Nuclear Revivalism - Sleepwalking into Oblivion

This sent in from Charles Schultz - "In the golden age of science, at the time when society had its most optimistic view of science, it basically had a wrong headed view of science. It had the view that this form of the technology was the inevitable form it had to take; and if that was the form it took, it must be the right form.  Forty years later we have a similarly naive view, it is no longed tinged by hope and optimism it's tinged by pessism and fear, but we still have this view that society can't shape technology: that the form technology takes is the form we must accept.  Just as it wasn't true in 1950, it's not true today.  This is not a story of technology run amok, though that is how many people would understand it to be.  The history of nuclear power is a history of political and economic and social decisions being made about a technology.  And the key decisions weren't made by the technologists; they were done in the business realm. What science and technologies give you are a range of possibilities. And those possibilities can take you in any number of directions. It is potentially a liberating force, but to get there, society has to stop sleep walking, and start realizing that it's not a scientific choice, it's not an economic choice, it's a moral choice." - Joseph Morone, historian