America's Nuclear Electric Future

Here's Llewellyn King with a column that ran nationally this weekend on the McClatchy-Tribune News Service:

Electricity has transformed the world. It has improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. Without it, only the rich could hope for lives of comfort. Aside from clean water, it has no peer in the realm of human well-being.

I believe in the benefits of electricity and have confidence in America's ability to engineer its way out of its problems. So it seems incomprehensible that we do not pledge ourselves wholeheartedly to an electric future. Most of the railroads await electrification. There is a glimmer of its possibility for automobiles, and cities need to rediscover trolleys and trams.

Back to the future, I say -- the nuclear electric future which is less volatile and more reverential of the environment.

For 30 years or more, we have talked about new technology and meant computers. Because of social and cultural pressure, the truly exciting technology of the atom has been shunned.

Now we talk a lot about nanotechnology. But if we are already using the components of matter, atoms, we should also have the moral courage to split them for electric power.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Energy, Technology, Environment, Electricity