> I thought regulation had rendered nuclear uneconomic.
Actually, it's not really the regulation problem, it's that hydrocarbon power plants are more reliable and have higher operating efficiency ratings than nuke plants do. Reason: radiation rots the innards of the whole heat exchange/coolant system, ionizes the water molecules, and of course you can't send just send plant workers into radioactive zones to fix pipes, seals etc. Uranium is an energy-intensive thing to mine and refine, and of course the wastes stick around for hundreds of thousands of years, unlike CO2 emissions, which can (potentially) be reabsorbed if we plant more trees (coal does dump lots of noxious stuff into the atmosphere, but you can switch to relatively clean natural gas or use scrubbers). All in all, it's a hideously uneconomic way to run your Pentium laptop, even by Wall Street's nutty standards.
-- Dennis