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There is a move afoot to start up nuke plants in this country again. It may take 10 years to get the first one online, but the environmentalists, and 'No Nukes' crowd will have a much harder time, this time around, getting them squashed. There is much more of a desire to reduce our need for oil from the Middle East, and stop feeding the terrorist networks, which receive money from sympathetic members of the royal families of some of the oil producing nations. If they aren't getting all that money, they won't have so much extra to part with.

Why should the government SUBSIDIZE any of these technologies? If they are shown to be cost effective and marketable, they will attract investors on their own. Regarding the nuke plants, the government doesn't need to subsidize them, but it could sure help by reducing the chances of the plants being held up in frivilous lawsuits like they were in the late 70's and 80's.

Would building a lot of nuclear power plants really reduce our need on foreign oil? Most of our electricity is generated with coal or natural gas.

I like nuclear energy too (as long as it's not in my backyard). It is good clean energy, but what nuclear waste does come from it is extremely toxic and it remains highly toxic and dangerous for thousands of years, and man made or natural disasters at nuclear plants can lead to some pretty horrible results. The quantity of toxic waste produced is relatively small though and nuclear plants have become very safe in this country. We can handle it. I'm not so much worried about us. What worries me are the other guys. If we start building a whole lot of new nuclear plants everyone else is going to want to build them too and we're going to have a hard time stopping all these little countries out there from going nuclear. Some of them will enrich their uranium. That's inevitable, and we'll have more nuclear weapons to worry about. Also, we don't know how good their safety track records will be and how well they're going to handle their nuclear waste. What's going to happen when their governments fail and crazies take over or when they have wars and nuclear plants everywhere start getting targeted? There will be a lot more nuclear plants in the world and there will be a lot less control over them. That scares me just a little.

I was in the Army in Germany when the Chernobyl incident occurred and several in my unit went out and checked radiation levels in the days and weeks after the accident. I personally saw levels much higher than were being reported in the news. That really kind of scared me, already being one who had grown up during the Cold War and having put more than a little thought into the prospect of nuclear war, radiation poisoning, and that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't want to live anywhere near a nuclear plant, or anywhere near a big city that would be a target for nuclear attacks for that matter. I'm sure nuclear plants are just as safe as can be in this country but I don't want one near my house, and I'd really hate it if I was living near the Mexican border and there was a Mexican nuclear plant not far from me. Think about that.