I suspect far fewer factories had to close due to this than maintaining a military presence in the middle east to keep the oil flowing (well, at least the military can now employ thousands of soldiers, putting them in harm’s way and keeping them away from their families).

You know, I’m with you on the whole government spending money wisely.  I have certainly seen a lot of wasteful spending.  But I have to ask you, what specifically is unwise about a project such as these that will generate hundreds of megawatts of zero emission and essentially free (once the building cost is amortized) electricity?  Would you prefer that we continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned money off-shore?

To what do you attribute the closing of a thousand factories – the US government, which has been mainly in Republican hands over the past 30 years? The government didn’t order the closing of the factories; the corporations that owned them did. It seems that those corporate leaders didn’t give a crasp about the men and women who had worked their lives out for them, or for the damage it would do to the communities that they had been a part of.

What might some other, more major reasons have been that all those US factories closed?  Global competition? NAFTA? The economic decisions of the plant owners themselves, who believed it was cheaper to hire foreign workers laboring in near-slavery and penury instead of well-educated, well-paid American workers? :Labor unions, who demanded and received a living wage and safe working conditions for their members?

Your comment makes no sense. All it shows is that you hate the US government. Why should anyone care bout the angry opinion of a man with no facts to back him up?

The same type of project has been proposed in Australia, without the need for 1000s of factories to close…and that’s from a country with a public healthcare system and a decent, federally funded education system.  I think you need to look more closely at your closed-minded ideas of socialism, because your capitalism is what is causing factories to close.  If things can be made cheaper in China, then that’s what capitalism says should happen…Governments need to invest in this type of project to prove its viability.  They only need to do it once and then private companies, seeing the benefits, will jump on board.

  SO I’m guessing the recent report that the ACTUAL U.S. corporate tax rate is 4th lowest in the world means–you’re wrong. Pretending that at least and noted time and time again, while the U.S. has a high
statutory corporate tax rate (meaning the rate on paper), U.S.
corporations actually pay incredibly low taxes due to the
ever-proliferating loopholes, credits, and deductions in the tax code
and the use of overseas tax havens.
U.S. corporate taxes that were actually paid (the effective rate) fell to a 40 year low of 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2011.
Corporatist moving their factories to next to slave wage countries isn’t the “governments” fault, it’s the pure greed of corporations and we do NOTE, who wants to continue it..

No one objects to new VIABLE energy efforts. What we object to is the waste of tax payer dollars to fund these boondoggles in the desert. I have no problem with some rich idiot throwing his own cash away on such a project, but I do object to government funding and the elimination of risk. I also object to the extreme damage such plants do to the environment, effectively per neatly removing significant land mass from the ecosystem with little in the way of an energy return for that land mass.

We really need to become much smarter about our future with regards to energy. The only way to do that is through diversity. However such diversity should not be allowed to destroy what little land area we have left nor should it require massive government subsidies for the tiny amount of power we will get from such systems.

Please take your argument a little further and understand that most energy is nuclear energy. (Tidal is one example of not.)