there are only more or less controversial ones, afaik.

as for oil, i see the ngo's point, although the damage to the environment and human health of feeding further oil dependency may be as bad as nuclear waste and accident fallout at the end of the day, it should not be an either/or, but rather a neither/nor.

as jerome brings it back into perspective, i fully agree. if we took conservation and elegance of solution to be the guidelines, we would look first to conservation, then to gradated lesser-evil answers.

whereas many of you may find my views blue-sky or utopian, i find the passive acceptance of the inevitability of the 'french solution' to scale up and sort the global human energy equation to be dangerous in its skirting of the need to break down our requirements to those which are truly essential, before handing over the keys to the bechtels and westinghouses of centralised, top-down, reliably mendacious energy rentiers, none of whose track records inspire a fraction of the trust i would want to feel, regarding future generations and our responsibility to passing on a liveable planet to them.

we in the west have set a terrible example, and now the new superpowers see no need to think more rationally than we did.

what has almost done us in, as practised by much less than half of the world population, will certainly be unsustainable as the rest follows suit.

the most likely scenario is that mother nature has timed the end of fossil fuels to coincide with our awakening as a species to the life-and-death choices and responsibilities we face, and how we could and should live equitably in a world of finite resources.

setting the wheels in motion fto finance, locate, justify to the already jaded and burned public, the number of nuke plants that would be needed to make a dent in our fossil fuel addiction, will deliver a very polarised choice to an ever more savvy and sceptical public.

my bet is that the world will move much more smartly towards cutting demand, and creating new, 'soft' solutions to challenges energy corporations will repeatedly try to snow us into accepting.

i remember the cognitive dissonance i experienced through the eighties, when the media was busily misinforming us about how solar was a dodgy, unreliable source, yet increasingly PV panels were popping up on all sorts of places, from lake buoy nightlights, to traffic signals.

a perfect metaphor is the drm efforts to sequester intellectual property versus the bit-torrent model.

one is elegant and liberating, the other a dinosaur that has called the shots for a long while now.

one insure-able, the other not...

it is greenpeace's job to knock holes in projected plans for waste disposal, and to alert us to the self-serving conniptions, greenwashing and propaganda those who claim to have solutions are not above using.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty