Generally, I have a lot of respect for President Obama. I think he has and is making some tactical errors in dealing with his majority, but all in all, I think he and the first lady are honest and trying hard to do the right thing. But this initiative to accomodate republicans and give public money to build new nuclear plants based on some kind of propaganda that now nuclear plants are suddenly "safe" and we need them to counter global warming is so far outside of reality that it really has me scratching me head.

I'd like to see how Obama is going to lift the entire nuclear fuel cycle out of the coal cycle. It takes a lot of coal to produce the nuclear fuel rods. These so called "new generation" of nuke power plants will use fission, and will be reliant on the same old fuel rods as the existing plants. While it is true that a new enrichment is being built in New Mexico, it won't be online for years, and the Paducah facility is one of the biggest energy hogs in the country. And what about the conversion plant in Metropolis, the Kotter yellowcake facility in Canon City, Col., and the fuel fabrication facilities? What about all the cleanups that are ongoing at these facilities which are far from being cleaned up yet billions of taxpayers dollars have already been spent?

I know Obama needs to get people to work, and a superficial analysis of this might suggest that it isn't the worst thing we could be doing. But money going to this form of electrical generation means money not spent on more environmentally sound techniques. I'm diappointed to the core in Obama's very public actions, providing the public with misleading (at best) information and spending public money on the wrong thing.