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The Bush II administation breathed life back into nuclear research which had recieved savage cuts under Clinton (dash for gas), probably because doing that involved much less costs and efforts than actually builing new conventional reactors.
The bottom line is that nuclear today and within any kind of foreseeable future means generation III+ reactors, which are improved LWR's. The same kind of reactors that we already have, except better. Examples of these are Areva's EPR, Mitsubishi's APWR, GE-Hitachi's ESBWR and Toshiba-Westinghouse's AP1000. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The same people who have always looked at millenial time scale storage as just punting the problem onto future generations continue to look on it in that light.
However, the approaches that best address those are the ones that are in the "D" stage of R&D at best ~ the Indian thorium fueled reactor they hope to get done in this decade is a pressurized HWR design, and even if it does not have all of the same risks as a mid-20th century enriched uranium LWR, it shares more of them than the ones that are further from mature technology. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
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