Solving

We all know that $30-a-barrel isn’t coming back. Just as we know that simply turning off a few lights won’t halt global warming. Yet the search for a low-emission, non-fossil-fuel source of energy has been a bit like “American Idol”: every now and then, another fresh-faced alternative-energy rock star wanna-be is eliminated. Wind and solar are nice and clean
As contestants are eliminated, it’s worth looking at the geezer in the bunch: nuclear power. Nearly 50 years after the Shipping port Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first commercial power plant to hit critical mass, the New Jersey-based utility NRG last month filed papers seeking permission to build a nuclear power plant in Texas. This represents the first such new application since 1979, nuclear’s annus horribilis. Two weeks after the debut of the fear-inducing nuclear-disaster flick “The China Syndrome,”life imitated art, as the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. That effectively forestalled the creation of new nuclear power plants for a generation. The last reactor to come online was the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee, in May 1996.

So what’s changed? Thirty years of safe operations have helped pave the way for NRG, and for a couple of dozen other possible plants in the works. Indeed, even as they’re mocked in popular culture