Mary Anne is right about the awful nuclear regulatory situation in our country. One of the reasons France is doing so well is that it uses standardized reactor designs.

Bowser is right about the technology of modern nuclear reactors. It isn't that hard to make them safe any more. And the waste should be stored in guarded repositories, where it can be monitored and eventually dealt with, not buried in the salt mines to be forgotten. A decent waste recycling breeder program would eliminate a lot of it.

As you both suspect, not much is going to happen until oil gets harder to come by and the prices start to rise. Assuming, God forbid, that the government doesn't decide to subsidize it. The free market always works. In the meantime, the government can help by reworking the tricky nuclear regulatory and liability situation so that there is some incentive for private industries to get back into the nuke business again.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of environmentalists--the more numerous non-radical kind you don't hear from much--who are willing to at least look at this option.