I totally support nuclear power, but I don't believe its detractors (although mistaken and overly cautious) are necessarily out to drive the world into a new dark age just to satisfy their Romantic pastoral fantasies. This is the fantasy of those who find the dialogue and compromise of a democratic society personally inconvenient.

The process of dialogue and compromise assumes that people on both sides are rational. For example, some locals around here are yelping about spraying pheremones to control the mating behavior of a moth that is a major agricultural pest. One objector, quoted extensively in the newspaper for God's sake, complained that if the government can use this stuff on moths, what's to keep them from using it on gay men?

I will discuss anything reasonably at great length with reasonable people, and have done so extensively here in the past on the subject of nuclear power. But I am getting crotchety in my later years, and have little patience with dingbats any more (LaRouche is included in that group, just as an aside).

If you want some good debate, spend some time on this Frontline site, which has arguments from informed people on both sides.

These musicians object to nuclear power because it's expected for people like them to object to nuclear power. I could predict their exact position on any other twenty issues you could name. Odds are excellent that none of them could tell you the difference between a proton and a neutron.

Their objections to taxes subsidizing the industry is a laugh. Such people seem to have no problem with taxes subsidizing and shielding from market forces pretty much every other leftist wet dream they can think of.

I don't have a solid position on how far government should be involved in nuclear power. It's glaringly obvious in any discussions of free markets and industry that a nuclear reactor does not fall under the same category as an automobile factory, and "laissez faire" is not going to be a valid choice here. It's also obvious that energy is rapidly becoming a critical national security issue.

I don't know about the other end of the scale, either. I don't trust government to be free of screwups any more than any other human entity, and probably less. Still, France's system is government-run, and now enjoys the cost and safety benefits of extensive standardization.

I think the solution is somewhere in the middle, and probably, believe it or not, tending toward more government standards and regulations. (The key with standards is to make sure they don't crowd out innovations.)

For example, I would have no problem with the waste processing and storage taking place on near-military government facilities.

Remember, the environmental movement used to support nuclear power as the clean alternative.

A number of well-known environmentalists still do.