Nuclear Family

America has a problem.

Despite being the nation that put the first man on the moon and pioneered the technology behind the Perfect Pancake Maker, compared to most European countries, American infrastructure is pretty pathetic.

Take, for example, the power-cut that crippled the North East back in 2003. That was all caused by a single branch falling into a single power station somewhere near Canada.

Even today, places like California commonly suffer 'brown outs' as the beleaguered power plants struggle to supply all the juice needed to run millions of air conditioners and televisions. In my home, I find it slightly scary that plugging in a hairdryer causes all the lights to dim!

Money that's wasted on foreign wars, bridges to nowhere and shadowy foreign internment camps could be much better spent fixing the wiring and bringing America up to the standards of the 21st century. We're the world's greatest superpower - surely there's no excuse for people in the suburbs of Los Angeles not having electricity!

One excellent suggestion that John McCain is advocating involves building another 45 nuclear power stations.

It's not rocket science [Actually, it pretty much is - Editorial Bear]. Nuclear power is safe, clean, cheap and efficient. Yet because of bad press and the legacy of Chernobyl, people in America shy away from the concept and prefer to rely on dirty old coal power plants (compare coal-mining deaths to the casualties of Chernobyl and it's pretty clear which is safer.)

In fact, America hasn't built a nuclear power station for thirty years - and John McCain admits that the major hurdle in building new power plants will be the fact that the technology and expertise has largely been lost!

That in itself reveals something scary - that to some extents, America is in the midst of a technological 'dark ages.'

Places like France have proven that nuclear power is effective and efficient in delivering a nation's energy needs. What's more, switching just 1/5th of America's power from coal to nuclear would save the entire world from carbon emissions equivalent to every single automobile in the United States.

Environmentalists claim the key to overcoming the energy crisis is to embrace new technology. A little research reveals that, in fact, the technology doesn't even need to be that new.