Renewable Energy without Pollution? Nuclear Energy's It

As usual, the thermodynamics-illiterate media and political classes miss the obvious. If we're serious about meeting our energy needs without massive pollution and without being in the pocket of the Arabs and Persians, there's only one way to rock:

So here's a suggestion. Instead of pumping water three miles into the earth to heat it, why don't we take the source of that heat and bring it to the surface?

That's what we do when we build a nuclear plant. The main source of the earth's heat is the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium atoms. A nuclear reactor simply brings this process to the surface and accelerates it under carefully controlled conditions. Drawing on this terrestrial heat isn't that much different from burning the stored solar energy in coal -- except that nuclear reactions produce 2 million times as much energy per ounce without any exhaust gases.

"Terrestrial energy" -- it's a "green" idea that didn't make U.S. News's "New Age of Energy." Somehow it hasn't yet made it into the environmentalists' playbook, either. But if we're going to solve any of our energy problems -- supply, pollution, global warming -- we're going to have to give it a more serious look.

The Japanese know the perils of nuclear power better than anybody on Earth. They run their country on nuclear power.

What more needs to be said?