In today’s Acton Commentary, I examine the overtures President Obama has been making lately to usher in “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” I call for in part a “level playing field” for nuclear energy, which includes neither direct subsidy from the government nor bureaucratic obfuscation. The key to the latter point is to avoid the kind of breathless concern over the countries involved in the manufacture of ponents for elements of the stations.

The playing field now is plex, of course, given prehensive system of tax breaks, incentives, and other subsidies that makeup today’s energy policy. In making this call I echo to some extent plaint of Ralph Nader, although I’m much more sanguine about the ability of nuclear power pete in a “free market” (HT: The Western Confucian).

Planet Gore’s Chris Horner calls Obama’s recent moves on nuclear energy contradictory and “flat-out dishonest.” Horner links to a couple of other important pieces that outline some of the economic distress potentially caused by clean energy legislation, as well as the official announcement of new guaranteed funds for nuclear power projects.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) points plicating factors beyond the availability of federal funds. I address the concern of regulatory “bottlenecks” in mentary piece, but I pass by the concerns over nuclear waste disposal.

Apart from recycling possibilities, which is of course a special concern for fissile material, how might we be able to safely dispose of the waste from this “new generation” of nuclear power plants? I’m talking here about the 4% or so that can’t be productively repurposed.

For a long time I’ve thought that an extraterrestrial solution might be ideal, given the political problems surrounding terrestrial storage (as in the case of Yucca Mountain), although in practice finding the technology to safely plish some kind of outer space disposal is more difficult. Space elevators might work. Storing material on the moon afterward might be an option, although in lieu of a lunar solution perhaps a solar solution might work. Although volcanoes aren’t hot enough to break down radioactive material, the sun would be.

So maybe we could develop and apply the technology to shoot nuclear waste into space on a trajectory that would draw it into the sun, or failing that, into a path that would not run back into us on the way around or interfere with future intra-system travel. Why not use “a cannon for shooting things into space” to dispose of nuclear waste?How the Space Cannon Works, John MacNeill

Any disposal site or method, especially one that included the transport of material into space, would need to be virtually immune from the kind of attack that destroys The Machine in the film Contact.

Selected related items:

There is No Perfect Fuel (2/12/10)Green Atomic Power (8/25/06)Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil (7/19/06)Comet-Busting Lasers: A Response to Andy Crouch (9/12/05)Pascal’s Blunder: Miscalculating the Threat of Global Warming (9/7/05)Stewards of the Cosmos (10/6/04)

More background links from a PowerBlog reader:

Nuclear Energy: Just the FactsNuclear Energy InstituteWorld Nuclear AssociationAtomic InsightsEnergy from ThoriumVirtual Nuclear TouristAtomic Insights BlogNEI Nuclear NotesEnergy from ThoriumNuclear Regulatory CommissionInternational Atomic Energy Agency