[Dick Bachert]

Why are we burning NATURAL GAS (a ready and inexpensive source for energy for MOBILE applications) in STATIONARY POWER PLANTS?
And WHY, in God's name, are we NOT moving ahead with SAFE, CLEAN NUCLEAR POWER (from which France now gets over 80% of ITS power)? We WILL solve the waste problem -- safely and cleanly. Since it takes over a decade to get a new nuke certified, we'd better get started now.
No one died at Three Mile Island. People DID at Chernobyl, of course, but that was an antiquated carbon pile system controlled by equally antiquated technology operated by undertrained personnel.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Too much logic in your comments!

[snopercod]

The problem is that to build and operate a power plant today requires PERMISSION from literally hundreds of bureaucrats and FAVORS from an equal number of politicians. The energy maze in America has become like a chapter in Franz Kafka's The Trial.

The fact that there are still companies with the capital and expertise to build something that people need and want no longer matters in America. America is going fascist right before our eyes.

"When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

--Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

Sorry to be so negative, but that's the way I see it.