Jim, I understand your arguments for nuclear power, but you leave out a side effect that is in my opinion a deal-killer namely that nuclear power is not without waste. When you factor in life cycle costs for power production nuclear power is not the best deal because it imposes recurring costs of waste management that will have to be borne for orders of magnitude longer than the productive life of even the most well engineered plant. I saw one study that estimated the $/kwh ratio of the hanford reservation as being twice that of the equivalent capacity coal generating facilities; counting only money already expended. Meanwhile the AEC claims that it is half that of coal (or thereabouts) discounting WPPS and all expenditures prior to 1946. Who to believe?
Besides which Nuclear power is socialist in the worst ways. No one but a government can afford to finance, insure, run and deal with the aftereffects of a power producing plant. (Yes, I know pebble bed and gas turbine models can be built that are much smaller in footprint , safer etc. but they are at the same stage as solar was ten years ago). Not to mention the whole thorny issue of weapons grade materiel. And this has to do with linux because none of us are going to get rich writing linux based apps to control nuclear power plants. But, some of us might make a living working on bit's and pieces of a decentralised network of mixed mode generation and consumption where any given site might both produce and consume power in differing amounts at different times of the day and year and there will need to be some smarts keeping track of who's putting in to the grid and who's drawing out of it. And penguins love power meters ;-) http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi) http://allie.office.efn.org/phpwiki/index.php?OregonPublicNetworking
