Since this is a railroad site...

In my misspent youth, I knew the daughter of, and got to meet, one of the engineers at Jet Propulsion Lab, who had worked on the research for a nuclear powered locomotive back in the 60's.... Bad Brad's team looked at various small "submarine" sized atomic reactors, which could be mounted on a choo-choo... It would work, but.... They also encountered a lot of potential "risks" of operating an atomic powered locomotive in the real world.... And, the fireman, once again, would have had to keep an eye out on how much water was in the glass....

There has been a lot of reaearch into cleaner safer atomic power technology, with less waste problems, that could becoome commercially viable today. But, the general level of public/political hysteria, over the many costly and catastrophic incidents with pressurized water reactors, and a bad case of investor "cooling" over the operating costs and decommissioning costs of the 60's generation of pressurized water reactors, has dampened the interest new commercial generating projects using 60's style pressurized water cooled reactor, with France being somewhat of an exception.

A mew generation of atomic reactors which use other processes, like using safer coolants (liquid salt, sodium...) or alternative nuclear fuels, are being tested and do seem to have a lot of potential.

I try to listen to the science, and do the eoonomics... And, there are some interesting new alternatives that seem to show great promise. So, of course, if we are following the science and looking for effective and efficient solutions to our power needs, we should look at these newer atomic power technologies.

I do have a caveat though... While I do think we should follow the science, I don't always believe all of the "hype", as I'm old enough to remember when we were all told that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter"... As of my latest bill, we've clearly failed to reach that promised goal...