How do you do it?

I work 10 hours a day and when I'm not at work I feel guilty for not spending any "free" time with my kids.

Fueling nuclear reactors with the element thorium instead of uranium could produce half as much radioactive waste and reduce the availability of weapons-grade plutonium by as much as 80 percent. But the nuclear power industry needs more incentives to make the switch, experts say.

Scientists have long considered using thorium as a reactor fuel -- and for good reason: The naturally occurring element is more abundant, more efficient and safer to use than uranium. Plus, thorium reactors leave behind very little plutonium, meaning that governments have access to less material for making nuclear weapons.

Have you told a veteran thank you today?

I believe that one of the drawbacks of nuclear power is not the energy source itself but rather the tremendous amount of misinformation about it that is circulated--sometimes by people who ought to know better, or do know better, but have an ideological agenda.

Or people fail to consider the big picture--the whole panorama of energy generation and the risks and drawbacks and external costs of each form.

People are superstitious about radiation and ignorant of the fact that even our own bones give off gamma rays and that coal-fired plants emit 100-400 times more radioactivity than nuclear plants, which shield and contain their waste.  People find medical radiation acceptable, and in the US we get the greatest amount of manmade radiation on average from nuclear medicine.  But Mother Nature outdoes humans in terms of level of radiation exposure--we get bombarded by radioactive materials in soil, rock, seawater and by cosmic radiation.  

People assume that exposure even to low-dose radiation causes cancer.  In fact about one-third of all deaths on the planet are due to cancer.  In societies where people live longer, we live long enough to develop cancers.  There have been no reliable studies correlating cancer increases to proximity to nuclear plants.  In fact in the US the National Cancer Institute did an extensive survey and found absolutely no increase of cancer around nuclear plants.

People believe nuclear plants can explode atomically.  This is impossible.

They believe terrorists can capture nuclear plants and nuclear waste.  Why would they bother to overcome more security obstacles than you would meet getting into Fort Knox or the Federal Reserve Bank or the White House when there are so many really easy ways to get radioactive materials (from the oil industry, for example).  Or why not just blow up a chemical plant--the risk and probability of that are much higher.

As for flying a plane into a nuclear plant--they're made the same way nuclear bunkers are, with thick concrete and steel.  The plane would crumple and the plant would remain intact, and the reactor would go into automatic shutdown.

The most serious risk to public health from energy generation is from burning fossil fuels.  

The most serious risk to the environment and to habitat is from burning fossil fuels.

As for Chernobyl, for a real-world analysis see the World Health Organization's report on the Chernobyl Forum 2005: http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/ff/ff43/topics.html