I didn't mean to sound preachy, I'm just bitter... It could possibly have something to do with the fact that my BS & MS was in nuclear engineering (Purdue '95 & '97 - haven't worked in the field for years) and I was once such an idealist.

Well, ditto. My degree was in environmental studies (Kansas U. cum laude '91; emphasis on public administration & land use planning) and I haven't worked in the field since 1993. I dug pretty deep into the question of nukes versus coal generation (I concede that these are the only viable means to generate the terawatts needed by this society as of now) and ran into all of these questions back then. For me, it's not a question of leftist ideology; it's a question of human fallibility in practice (more on this in a minute).

I do believe that many of the concerns about nuclear energy can be effectively managed by sound engineering, but unfortunately, they're only one part of the equation. There's management, investors, & bureaucrats layered on top of them.

Because the waste disposal was paid for, it was taxed into nuke power, and supposed to be put into a 'lockbox' that would pay for stable long term storage. Yucca is long term stable on geological time scales. But the money got spent, in lawsuits, in mismanagement, in clean ups, you name it.

Well, Nevada kinda took it in the shorts on that deal, too. If I recall my thesis properly, Yucca was legislatively declared the best option in Congressional committee while the Nevada delegation wasn't present. You see the same approach being taken in "regulatory streamlining" and it's rather disturbing.

You have to concede that the NIMBYism inherent in nuclear disposal is understandable, though. Politically, no one wants the next Times Beach plopped in their jurisdiction.

In some ways, it's ironic. The nuclear boogeyman was largely a creature of the Cold War. People were programmed to be terrified of the power of the atom. It's sort of difficult to get ordinary folk to parse one radiological hazard from the other, and the spectre of cancer will scare the bejeezus out of any thinking and feeling individual.

But at the end of the day we still have to make choices. I'm not an alarmist by nature; we usually solve almost any problem soon after it becomes clearly profitable to do so. But global warming terrifies me, precisely because by the time we recognize the economic incentive, it will be too late. I would rather risk mishandled nuclear waste than the loss of the ocean currents and the jet stream.

The Greenhouse Effect was something I didn't fully appreciate when I was investigating The Great Atomic Power (hat tip Ira Louvin). In my own defense, that was 15 years ago and a lot of science has come forth since that time in this regard.

That said, I think you're absolutely correct. I'm reading an especially well-written book by Jared Diamond called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the global human community may just be facing -- on an unprecedented scale -- the sorts of accumulated crises which led to the disappearance of peoples throughout history. I'm not done with the book yet, but I'm beginning to see the common thread.

Chaos (if you believe in such things) teaches us that infinitely complex patterns are essentially the same no matter what the magnification is. So what happens at the community level, e.g., is repeated at the state level, which is repeated at the national level, which is repeated at the global level. Anyway... as human culture becomes increasingly global, the entire human population is hitched to the same, Leviathan consumptive wagon. And no matter what human population you have, you need water, you need fuel, you need food (this is all rudimentary Malthus study here). As populations become more dense, the demand for these things increases, so the consumption of resources continues. At some point, environmental factors may have cascade effects which can wipe out entire populations. Take the Easter Island Polynesians as one example; they completely deforested their habitat to make fire and to erect those mysterious heads. And that was a society with limited technology and a couple thousand people.

Now, just extrapolate this and consider what the human population of seven billion is up to, and liken our consumption of energy resources (at a global level) to an island community using up its limited resources.

What do you think the Easter Islanders thought when they cut down the last tree?

...by the time we recognize the economic incentive, it will be too late.

Yep. And we have no experience, as a global population, of an environmental shift which can dramatically affect our ability to, well, live.

I'm no alarmist either, but the prospect is pretty stark.

(I hope this all makes sense; I'm pretty much putting this all together based on some very recent digestion of info.)

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On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning. --H. Thoreau