Scottar's recommendation of building highly efficient homes is an excellent one. Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org) has been making the case for more than 3 decades that investments in energy efficiency (low-hanging fruit) are much more profitable than investing the same money in producing energy from nuclear power. However, in the U.S., nuclear power benefits from huge federal subsidies, some direct, and some indirect, like the Price-Anderson Act's assumption of federal liability for nuclear power plant accidents. Even now, with oil as high as it is, the nuclear industry is lobbying hard for $40-50 billion or more in new federal subsidies. The "free market" passed judgement a long time ago on nuclear power in the U.S.; utilities have not been able to borrow money in commercial markets to build nuclear plants.

Scottar is incorrect when he says that the nuclear genie is "out of the bottle," that the dam has broken. In fact, in the absence of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, it is not possible to build a nuclear weapon. So a world-wide moratorium on building new enrichment plants would in effect put a cork in the bottle. Is there a lot of weapons-grade material already in existence? Yes there is, but thus far, no country has produced nuclear weapons by stealing such material. That's one reason why there has been so much controversy over whether the Iranians were building enrichment facilities.

I agree that biological weapons are also a grave concern. And unlike nuclear weapons, the technology needed to create biological weapons does not require large industrial plants to create the raw materials, and is therefore much more difficult to detect. But that's no reason to keep multiplying our exposure to terrorism by continuing to spread nuclear technologies.