Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-mile island and chernobyl, but the fact remains the public is skeptical regarding fission for good reason: history has not been kind to the kind of disasters fission reactors have wrought.<p>If you want to convince the public you're going to do it right this time without creating mini fallout zones, you have to do a good damn job of that instead of just wagging your finger at people and calling them dumb. They aren't dumb, they just know rightly that engineers can't foresee the everything in the future and are understandably skeptical.