Despite Long-standing public concern about the safety of nuclear energy, more and more people are realizing that it may be the most environmen-tally friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity. Several nations, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, In-dia, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam, are building or planning nuclear plants. But this global trend has not as yet extended to the U.S., where work on the last such facility began some 30 years ago. If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustain- able and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods — namely, worries about reac- tor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global re-serves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel