When the president said that science would be respected again in the Obama Administration he obviously invited people to test that pledge. This same president promised to develop renewable energy sources.

Well, what about nuclear energy, one of most carefully tested technologies available to us to fight pollution and the tyranny of foreign oil? Josh Gilder of the White House Writers Group writes about it thus in The New York Post. (This is one of those gravely consequential developments that will cost America plenty, but in the midst of the histrionics over matters like the AIG bailout are lost to most news followers.)

Nixing Nuke Power
by Joshua Gilder
"New York Post" (Published 03/13/2009

When it comes to nuclear energy, settled science appears to count for little with the new Obama administration. This week, ostensibly "pro-nuclear" Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced the administration's decision to kill the nuclear-waste-storage site at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert.

Chu said we need to take a "fresh look" and that "we can do a better job." Good luck. The Yucca site had been studied for more than 20 years, undergoing $9.5 billion of tests by some 2,500 of the nation's leading scientists.

They gave the Yucca project a green light, for obvious reasons. Yucca Mountain is in an isolated desert region with ideal meteorological conditions for a nuclear-storage project. If we can't dispose of our nuclear waste there, we can't dispose of it anywhere, and we will never be able to build a new nuclear-power plant in America again.

So much hysteria has been generated on the subject of nuclear waste and radiation in general that it's worth taking a moment to put Yucca's supposed risks into perspective.

Those billions of dollars of studies determined that 10,000 years from now the greatest annual radiation dose near Yucca Mountain as a result of deteriorating storage canisters would be 0.24 millirem. In a million years, it might get up to .9 millirem. Yet normal cosmic radiation delivers a dose of 26 millirems a year at sea level. If you moved from Manhattan to Denver, you'd be about doubling that.

In other words, the residents of Denver (who, except when the Broncos win the Super Bowl, have never been known to sport two heads) are all getting more than 52 times the dosage of radiation that inhabitants of the Armagosa desert valley (which lies below Yucca) might get a million years from now.

Transportation isn't a problem, either. As Ted Rockwell (who helped build the first nuclear sub and commercial nuclear power plant) once said to me, you'd have to use a shaped charge to blow a hole in the canisters they ship the waste in, then stand next to it taking no precautions, for there to be any significant danger.

Energy Secretary Chu - a Nobel Prize winner and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab - must know that Yucca is safe. What he may not understand is that his success or failure as energy secretary will be largely determined by his ability to find adequate energy sources for our economy's future growth - and he just appears to have cut off his one viable option.

There is plenty of carbon-based energy lying around, of course. But these sources are anathema to the global-warming worriers, and the Obama administration intends to impose a massive tax on their production and use.

And, though we hear endlessly about "alternative" or "green" energy, its boosters never mention that, despite massive subsidies, solar and wind today provide about one half of 1 percent of our nation's energy consumption. You could cover the nation over with windmills and solar panels (and then listen to the enviros scream about the destruction of habitat that entails) and still barely make a dent in our energy needs. Meanwhile, we are dismantling our dams and lessening our hydroelectric capacity.

Where are we going to get the power, all from biofuels? Every plausible national energy policy includes building many more nuclear plants.

Recycling nuclear waste is part of the solution, but we'll still need Yucca to store the waste byproducts. In the meantime, all that nuclear waste is sitting around in shallow pools or in above-ground containers next to nuclear-power plants in some of the most populated locations in the United States.

Chu said in congressional testimony that this is perfectly safe for now, and he's probably right. But it does beg the question why a theoretical danger a million years in the future - way out in the desert near where we once tested nuclear bombs - should be allowed to imperil our nation's energy future.

Is ignoring nuclear science what President Obama really meant by his inaugural pledge, "We will restore science to its rightful place"?