The first link you gave simply throws numbers around. Where did these numbers come from? And don't think pro-nuclear people are all in love with Yucca Mountain. Most of us hate it. We would much rather use waste-eating reactors--the CANDU class, currently operating commercially in Canada, could use light-water nuclear waste if export bans were lifted or it were licensed in the US. The experimental IFR, developed at Argonne in the late 80s to early 90s, ran for several years on waste from a nuclear power plant. Fission products are useful for nuclear batteries, measuring equipment, and medicine--where they're already used today. Waste costs are hidden just about everywhere else but nuclear reactors. All the fuel over the entire life of a plant is stored onsite. Do you think that's free? Chernobyl shows the magnitude of damage probable if you run an unauthorized test that you know could result in a loss of coolant on the worst-constructed of the worst reactor class in the world. Nothing more. You persistently refer to these "uncovered pools"--which are belowground most of the time, accessible all of the time, and contrary to what you say, covered and contained. The link you refer to is laughable--the shallow pools that they zoom in on aren't the spent fuel pool. The spent fuel pool is the white building between the two domes. You also cannot answer my objection that your figure of several hours for a fire to start would allow the fire department to start dumping water on it. Do not "trust" the industry. Listen to what it has to say, listen to what disinterested observers have to say, and listen to what its opponents have to say, and form a conclusion. Use critical thinking skills. As for wind's costs, you point to a wind industry projection. So we should trust the wind industry and not the nuclear industry? You simply can't point to any real performance data. Besides, no matter how much wind capacity you install or how cheap it is, it's still only on 30% of the time under the best possible conditions. It doesn't matter how much you're willing to pay for electricity if it doesn't exist. With plug-in hybrids, you still have to get that electricity from somewhere. One of the best ways I can think of to strangle electric cars would be to have an inconsistent source of electricity. Decommissioning is going to get much easier to do once we get to the operational plants, meaning not Shippingport and Yankee Rowe, but plants that were designed with the life cycle in mind. Fuel costs are a miniscule amount of a nuclear power plant's operating costs--if it were only fuel, it would already be literally too cheap to meter, on the order of a dollar per home per year. Fuel isn't being used efficiently either--from 90%-97% of the energy of a fresh fuel rod is still inside at the end of today's once-through cycle. The reality is that you can't come up with any real numbers on this either--simply using words like "huge" and "skyrocket" to cover a vacuous argument. --Stewart Peterson