As for nukular power, I can only say it is preferable to coal plants. But that is damning with faint praise.

I am no expert on this subject, but I'm open to the idea of a thorium reactor if it is as safe as it is said to be and it doesn't produce large quantities of waste that must be stored for tens of thousands of years.

However, current nuclear reactors are little more than amazingly complicated boilers that can lay waste to large areas of the planet. To think that we can manage them effectively is hubris in the extreme.

I've been back and forth and never very far from being atop the fence. I think James Hansen makes a good case to finally accept them, given the grave fossil dependence we're in. I'll have to go back and read your excellent piece from 2011, but I understand Fukashima reactors were a generation or two older than TVA nukes and dangerous mostly because of their spent fuel storage method.

I do favor nukes over natural gas from fracking (and far more than oil from tar sand), unless there are more safeguards on fracking and time limits on its use, such as by instituting a carbon tax which is desperately needed in any case. Both forms of energy should be used only to supplant dirtier GHG fuels like coal and oil.

The big problem with new nukes is their huge cost and time to getting online. The market can't warm to that kind of investment when it doesn't know the price of future technologies that will reach deployment sooner. Safety should be commensurate with cost and probably is if everything's done right, but that is also against Murphy's Law and human nature.

I don't know enough about thorium, et. al. Who is trustworthy on these nuke alternatives?

do we really want to trust a government (when they want to be) slash private (when it's more convenient) agency like TVA with a poor track record on safety and environmental responsibility? An agency that is able to shirk responsibility and dodge any government oversight off of a few chamber of commerce approved press releases about economic development?

TVA is a cauldron of scandal and incompetence. Do we want the agency that can't oversee piling dirt safely to be in charge of new nukes? If so, could we put them upstream of Bill Samsom's house instead of mine?