Great for China and humanity's survival. Poor for democracy
Gates has gone to China, I presume, because of the near impossibility of enlightening the NRC to the fact that reprocessing nuclear spent fuel is essential to the disposal of long-lived waste. We generate less than 100 tons of waste a year, isotopes with half-lives shorter than 30 years, and promiscuously leave those still with about 50 tons of plutonium, and 3000 tons of unused uranium. Then people like Amory Lovins talk about stuff that lasts billions of years, and its descendant decay products include deadly stuff like radium, polonium, and radon. He doesn't mention, perhaps doesn't know, that it takes tens of thousands of years before the quantity radium, etc, is enough that its radioactivity equals the quite low level of the tons of parent uranium.
Be that as it may, the crowning stupidity of most of my fellow-environmentalists is that they imagine the 18th century energy sources --biomass (think whale oil and slaves), wind (think of the steam tug towing the Temeraire to be broken up), and solar (think Ireland, Finland, or the Hebrides) can become resurgent against the technologies that ousted them.
The stupidity of the prevailing anti-socialist sentiment, the Right Wing Nuts et al., is that private enterprise is the only way to do it. The development of hydropower, aircraft, and the fundamentals of nuclear power, were all done using government money, directly, not by idiotic subsidies.
