Nuclear Energy

Here's an article I was pointed to by macroblog. Three pretty good reasons why the US hasn't gone to nuclear energy to a larger degree:

• Unknown costs of a disaster (Chernobyl) - better to face a known cost of a coal plant's pollution.
• The political problem of storing nuclear waste.
• Coal is cheaper/more profitable?
  

I don't know if that last one is true. If its not I would be really interested why we don't have more nuclear power. It could be a path-dependency problem. By the time nuclear technolgies matured we already had a huge infrastructure of coal burning plants whose costs were already sunk in building them. We don't have nuclear energy because we wanted those plants to pay themselves off first.

Couple of other things: France relies very extensively on nuclear power. Becker asserted they "recycle" their nuclear waste and don't have a big storage problem. Secondly, why couldn't we blast the waste into space? Presumably we could shoot if off I a direction where it wouldn't hit anything for hundreds of millions of years if ever.

Secondly, how scarce are the materials for nuclear power? Would we be trading dependence coal mines for dependence on uranium mines?

Finally, Wind farms. Basically you're pulling energy out of the sky. If you had big enough wind farms wouldn't that effect the local or global whether?