The nuclear option

No, not talking about Congress and judicial appointments. :-)

Given that Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, what to do with nuclear waste is a particularly important issue here.

And since our supplies of fossil fuels are limited, development of alternative energy sources is critical. So what role will nuclear play?

After the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents, I'd been opposed to nuclear power plants for quite awhile. Global warming re-framed the problem for me. As one article I read pointed out, the problem of managing a relatively small amount of nuclear waste is a problem orders of magnitude more manageable than the one of putting billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

So if the technology is right, I'm open to re-invigorating America's nuclear power industry. My preference, though, would be that nuclear energy only serve as a bridge as we transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based on truly sustainable energy sources like wind and solar.

John Scire, a professor at the University of Reno, recently published a short article about the re-processing of spent nuclear fuel to significantly reduce the amount of waste that has to be stored for the long term. He stated that Senator Pete Domenici supports the idea; here is the bill that I think he is referring to (S. 3215).

There's also an article from the December, 2005 issue of Scientific American on the subject; it's available as a PDF here.