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[ted <music AT thenightshades.com>]

 I'm not sure that we could build the Golden Gate Bridge or a Hoover Dam
these days, let alone a "safe" nuclear facility. Why? Rampant corruption.
Who's going to build it? One of these defense contractors? Halliburton?

And more to my original point, who is going to make sure that the cream of
the upcoming crop of pesticide-damaged (as we all are, increasingly)
children are going to get the kind of rigorous and specialized education
necessary to staff these reactors with people who can assure their
continuing safety? Who's going to make sure the infrastructure of the US,
now so pitifully exposed by our taste for huge long distance AC lines and
oil pipelines, continues to function? And who is going to make sure the
money is available for constant upkeep and any emergency procedures?

Don't look now, it ain't you or me.

With increasing privatization of everything, and everybody's hand in the
gov't pie, as soon as it ceases to be profitable the whole infrastructure is
going to shut down and or collapse, piece by piece. And when it does, their
will be all the lawsuits over lost projected profits and the rest of it.

Here in the NW we have Hanford already poisoning the great Columbia, and
very little is being done to contain it. There's just no money in containing
it. It's likely to get a lot worse at any time.

Our entire approach with the long-distance AC lines is absurdly vulnerable-
reviewing Schwarzenegger's latest plan to supply CA with power from a dozen
or so coal plants in neighboring states, and the inevitable huge AC line, my
father said to me "it's too bad the Nazis didn't set up their infrastructure
like this- we could have shut them down with one airplane."

And let's hope when huge areas are shut down by attacks on our power system,
it's the power lines they go for and not the reactors. It's too easy to
imagine a 9/11 and Chernobyl all in one. People in glass houses shouldn't
throw stones, and yet we continue to make enemies left and right every day.

Better answer- lots of small local systems, increased efficiency (like we
have ANY efficiency now), establishing food sources (agriculture) nearby all
urban centers, sufficient to feed them w/o depending on interstate trucking
for profit (only) and long distance AC lines.