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Would building a lot of nuclear power plants really reduce our need on foreign oil? Most of our electricity is generated with coal or natural gas.

I like nuclear energy too (as long as it's not in my backyard). It is good clean energy, but what nuclear waste does come from it is extremely toxic and it remains highly toxic and dangerous for thousands of years, and man made or natural disasters at nuclear plants can lead to some pretty horrible results. The quantity of toxic waste produced is relatively small though and nuclear plants have become very safe in this country. We can handle it. I'm not so much worried about us. What worries me are the other guys. If we start building a whole lot of new nuclear plants everyone else is going to want to build them too and we're going to have a hard time stopping all these little countries out there from going nuclear. Some of them will enrich their uranium. That's inevitable, and we'll have more nuclear weapons to worry about. Also, we don't know how good their safety track records will be and how well they're going to handle their nuclear waste. What's going to happen when their governments fail and crazies take over or when they have wars and nuclear plants everywhere start getting targeted? There will be a lot more nuclear plants in the world and there will be a lot less control over them. That scares me just a little.

I was in the Army in Germany when the Chernobyl incident occurred and several in my unit went out and checked radiation levels in the days and weeks after the accident. I personally saw levels much higher than were being reported in the news. That really kind of scared me, already being one who had grown up during the Cold War and having put more than a little thought into the prospect of nuclear war, radiation poisoning, and that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't want to live anywhere near a nuclear plant, or anywhere near a big city that would be a target for nuclear attacks for that matter. I'm sure nuclear plants are just as safe as can be in this country but I don't want one near my house, and I'd really hate it if I was living near the Mexican border and there was a Mexican nuclear plant not far from me. Think about that.

It amusing that you mention being nervous about living near a nuke plant. We took our kids on a field trip up to Seabrook Nuke plant in NH with a group of homeschoolers. One of the questions asked was were people worried about living nearby. The man showed us aerial photos of the beach area where the inflow-outflow pipes of the plants were located. When the plant was built, about 20 years ago, the beach was almost empty. Now there are a scad of high end homes within a few blocks of the pipes. Obviously, those folks are not worried. Having seen how the plants are constructed, I'd have no worries about living near one.

Chernobyl was nothing like anything in this country in its style of contruction, so there are no concerns about that type of accident. Seabrook was phenomenal in the level of construction for security purposes. The reinforcing steel within the concrete walls and dome are 4" thick! There's no way a plane crashed into it would do any damage to the structure; the plane would simply disentegrate. Even with the accidents that have happened, there hasn't been any danger to the general public. Three Mile Island didn't release any real levels of radiation outside the plant, regardless of breathless reporting to the contrary. As a bumper sticker reads: "More people have died in Teddy Kenndey's car than in any nuclear power plant accident in the US."

The biggest reason nuclear hasn't gone further than it has is because folks just don't understand the process, and were easily manipulated and frightened by the rhetoric of the anti-nuke crowd.

From what I've read there is space to store the spent nuke fuels safely, again it's just an education process.

Most of our electricity is generated with coal or natural gas.

If nuclear energy were more readily available, some companies might consider switching from coal because of the emissions and the effect on the environment. It's also possible that the cost of natural gas could go up, also being an influence on switching to nuke generated electricity.

Another effect of having nuke plants is the availability of electricity at a reasonable cost to power hybrid or electric cars, and that would affect how much oil needs to be imported to refine into gasoline.