Did not want to argue,but uranium mining is really awful.

So is coal mining.

Also wind power cheaper and cleaner than nukes.

I don't necessarily disagree, but the wind doesn't always blow and until we can effectively store electricity, we're not going to be free of coal and nuclear. I still don't see any way to scale up alternate energy to U.S. demand.

This NY Times article [link] is less optimistic but probably pretty accurate. Matt Wald is the only major journalist with nuclear expertise.

We can effective store small amounts of electricity. We can effectively move electricity. We could put what we spend on stupid wars into renewables (including storage, transmission and natural gas backups) and get a 98% fossil fuel grid less expensively than we could do the same thing with nukes. I've been cricitioal of nuke industry and it has never been about safety of power plants but about what we could do with today's technology cheaper than nukes.

Transmission is a HUGE issue as it stands now. I wouldn't say we can effectively move electricity. I've been through the brownouts when the grid fails. It is not nearly as robust as it should be.

NM is largely fueled by coal. And it is local. But when the TX power plants went down, it was bad, and NM is a net exporter.

I have to say, I'm hugely impressed that they can suffer an 8.9 (!) earthquake and contain the damage to the nuclear plant. Which is just as well, because they won't be short of other demands on their disaster relief efforts.

As sarameg says, we really can't effectively move power now, and while there's a lot of talk about improving the grid and implementing smart grid technology, I don't see where the money's coming from.

I should say we know how to build transmission. We are not doing it, but we are not building enough nukes to shut down coal either. If we are going to solve global warming we are going to have to do something we are doing. So "we aren't doing it now" is an arguement for doing nothing.

And now for something completely different: Dabke dance flash mob in Lebanese airport - [link]

So "we aren't doing it now" is an argument for doing nothing.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be building wind, solar, geothermal, landfill methane and any other effective alternate energy facilities; beefing up the grid; and working on storage technology. We need to do that, but I still think we're going to need central station generating for the foreseeable future, and I'd rather have nukes than coal. The new designs have far more passive cooling, including having cooling water located over the reactor so it feeds by gravity.

Finite amount of money. I'm not suggesting shutting down existing nukes prematurely, but the money we spend on new nukes could buy a combination of grid improvements and wind and solar that would displace more coal. And it is not like the cheapest wind and solar are not central station generating. Wind and solar both get cheaper in the 10s or 100s of Gigwatt ranges.

Having worked at a wind power company that made turbines, I'm going to note that wind power is not without its environmental costs. Raptors tend to fly the same wind patterns that fuel turbine farms and get chopped up pretty good in the blades. Are the negative environmental consequences of coal worse? Definitely. But when your wind farm is littered with eagles and hawks its a tough sell at times.