"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 are much more profitable than investing the same money in producing energy from nuclear power."

Richard missed my point entirely. The architect of his home, Bruno Comby, is a nuclear engineer and President of EFN (Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy (International)) ecolo.org. He shows his ingenuity in his home and says that Nuclear Energy overall is the best, cleanest energy source over all others. I think a person with such intelligence would recognize any terrorists dangers from nuclear proliferation and drop his support for nuclear energy if it were a real threat from safe, clean Nuclear Power designs.

I was at RMI today and the problem with his scheme is affordability of so called micro power. In his concept every dwelling would have solar and wind local power. I have seen many homes built but with no solar or wind energy inputs. His car concept seem similar to the Saturn with a battery or fuel cell. Lithium batteries might work but fuel cells are still too expensive and what hydrogen generating scheme is efficient enough to replace oil, gas or even ethanol. There is no efficient way of generating any bio fuels with out severally impacting the land or our food upply.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news/renewable_energy_wrecks_the_environment.

Then there's the expanding population problem.

"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."

The initial costs are so huge that they must be subsidized and a lot of that is due to excessive enviro regulations. But wind and solar would not stand on their own without significant subsidies, . Nuclear energy has a significant value per buck that the others don't. See http://media.cleantech.com/605/nuclear-power-is-particularly-green-energy

"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."

But China and Russia will never agree to this. It hasn't stopped N Korea or Iran from getting and developing such technology. The sanctions against Iran are working like the Oil for Food program worked for Saddam. Despite the official proclamations, EU companies still do significant business with Iran. The genie is out and quite impossible to return. And some nuclear weapons grade material has been missing for some time from Russia.

"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."

Most present day reactors (Light Water Reactors or LWRs) use enriched uranium where the proportion of the U-235 isotope has been increased from 0.7% to about 3 ~ 5%. Uranium used for nuclear weapons must be enriched to at least 90% U-235. Note: Fuel for nuclear reactors is totally unsuitable and irrelevant to weapon production. The IEAE supervises the nuclear industry. world-nuclear.org