Frugalness is fine. I keep my thermostat at 60-62F in the day, 57F at night, except when it goes below 0F, when it needs to go up a bit at night to keep pipes from freezing. I don't use air conditioning at all and can't understand why anyone uses it in Western Pennsylvania.

But considering the urgency of the climate problem, we can't keep any options off the table.

---USAn---

Lovely sentiments, but you are mixing your ideas. You are sort of right about the lack of funds available for research, which came as fallout from the anti-nuclear hysteria, but fortunately it hasn't really impeded progress. I have read Naomi Klein's published works. "Disaster Capitalism," the term she coined, refers to economic policies implemented to benefit a few by taking advantage of societies reeling from natural and manmade disasters. I'm not going to stretch this genuinely insightful concept out of shape to fit it into the anti-nuclear kabuki, but will be glad to respond to it if you do.

Sorry you won't allow me to mention the Yucca site, though it may bare occasional repeating, that the scientific community doesn't have the problems with it that your obligatory censorship implies.

"Each plant produces dangerous detritus."

Not really. It's called recycling, or what used to be called reprocessing. The French and the Japanese use it. It is basically separating out the remaining uranium and the plutonium that is manufactured as a byproduct and used as fuel again. Plutonium is a fuel. Contrary to what anti-nuclear expert, Jackson Browne says, we don't need to wait 250,000 years for it to decay. We can use it right away as a fuel and turn it into fission products, which will then have a 300-year lifespan of being radioactive. If that seems like a long time, I'll refer you back to the MIT study again, with it's safety projections exceeding 1,000 years before another evaluation is needed. Japan just opened a fuel fabrication and recycling center in Northern Honshu. Japan took the French technology, which is probably the leading technology, and design a system in which the plutonium never emerges as a pure product anywhere; it's only inside, where nobody could, without dying, get it. The plutonium is separated, then before it comes out it's recombined with uranium into what's called mixed-oxide fuel, which cannot be made into a bomb.

"Ralph Nader's publication "Public Citizen" spoke about the way some of these radioactive metals (old piping and such) were being "recycled" along with metals never thus exposed, and SOLD in the form of everyday household appliances, even children's braces!"

I agree, that is a horrible anecdote. A lot of things including computers and the batteries necessary to store solar power continue to be recycled in bad ways.

"The American Indigenous held councils and discussed the potential impact the actions they elected to take today would hold upon FUTURE generations. With our nation in a moral sewer, funding bombs rather than school lunches, the moral impetus to even consider what our actions will cost future generations is disabled."

All of our actions affect future generations. Including the one to deny life saving nuclear generated energy to those who aren't getting it.

"This bloated spoiled nation needs to put REAL conservation practices into use. I do it! Who said we have to always have a room at 70 degrees in summer or 75 in winter... wear a sweater if it's cold. Scarcity could be good for prompting a re-evaluation of what's been so grossly taken for granted."

As to addressing first world consumption by cutting back wherever possible, we are in complete agreement. So assuming you are sitting in a building that is using no more electricity than your computer, what is your suggestion for the three-and-a-half billion people on earth who still use less energy in a fortnight than you used to post your comment? To bring them up to your conscientious level requires either the combination of nuclear and a fanciful array of all of the renewable energy plans, or else some cosmic vibration that no one in the scientific community seems to be aware of. Simply put, how do you propose to harness energy effectively enough to meet the task of dealing with the catastrophe that most of us are already in? I'm assuming that you either don't want to sacrifice, or may not want to admit that sacrificing at least half of the world's population is part of an acceptable plan.

"Now if you're willing to have all the spent fuel rods in YOUR back yard, perhaps we can continue the discussion. And I suppose you'll be wanting round-the-clock guards to ensure that none of it makes to the black market."

That's quite a demand you make for continuing a discussion. As I'm fortunate enough by birth to reside in sunny climate, my back yard is fully planted. Otherwise I wouldn't have a problem with it, though some under-educated neighbors might. MIT has a recent long-term safety study for holding nuclear waste. It's one of very many showing that it is safe. They, among others also address your concerns about the unmentionable mountain depository. As for how recycling of spent nuclear fuel works, there is the transition from a once-through fuel cycle to an approach that includes recycling of spent nuclear fuel without separating out pure plutonium. Recycling can employ uranium extraction plus (UREX+). Research has shown that UREX+ can separate uranium from the spent fuel at a very high level of purification that would allow it to be recycled for re-enrichment, stored in an unshielded facility, or simply buried as a low-level waste in my backyard or yours.

Unfortunately, we will both continue for the rest of our lives to get a lot more radiation into our system from burnt coal than nuclear. So, I would ask in closing, would you be adamant about immediately shutting down every filthy coal plant and trusting whatever you think would be left of civilization to renewables? Solartopia or Solarfantasia notwithstanding, there are no credible notions, not to mention plans on the table, that would even give you the opportunity to respond in your lifetime.

Both science and common sense would call for an energy technology that neither leaves any sort of pollution nor requires around-the-clock maintenance and attention to avert a deadly catastrophe. That would definitely call for wind and solar, which generate electricity on their own for decades without requiring a large and very expensive staff to monitor them, can be built or installed in hours or days instead of the decades it currently takes nuclear reactors to be built, and requires no further efforts once built and hooked to the power grid to deliver power, unlike coal, nuclear, oil, or gas power plants which require a constant and never-ending supply of fuel. Clean, quick, lasting, effortless energy versus dirty, deadly, burdensome, onerous energy. Which would you pick, if you had common sense?

I'll add that both Obama and Al Gore are politicians who are not particularly choosy about where their campaign donations or speaker fees come from. But I'm afraid most people are swayed by nuclear and fossil fuel industry-funded propaganda.

I was also told nuclear power plant construction requires more energy than it will ever produce, and brought up this point at a renewable energy conference, but a scientist participating in the conference corrected me. A nuclear power plant merely requires 20 years of operation before it offsets the carbon released into the atmosphere during its construction. Still, a 20 year waiting period before it starts to pay off...doesn't seem very useful to me. Especially since they're not supposed to be operated much more than 20 years,

Sioux Rose

ZMAN: Great post! It's important that the true scale of costs be understood. It's related to that factor termed "Natural capital," and it seldom figures on any MANMADE balance sheets. It approximates what it would cost (but how indeed does one factor in that price when countless CENTURIES of biological activity are required to produce said substance?) to replace the mountain tops lopped off, the countless ecosystems battered, and the species eradicated to maintain the rabid resource depleting use of coal? But that doesn't make nuclear the next best thing.

Quite profound...thank you.

"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so. Bertrand Russell

http://www.amnucins.com/About%20ANI.html