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The Dallas Morning News Edit Board and Nuclear Energy

By Eric McErlain
Over at the Dallas Morning News' Editorial Board Blog, James Mitchell posed the question of the day about nuclear energy.
The Senate's energy bill strongly advocates nuclear energy as a way to make the United States more energy diversifiied. Past efforts to promote nuclear energy in the 1970s ran into environmental opposition, not-in-my-backyard sentiment, and herky-jerky federal policy that left utlilities and rate payers holding a huge financial bag of costs.

Today's question is really five: Pick any portion

How comfortable are you in making nuclear energy a major component of national energy policy and do you have concerns that government policy will not again pull the rug out from under the industry in the future?

Should the government subsidize its development, which means picking winners and losers in the marketplace and possibly putting wind and solar on the backburner?

Should we aspire to be France, where virtually every KW of electricity comes from nuclear power?

What should be done about the waste issue - long term short term?
It was hard not to sit up and notice right away, as our CEO Skip Bowman was in Dallas just last week to give a speech about the state of the industry.

In any case, here are the responses, keyed off the names of the writers who posted them:

James Mitchell
Keven Ann Willey
Todd Robberson
Mike Hashimoto
Todd Robberson

I'd encourage our readers to stop by and participate in the discussion. And please say thanks to the bloggers on the edit board for giving our issue a little more air.

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