There seems to be great confusion about the term "conspiracy" around here. If I were to collect a thousand Berkeley students at random, and put them in a room, or a thousand mainstream media journalists, and ask them a series of questions on policies and political positions, lo and behold, almost all of them would have a narrow range of opinions on certain subjects. Did they all get together ahead of time and work this out in secret? Or maybe can a certain environment select for a particular worldview and tend to ease out the other ones? "Conspiracy" has a real meaning. I'm not using the word. You are.

That aside, I'm not talking about liberal "people on the street." I'm talking about politicians, policy wonks, scientists, and others who damn well should know what the facts are, and are still opposed to nuclear energy as any serious part of the energy problem. You tell me what their motivations are. Al Gore comes to mind.

If Obama wanted a real stimulus project, he could have done a lot worse than simply greasing the process to get some new plants built, perhaps in combination with large-scale studies of the new techniques available now.

Nuclear power was deliberately killed in this country in the 1970s. So today we watch on the sidelines while new types of reactors are being built in China and India, and France thumbs its nose at OPEC. We don't even have the industrial capacity to build the goddam reactor structures in this country any more. When we do build nuclear plants, we'll probably end up buying most of them from some other nation.