The Bates Motel of energy ideas

Up until the disaster in Japan of the GE built reactor, the US nuclear industry was all but dead.  I work in heavy industry, and I can tell you the capacity to make large components for new plants in the US is almost nil.  If  more are built, much of the large forgings and machining must come from Japan, China, Germany, France, Italy, US content will be small on the big ticket items.    But the real reason it was stalled was money.  No one can be sure what it costs to build a new plant here, no bank or company wants to risk the billions and spend 5 to 8 years making it.  These things are hugh and the giant components of exotic materials are very long lead items.  The pay back is long.  And alternative energies and dirty coal make the return on investment over this very long build cycle very unappealing.  Thus, the lobbyist and the Congress they own will spend tax money to partially fund it and then give it to industry so that they may profit.  At the moment we have the proof of the folly of it, it seems the clowns have the loudest voice, and the industry has another chance to do us harm.  Capitalism?

Above are containers of nuclear waste.  No solution exists in the US to dispose of it, none.  This crap is hot for the next 5,000 generations.   So, why should we not be afraid?

Here is the media/industry/political story.  Don't worry, (a) the event in Japan is 1 in 500 years, (b) most reactors are not the type that failed.  Story (a) is for people who failed math.  Probability estimates the chance of happening, it offers no insurance of the frequency, it could happen again tonight.  Story (b) is suppose to be good news, but your "bullshit" detector should be shrieking like a guest in the Bates Motel shower.   If we look at Three Mile Island, that was a different reactor and it failed in a way that had never occurred.  Chernobyl was another kind of reactor, and it failed under conditions and events that had not happened before.  The Japanese reactor was different from the other two, and it failed in a new way.  So, we wait for the 4th failure, with a different design, and under circumstances  unforeseen.   A nuclear energy generation plant is one of the most complex machines made, with chains of redundant devices, chains of mechanical and electrical components, chains of monitoring devices, layers of human operators.  While this may sound reassuring it should be the opposite, this machine, every machine, without knowledge or intent is testing every possible combination of events and hazards every minute of it's service life, and without fail it will fail, it will find the weakest link in the chain and break it.  In short, engineers joke about complex machines as having too many potential points of failure, too many tent poles, break one and the whole thing falls in on you.
Obama, and the Congress, and the bankers, should find something else to do and forget this source of energy.