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There is some minimal sane in Barack Hussein, as evidenced by his recent embrace of new nuclear power plants (a positive direction I've long desired to see the United States take). But sure enough, the whiny left is in opposition.

From the NYT...

Environmental Advocates Are Cooling on Obama

WASHINGTON — There has been no more reliable cheerleader for President Obama’s energy and climate change policies than Daniel J. Weiss of the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress is disappointed by President Obama's enthusiasm for nuclear power.

But Mr. Obama’s recent enthusiasm for nuclear power, including his budget proposal to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion, was too much for Mr. Weiss.

The president’s embrace of nuclear power was disappointing, and the wrong way to go about winning Republican votes, he said, adding that Mr. Obama should not be endorsing such a costly and potentially catastrophic energy alternative “as bait just to get talks started with pro-nuke senators.”

The early optimism of environmental advocates that the policies of former President George W. Bush would be quickly swept away and replaced by a bright green future under Mr. Obama is for many environmentalists giving way to resignation, and in some cases, anger.

There's push back from other left-leaning sources as well...TIME Magazine, for instance, speaks of the cost of new plants, and declares that the greatest threat to mankind EVAH, is the problem with disposal of the spent nuclear fuels.

If we could just for once put a moratorium on the endless parade of lawsuits the envirowhacko lobbies unleash at the first words of "New NUCLEAR Plant" then maybe, just maybe, utilities might want to move forward. Just as in health care, unharnessed lawyers are excessively intruding into what should be a straightforward process: build new plants with modern safeguards (France leads the way with 80% or better of it's electrical grid powered by nuclear), put 'em online, and reap the cost savings.

How many new hydroelectric dams have you heard of being constructed in the U.S., to harness the power of moving water? How many dams could we have constructed during the heyday of the TVA, if our modern version of insane envirowhackos and (mostly Democrat) progressives been on hand to naysay them?

The TVA powers my home with nuclear energy.

Oh. Nuclear Waste, you say?

GE and Hitachi want to use nuclear waste as a fuel

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the world's biggest providers of nuclear reactors, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (a joint venture of General Electric and Hitachi), wants to reprocess nuclear waste for use as a fuel in advanced nuclear power plants, instead of burying it in waste repositories such as that proposed at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

Conventional nuclear power plants in the US only harness around five percent of the energy of nuclear fuels. The reprocessing technique would separate nuclear waste into different types of fuels, some of which can be used in conventional nuclear power plants, and some of which can only be used in advanced fast neutron reactors. Reprocessing of nuclear waste to extract more useable fuel has been criticized in the US because it produces pure plutonium, which could be stolen and used to make nuclear weapons. To get around this difficulty, GE Hitachi’s proposed method produces a fuel that is much harder to steal.

The GE Hitachi process separates wastes from conventional nuclear power plants into three streams, by applying voltage to a molten salt. The first waste material consists of the products of fission, which cannot be further used as fuel and will need to be stored, but the storage time required is reduced from tens of thousands of years to a few hundred years (although a small fraction of the material will still need to be stored for over 10,000 years). The second material is uranium that does not have enough fissile material to be used in the light water uranium reactors in the US, which need enriched uranium, but it can be used by deuterium (heavy water) uranium reactors, which are used in Canada.

The final group of waste products is a mixture of transuranic elements including plutonium and neptunium. The plutonium is not separated from the other elements, and the mixture releases 1,000 times more heat and 10,000 times more neutrons than pure plutonium. This makes it much harder to steal, and therefore less of a security risk, and it is also much easier to detect. The mixture of transuranic elements can be used in nuclear reactors that use molten sodium as the coolant rather than water, and this type is used in Japan and a few other countries. GE Hitachi has designed a reactor known as the PRISM reactor that would be able to use the mixed fuel, but sodium cooled reactors have not been approved for use in the US.

Let's move forward with this new technology; let's show some faith in American industry and technology...again.

To HELL WITH ENVIRONMENTALISTS!

Progressives, envirowhackos, your time is UP.

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