"Sure, go ahead and vote..."

The Washington Times had an interesting story on how many felons Governor Warner D-VA has granted voting rights to before leaving office later this week.
http://washtimes.com/metro/20060112-102122-5757r.htm

It seems our friends at Moveon.org are urging Warner to issue blanket restorations to more than 240,00 convicted felons.

Seems Warner, like President Clinton, likes to use the pen
to pardon and restore rights to those who have been
convicted of serious crimes...

Mark Warner Democrat 3,414
James Gilmore Republican 238
George Allen Republican 460
Douglas Wilder Democrat 427
Gerald Baliles Democrat 853
Charles Robb Democrat 1,180
John Dalton Republican 939
Mills Godwihn Republican 515
Linwood Holton Republican 303

Looking at the numbers...

Investor's Business Daily did another great story on energy use and energy sources. Unfortunately I am not able to link to these stories for they do not post these sections on their website. I have found their editorials and stories very informative and I urge to to take a look at a printed copy...


They just did a story about the 12 miners who died in a mining accident last week in West Virginia. They reported that 3,242 men died in coal mines in 1897. And the yearly total in the 20th century was usually over 1,000...

Technology and equipment improvements has lowered this rate by a great factor. Last years total was the lowest on record at 22 deaths... The story went on to point out that there is one source of energy produced in the United States that has never lost a worker in it's operation...

This energy source is Nuclear power.
This has been a hot topic in the past and I am sure will come to light in the near future with worldwide energy consumption increasing.

What I found interesting was the data on how much energy it takes and the quantity of each type it takes to produce the same ammount of electricity...

To burn a 100watt light bulb for a year it takes:

876 pounds of coal...
508 pounds of oil...
or
0.0007 pound of uranium in a commercial reactor...

One uranium fuel pellet-the size of the tip of your finger-
is equivalent of 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,780 pounds of
coal or 149 gallons of oil...

America only gets 20% of it's electricity from nuclear but this
did prevent 3.43 million tons of sulfur oxide from going into the
air. 1.11 million tons of Nitrogen oxide and 696.6 million additional
tons of carbon dioxide in 2004...

Something to think about....