Yet it has to be admitted: Environmentalists have a point about the dirt and danger of coal. Here we are, more than half a century after the splitting of the atom -- and we're still deriving more than half our electricity from the fuel that powered the steam engine. It's a fuel for which hundreds of miners still die every year, that puts millions of tons of emissions into the atmosphere, and leaves more millions of tons of ash and waste behind on the ground.
Though wind and sun cannot substitute for coal, there is a fuel that can: nuclear power. Nuclear power is the whispered theme of the report delivered in May 2001 by the Cheney energy task force. Of course, the enviros hate nuclear power even more than they hate coal. But in the years since Jackson Browne strummed outside nuclear reactors, the enviros have lost the public. During the California energy crisis, in fact, polls found that majorities of Americans now favored the expansion of nuclear energy. Do Americans still feel the same way 18 months later? The pollsters no longer ask, or at least the publicly available pollsters no longer ask. But it would be interesting to know the answer -- to know whether there might be a bigger prize out there for the Bush administration's energy policy than the incremental improvement of the technology of yesteryear, or rather yester-century.
Source : http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_24_54/ai_95056782
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