In article , Gary Coffman says...

Politics and PR are a problem for the future, since no new plants
are being built because of anti-nuclear hysteria, but that isn't a
problem with respect to the economic viability of existing plant.
With essentially no fuel costs, they are cheap to operate.

The fuel is however, taxpayer subsidised. It has to come from
somewhere.


Or at least not until we're sitting in the dark for longer
than we ever have.

Unfortunately, I believe that is true. Too many members of the
public are being willfully stupid on the issue of nuclear power,
and too many politicians pander to that stupidity.

That's their job. Find the lowest common denominator, and
play to it. Votes votes votes. If the truth happens to get
trampled in the meantime, well so be it.

Attempting to educate the public, and correct their misperceptions,
has largely failed. Even rolling blackouts, brownouts, skyrocketing
rates, foreign wars to secure fossil fuel supplies, etc haven't done
much to shock the public to reality. While they've been vilifying the
"evil corporations", they've ignored the real problems looming on
the near horizon.

(Government has made matters much worse, of course, with its
ridiculous "deregulation" schemes which have actively promoted
corporate malfeasance through inane attempts to force a natural
monopoly into a pseudo-free market mold. In other words, the
government set up conditions which virtually guaranteed that
there'd be an Enron type scandal.)

You have that the wrong way round. The de-regulation was
pushed by the industries themselves, and carried through
by their donations to politicians willing to sell out for
campaing contributions. Those scheme were not 'ridiculous'
for the folks who were raking in the money. No right minded
public servant would *ever* believe that what they did was
in the interests of the general public. The scandle is,
they got away with it!

But longer term, the picture is stark, dramatic, and very bleak. We
simply *must* convert away from fossil fuels this century. The supply
is finite, much of it isn't under our control, and the environmental costs
of fossil fuel use are high. Long term, there really is no other viable
option than nuclear power to meet the base load demands of a high
energy civilization (and the size and urbanization of the world's
population permits no other kind unless we're willing to accept a
large scale die off of humanity).

Malthus here we come.

Jim

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