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Yes, it's high time. I think for a long time public opinion lagged behind actuality. Too many people only thought of that old Jack Lemmon movie "China Syndrome" or the Three Mile Island accident when they thought of nuclear energy.

Most don't realize how much progress in safety and technology has been made since those days. Your post mentioned France. I think for years now their source of energy has been 70% nuclear.

I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking about TMI when considering nuclear power. I mean, here's a MAJOR nuclear power plant disaster and: nobody dies, the containment vessel holds the core, the radioactive release is minor, and the rest of the plant continues operating normally. And that's for a MAJOR disaster. Admittedly, the anti-nuclear zealots will claim that 100s or 1000s of cancer deaths will occur over the future because of the leak, but even if that were true and not shrill hyperbole as is typical from them, it would have to be compared with the deaths due to refinery fires and, of course, GLOBAL WARMING that didn't happen because fossil fuels weren't processed and consumed in the course of generating that electricity. (I don't happen to subscribe to the global warming hysteria, but the Greenies who do have to present a response to the fact that nuclear power does NOT put greenhouse gasses in the air, and therefore doesn't contribute to global warming as they understand it.)

The kind of disaster Chernobyl was could never happen here, because we don't build plants like that. That said, if Three Mile Island was a major disaster, Chernobyl was a global catastrophe - and was responsible for the deaths of about 45 people, with maybe a 100 more over the future due to leukemia. That is, worth about the same number of deaths of one serious coal mine collapse.

I wonder what the anti-nuclear zealots think about this paper: Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?

Yes, it's high time. I think for a long time public opinion lagged behind actuality. Too many people only thought of that old Jack Lemmon movie "China Syndrome" or the Three Mile Island accident when they thought of nuclear energy.

Last I heard, there has been more people die in drunken Ted Kennedy's oldsmobile than as a result of radiation from a U.S. nuclear power plant.