While Europe (mainly France) is utilizing nuclear energy, they are also investing heavily in solar, wind, and biofuels. Germany is a leader in both solar and wind power, and nobody thinks of Germany as a sun-drenched nation or particularly windy place, certainly not like the U.S southwest (sun) or central plains (wind). Biodiesel is also used widely in Europe, where about half of the cars have diesel engines.

If you say the nuclear waste issue can be solved, go ahead and solve it first. Don't build these expensive plants, and then figure it out. Also, no community in America wants to deal with the waste, and few of them want to be near a nuclear power plant.

There are lots of people investing hundreds of billions of dollars on renewable energy in the U.S., with very little of it coming from the government. If the nuclear industry wants the public to get behind their technology, they need to invest their own money in developing a solution for the waste problems that will be economically viable (dealing with waste and de-commissioning nuclear plants makes the cost of producing that kind of electricity too expensive, but the builders of those plants don't have to deal with those expenses - they typically leave it for taxpayers are utility customers).

Germany has a lot of windmills. They produce less than 5% of Germany's electricity and have required enormous government subsidies. The country is planning a number of new coal fired power plants and natural gas burning turbines to supply the electricity that is now produced by its nuclear plants. Interestingly enough, Gerhard Schroder, the former Chancellor who pushed for the plant to shut down the nuclear plants is now working for the Russian natural gas monopoly named Gazprom. The project he is leading is building a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea so that it does not have to go through any other countries between Russia and Germany. Its capacity will need to be sold right about the time that the nuclear plants begin to be prematurely shut down.

Energy politics are almost as dirty as the emissions coming from those German coal plants. (BTW, I spent a week on the Rhine River this summer and watched hundreds of coal barges pass by. The crew of the ship I was on told me that many of them are moving South African coal imported into Rotterdam.)

I don't know what it costs to deploy wind power in Germany, but in the US it's less than 4 cents per KWH, without subsidies. Also, if we're going to include subsidies in discussing energy options, we shouldn't ignore the massive subsidies the fossil fuel industries receive, such as hundreds of billions of dollars
in military spending to "secure" an oil supply, untold billions in not forcing coal companies to clean up their mess or coal burning utilities to pay for the mercury emisssions (not to mention the carbon), or even the recent billions of dollars the government has given to coal companies to do research to turn coal into hydrogen.

I didn't mean to suggest that Germany was moving completely to renewable sources, but that it is a viable option there. Gross gave the impression that the future of energy in Europe is nuclear, which is just not true.

Also, I am not saying that nuclear power should be taken off the table, but that the nuclear industry needs to solve the waste and de-commisioning deal breaker before it is considered a viable option.

So the production tax credit for wind in the US isn't a subsidy?!

Look, there's a reason why large utilities are the ones building wind farms. The subsidies provided by the US government (in the form of tax credits) make it just economical to build these farms, which is why the growth of new wind capacity falls flat in years after the tax credits fail to be extended promptly. The big players are in the best position to take advantage of this form of subsidy.

Essentially all forms of power generation in the US are subsidized by the government, including fossil-fuels as you point out. Don't think that wind is any different, or solar.

We'll see what happens in Europe. Sweden has gotten cold feet over its "nuclear phase-out" (they're certainly not going to do it by 2010, as originally planned), and things are looking up for nuclear in Germany as well. It will only take a change in government in the next German elections and the phase-out will be gone. Some of the recent maneuvering in Germany has hinted at how desperate the Social Democrats and Greens are to get even one more plant closed before the tides change.

I think that nuclear will continue to be the future of energy in Europe, and I would not at all be surprised to see it grow. There is currently one plant under construction there and another begins construction at the end of this year.

Finally, your call for the US nuclear industry to solve it's "waste deal-breaker" (decommissioning is no big deal, and is already accounted for in the financing of the plant) is rather unfair, since for the past 25 years the US government has taken this out of the hands of private industry. Instead of being able to find their own solutions, the owners of the plants have to pay a fee for producing electricity, and this money goes toward waste disposal. All of the money that has been spent to bury commercial nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain has come from this fund, which was paid for by the utilities.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) the US government has done a lousy job at handling this task, and so the utilities are suing the government (and winning, I might add) to get their money back, since the government has reneged on its promise.

The problem, however, is not technical, nor is it economics or business. The problem is entirely political. So, if you want to solve the "waste deal breaker," I suggest that you contact your congressman or senator and urge them to live up to the promise that the government made a quarter of a century ago.