In reply to cb294:
That's a nice summary of the nuclear debate in a family sized nutshell!
My take is that there is no fundamental reason why nuclear fission should be as bad (technologically, politically and financially) as it has been, and that with 60 years of progress since the first piles were built, there is no reason it has to suck so much in the future. Look at the transformation of space launch costs under Elon Musk and SpaceX - 10% of the cost of previous government efforts through sensible management and adoption of new technologies, without sacrificing safety. If only someone would apply the same approach to fission - I see many parallels to rocketry, e.g. cost, size, danger, large quantities of energy involved, improving fundamentally old-school technology through incremental improvements in instrumentation and materials technology.
Nuclear fissions is the safest of all current energy generation schemes by any metric other an the court of public opinion - even accounting for past insanities such as the soviet approach of building an "explode now" button and pressing it at Chernobyl. Apparently this includes wind which I guess kills people in assembly, installation and servicing.
Transmutation of nuclear waste is something we know how to do, but for now the political and financial capital is lacking. It is also something that is highly containable and without wide ranging side effects and consequences, unlike concerns over both CO2 and geoengineering, both of which are potential pandoras boxes of the highest magnitude, but really nobody actually knows as the models are lacking so much as to render them highly speculative.
Perhaps if we are lucky one of the non Tokomak nuclear fusion projects will hit break-even in the next few years and a new era will dawn, otherwise I fear that we will keep building windmills and cutting fossil fuel plants until the grid becomes unstable, and then suddenly there will be renewed interest in fission plants, and a new generation of fission will be rushed in amidst massive civil discontent and as it's rushed all the mistakes of the past will be repeated, instead of an ordered transition to the "forwards looking, well managed and regulated nuclear industry" which as you say simply does not currently exist.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-pric...