[carl in alaska]

I'll pass on the nuclear reactors, because they produce too much radioactive waste that has to be shipped across the country and disposed of safely somewhere for hundreds of years. But I agree with you about the need for much more research in this area, and drilling in ANWR, getting rid of 84 different gasoline blends, and tapping into NG resources. We also need a lot more distributed generation of power using wind and solar power. Solar has moved to a new level of technology with the first large scale solar plant being built in California using a field of hundreds of solar-powered Sterling engines. This could also be done locally in areas with a high percentage of sunny days.

Our energy policy needs a lot of improvement and it's influenced too much by radical environmenalists, big utility companies and foreign lobbyists. We need more good old American ingenuity and you'll be seeing that increasingly in the future. We have underinvested in energy research over the last 25 years, but that is changing rapidly. This will be a totally different economy in another 25 years. It has to change because the price of oil is going to keep going up.

[Physicist]

I'll pass on the nuclear reactors

As you like, but the rest of us won't.

The problem of nuclear waste is strictly one of perception. People are killed by fossil fuels all the time and in many ways that never would have been accepted in the nuclear industry. If safety were truly your concern, you would demand nuclear power.

[Willie Green]

I'll pass on the nuclear reactors, because they produce too much radioactive waste that has to be shipped across the country and disposed of safely somewhere for hundreds of years.

That so-called "waste" is actually a fuel source that can be safely reprocessed and recycled to produce usable energy for hundreds of years.

[quant5]

"We have underinvested in energy research over the last 25 years, but that is changing rapidly. This will be a totally different economy in another 25 years. It has to change because the price of oil is going to keep going up."

I agree with your statement above. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Also, we are in the Information Age. Old methods of stifling technology ideas through politics or bureaucracy is ending. A politician here in the USA will not allow embryo research? Fine, someone in Korea will do it and then we'll all benefit later. This will happen with the petroleum dependancy also.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

I'll pass on the nuclear reactors, because they produce too much radioactive waste that has to be shipped across the country and disposed of safely somewhere for hundreds of years.

If we weren't forbidden to reprocess the nuclear waste, we wouldn't be having that problem.