Some nations run very successful nuclear power programs. France gets 70% of its electricity from Nuclear power plants. Other nations yield to the misinformation of the radical greenies.
Sweden is doing just fine - from the Scientific American:
The World Really Could Go Nuclear
Nothing but fear and capital stand in the way of a nuclear-powered future
In just two decades Sweden went from burning oil for generating electricity to fissioning uranium. And if the world as a whole were to follow that example, all fossil fuel–fired power plants could be replaced with nuclear facilities in a little over 30 years. That's the conclusion of a new nuclear grand plan published May 13 in PLoS One. Such a switch would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nearly achieving much-ballyhooed global goals to combat climate change. Even swelling electricity demands, concentrated in developing nations, could be met. All that's missing is the wealth, will and wherewithal to build hundreds of fission-based reactors, largely due to concerns about safety and cost.
"If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored," argues Staffan Qvist, a physicist at Uppsala University, who led the effort to develop this nuclear plan. "The mantra 'nuclear can't be done quickly enough to tackle climate change' is one of the most pervasive in the debate today and mostly just taken as true, while the data prove the exact opposite."
A bit more:
The data Qvist and his co-author Barry Brook, an ecologist and computer modeler at the University of Tasmania, relied on comes from two countries in Europe: Sweden and France. The Swedes began research to build nuclear reactors in 1962 in a bid to wean the country off burning oil for power as well as to protect rivers from hydroelectric dams. By 1972, the first boiling water reactor at Oskarshamn began to host fission and churn out electricity. The cost was roughly $1,400 per kilowatt of electric capacity (in 2005 dollars), which is cheap compared to the $7,000 per kilowatt of electric capacity of two new advanced nuclear reactors being built in the U.S. right now. By 1986, with the addition of 11 more reactors, half of Sweden's electricity came from nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions per Swede had dropped by 75 percent compared to the peak in 1970.
France, a larger nation, has a similar nuclear tale to tell, weaning itself from imported fossil fuels by building 59 nuclear reactors in the 1970s and 1980s that produce roughly 80 percent of the nation's electricity needs today.
All that would be required for the Chinas, Indias and U.S.s of the world to emulate these two nuclear pioneers is "political will, strategic economic planning, and public acceptance," Qvist and Brook write. For example, nations would need to commit to a single design for reactors, as occurred in France and Sweden, as well as mandates requiring utilities to build said reactors and financial support for the construction from the national government. "The state reacted to a crisis, at that time the oil prices, and implemented a plan, which quickly in 15 years had solved the problem," Qvist says. "Analogies could be drawn to the crisis we have today: climate change."
More at the site - this would be a lot better if they were building Thorium reactors but you need to start somewhere. Much more at the site and Kudos to Scientific American to publish an article like this. The last 20 years have seen them publish a lot of politically safe articles and not the kind of penetrating actual looks at numbers kinds of stuff they used to. I remember them back when they were a respectable source of information.
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