In Support of Nuclear power

Nicholas Kristof occassionally makes sense and today would be one of those times:

But it's time for the rest of us to drop that hostility to nuclear power. It's increasingly clear that the biggest environmental threat we face is actually global warming, and that leads to a corollary: nuclear energy is green.

Nuclear power, in contrast with other sources, produces no greenhouse gases. So President Bush's overall environmental policy gives me the shivers, but he's right to push ahead for nuclear energy. There haven't been any successful orders for new nuclear plants since 1973, but several proposals for new plants are now moving ahead - and that's good for the world we live in.
Global energy demand will rise 60 percent over the next 25 years, according to the International Energy Agency, and nuclear power is the cleanest and best bet to fill that gap.
Solar power is a disappointment, still accounting for only about one-fifth of 1 percent of the nation's electricity and costing about five times as much as other sources. Wind is promising, for its costs have fallen 80 percent, but it suffers from one big problem: wind doesn't blow all the time. It's difficult to rely upon a source that comes and goes.

In contrast, nuclear energy already makes up 20 percent of America's power, not to mention 75 percent of France's.

Indeed. Nuclear (nucular?) power is the cleanest power available and could make us far less dependent on mideast oil. The Environmentalists in the US have made Nuke power the most evil form of power in the world yet have not even revisited ythe topic in years. If it's nuke, it's bad, period.

I know people in the industry and they say that with the technology we now have available, we could make plants that are many times safer than those currently supplying power as well as much more efficient.

The main problems are regulatory and the NIMBY mindset. Due to regulatory scrutiny, it takes a decade or more to get a plant up and running. By the time a plant is fully operational it's already old technology.

The NIMBYs out there are a bigger issue, people envision nuke plants operated by people like Homer Simpson which is most definitely not the case. The plant personnel I've met are highly-trained professionals who have to meet stringent standards to remain employed.