F-in Republican Spin: "Freedom Fuel" - sure sounds good to me!

“Freedom Fuel”…Sounds Good To Me!

Freedom. Fuel. These two words separately invoke thoughts of liberty (in the case of freedom) and a financial burden (in the case of fuel). Put these two words together and FREEEDOM FUEL, or freedom from a financial burden, is born. To the average American, Freedom Fuel sounds like the winning plan. With the cost of oil fluctuating with every natural disaster and car bomb that takes place between Mexico City to Jacarta, Americans are feeling the very direct impacts of what foreign dependence on oil means for our pocket books individually and collectively and are sounding the alarms to Washington that the country needs a change. To know that Freedom Fuel can be homegrown, is sustainable, and essentially emissions free only solidifies how enticing it already sounds.
But wait…for purposes of clarity, an explanation of Freedom Fuel under it’s more commonly known framework may be necessary. Freedom Fuel is merely Nuclear Energy, and the key component to the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Fuel Plan 2010” proposed in 2002 to revitalize the nuclear industry after three decades during which no nuclear plants were constructed. The selling points of Freedom Fuel are simple, “Freedom fuel” is economically more competitive, with higher efficiency, lower cost, safer, and more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels and even last generation nuclear energy.1
Environmentalists and other opponents push to maintain the “Nuclear Energy” reference in hopes that this rhetoric reminds people of the dangers of nuclear waste and nuclear plant explosions that plagued that latter half of the last century. The emphasis here is on whether the cost of nuclear energy is worth the benefits. If there were ever an explosion in Illinois, which has the most nuclear plants in the country, it would single handedly result in thousands of deaths, casualties and latent cancers in almost a million citizens, and property loss would be in the billions of dollars. The “Freedom Fuel Plan” claims of new ‘Generation 4’ technology that will be cheaper, safer, and proliferation-proof are disavowed as bogus by environmentalists who assert that this technology will be even more disaster prone, because it recycles spent uranium as a cost-saving measure. This creates the ultimate danger of all because spent uranium contains high levels of plutonium that could be used in weapons if in the wrong hands.1 The takeaway point for environmentalist is clear; Freedom Fuel is just empty rhetoric that will endanger more lives in the homeland that any war abroad could ever do.