The Funniest Joke Ever..On Us.

[Factfind]

Note* Rec'd via e-mail

THE ABSOLUTELY 'FUNNIEST' JOKE EVER - On us!

What was the reason given for developing the Department of Energy during the Carter administration? We have spent multi-billions of dollars in support of this agency and I am willing to bet not one person who reads this will remember the reason given.

It was very simple.

'THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY WAS INSTITUTED TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.'

NOTE: IN 2008, THE BUDGET FOR THIS DEPARTMENT IS NOW AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. THEY HAVE 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES.

Ok, for $24 billion per year we are not achieving our goal and we still do not have an energy policy.

So we have a lot of people that think this same government can manage our retirement monies, our health care, and regulate our investments to insure transparency and security?

Why is that?

[Frankingun]

Wow.

Reminds me of an old joke about the Agriculture Dept, which has about as many employees as there are farmers. Something like: "Why was the USDA employee crying? His farmer died."

Energy has 100,000 employees on contract? Wtf?

[Aaron]

I almost feel like crying. We are so screwed by our government and so many people want to make it BIGGER.

[Combat Controller]

The DOE is the old Atomic Energy Agency. It handles all our nukes, including our military stash....

[cu74]

The DOE is the old Atomic Energy Agency. It handles all our nukes, including our military stash....

[strike]Well, actually, I don't think that's quite correct[/strike]. Oops - I stand corrected. The balance of the post containing erroneous AEC, NRC, etc. information deleted.

[D5CAV]

The DOE is the old Atomic Energy Agency. It handles all our nukes, including our military stash....

CC is correct. The DOE is responsible for developing, manufacturing and maintaining all of the US nuclear arsenal. The DOE runs the nuclear arsenal at Savannah River plant (consolidated from Hanford and Rocky Flats), and the national nuclear development labs at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Oak Ridge.

Owning and maintaining nuclear weapons is an enourmously expensive undertaking (as can be seen from the DOE budget), which is why the nuclear club is limited to a handful of countries. It is not an issue of technology. The knowledge to build nuclear weapons is taught at the undergraduate level at most top-tier universities around the world.

Countries like India, Pakistan and North Korea only have nuclear weapons because they devote a large fraction of their GDP to maintaining nuclear weapons, at the expense of starving vast numbers of their population.

Israel and the UK only have nuclear weapons because the US supplies and maintains them.

China's economic boom started about the time the leadership decided to stop spending vast amounts of money on their nuclear weapons -- about the time Mao died. I know DOE people who have toured China's nuclear weapons facilities -- they are barely sufficient to maintain a fraction of the country's nuclear weapons.

Russia's nuclear arsenal is a shadow of it's former self (although still formidable), with much of the diverted spending going to help make a few Russian oligarch's very rich.

France maintains a reasonable nuclear arsenal on it's own, but the French have a very imaginative way of maintaining a nuclear weapons program without crippling their economy. France generates about 80% of it's power with nuclear. All the French nuclear power plants are run by the French Navy (and guarded by French Marines, not by Wackenhut rent-a-cops). Germany refuses to build nuclear power plants because of the influence of the 'Green' party, so they import about 40% of their electricity from France. Electricity exports to Germany is one of the biggest revenue generators for France. It's revenue from German greenies that supports the French nuclear weapons program. There's a certain symmetry in that, which is interesting from a number of angles!