn’t a solution either.
Considerable progress has been made to make nuclear power safe. Modern reactors (such as Westinghouse’s AP1000 or GE Hitachi’s ESBWR) use passive safety systems that require no electricity, no operator action, and no external pumps. Modern reactors are designed to use something called TRISO: Tri Structural Isotropic fuel which encapsulates uranium pellets in carbon and ceramic shells, which are virtually indestructible and can’t melt as older fuels could. Finally, there has been a shift towards Small Module Reactors (SMRs). While they (individually) produce less power, they contain much less radioactive materials, making them much easier to cool.
SMRs are vastly safer due to smaller scale, physics driven engineering, and dramatically reduced radioactive material. They can also be made in a factory, instead of custom built every time. SMRs are in active use in China and Russia. Canada and the UK are on track to have operational power plants based on this technology within the next few years. The US is lagging behind. SMRs are being evaluated at Oak Ridge, Tennessee but the efforts are bogged down in regulations and red tape. We might see commercial operations in the early 2030s. There are a couple of start-ups such TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates) and X-Energy.
My view is this. If we continue to use oil and natural gas for energy production, we are screwed. Climate change will kill us all … eventually. Nuclear power has its problems, but I think we can overcome them and make it just as safe any other kind of power generation system. We owe it to our grandchildren to consider ALL options.
NOTABLES
Health Care in America: The For-Profit Dilemma. By Marita Florini
When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed (March 2010), a move to consolidate medical practices and hospital functions was promoted. Regionalization was seen as a way to provide the best care to the consumer without duplication of personnel and facilities.
Meanwhile, private health insurers during the President Regan years profited under the move to deregulate private markets in health care. Policies that loosened rules limiting private sector involvement made privatization of health care services more common. The framers of the ACA tried to curb insurers’ profits and their executives’ salaries, which were some of the highest in the U.S. health care industry, by requiring them to spend 80 to 85 percent of every premium dollar on patient care. Insurers fought bitterly against this provision. (Insurance Policy The Stanford Medicine Magazine May 2017). Privatization in health care is the acquisition of public medical care by private entities. These acquisitions are increasing exponentially.
In 2026 we see the progression of these changes to include all health services, financing, and/or management of medical facilities and practices and also supplies and pharmaceuticals. Corporations and other private entities are also hired to oversee departments under government funded health care such as the VA. Since medical care quality is monitored by the federal government, most of these entities are a hybrid of private companies, Medicare or Medicaid, and other government programs such as the VA, but they remain for-profit.
The unfortunate result of this “hybrid for- profit ownership” is similar to what we have seen in the retail sector. Many times, the company that is hired to manage a department or which buys the medical practice will cut costs, eliminate what they believe is fraud and waste, and limit employment. These practices often result in less quality and equity of healthcare. As the market changes with dramatic cuts to consumer healthcare, departments and practices are closed and systems are sold.
Nursing homes are undergoing similar changes as are companies in home care, dental practices, and non-hospital based pharmacies. Some legislators are taking steps to limit this type of practice. Read more about this trend here: The Corporatization Deal — Health Care, Investors, and the Profit Priority | Harvard Kennedy School
Action Alert/Events
Next TCDC Meeting: November 17. Please Join Us!
If you are interested in joining the Leg Act Committee or want to submit something to our newsletter, send an email to TCDC at TIOGANYDEMS@GMAIL.COM or MARITA FLORINI at FNPMAF1@GMAIL.COM.
