Georgia Nuclear Peachy

Southern Co. is busily working on the site for their two new reactors at its Plant Vogtle site in Georgia, so the Associated Press decided to ask the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidates what they think about nuclear energy in the state.

Answer: they’re for it.

Here’s former Congressman Nathan Deal:

"I believe it is an answer to part of our energy issues," Deal said in a recent interview. "It is a renewable resource."

Well, sustainable, anyway, but we’ll take it.

And here’s former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel:

"I support a diversification of our sources for electrical generation and believe that nuclear power represents a safe and clean option and should continue to play significant role in Georgia's overall power generation supply," she said in a statement.

Here’s Handel’s Web site – she won an endorsement from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, which is right up front. On the issues page, she doesn’t have an energy section, though I may not have spotted it under a different heading.

And here’s Nathan Deal’s Web site – he won an endorsement from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Also nothing on energy we could find.

The Democrat is former Gov. Roy Barnes. We looked around to see if he had said anything about nuclear energy, but nothing turned up. But we were interested to run into this campaign ad. Here’s the script:

Narrator: Because of our great climate and growth rate, Georgia is the Saudi Arabia of pine trees. Europeans burn fuel pellets made from Georgia pine. But we don’t require our own electric plants to use them. If they just burned 10 percent pine pellets, thousands of jobs would be produced.

Barnes: When I’m governor, we’ll turn our renewable forests into a job-creating industry.

Pine fuel pellets? Well, that’s – specific. But you can see where the focus is here – jobs and more jobs. Really, that’s the focus for all three candidates.

The Republic primary is August 10. In the most recent polling I could find, Deal and Handel are running neck-and-neck. The same Rasmussen poll shows either Republican running neck-and-neck with Barnes. Sounds like an exciting race.

---

Since, as we learned yesterday, Germany wants to switch over to all renewable energy by 2050 – despite being in a rather difficult place to accomplish that by then – all one can say is, if that’s what the Germans want to do, good luck to them.

But maybe it will take more than luck. Maybe it will take – a logo.

Environmental group Greenpeace in partnership with creative talent contest website Jovoto have launched a global campaign to design a visual message to support the slogan "Renewable energy can cover 100% of our power requirements by 2050."

Greenpeace has a motivation for doing this – it doesn’t seem to believe it’s very likely, either.

In September 2010, Germany's federal government intends to submit a national energy concept which will outline Germany's policy on power generation for the coming decades; however there is concern amongst environmental groups that Germany will choose to focus more efforts on nuclear power as well as renewable energy - several scientists have also expressed doubts that the two sources can coexist equally.

I cannot quite parse what the last part of that paragraph means – nuclear and renewable energy cannot co-exist? That would be incorrect, but that may not be what is meant.

But as far as the logo is concerned:

The campaign, which runs until August 15, is open to internet users around the world and hopes to draw attention to the benefits of renewables and encourage people in Germany to express their opposition to nuclear power.

So far, not too much of the latter – there’s one clever little video in which the nuclear symbol turns into the blades of a windmill - and some of the former. If you want to participate, head on over here. A few logos showing renewables and nuclear happy together would not go amiss.

One of the logo entries. Weitblick means vision – hence the wise owl with glasses, I guess – and Erneuer means renewable – not quite sure about the bare suffix there. If you decide to participate, nuclear energy is Kernenergie.