By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service

Initially it won't be cheap, but the Obama administration's plans to revive construction of nuclear plants after more than three decades of dormancy is good news for anyone who wants to maintain a thriving, modern, industrial economy, if not for some of those who have a different future in mind.

Some do, and that's not just my imaginings at work. You can scout the writings of some environmental extremists and discover any number who think this land of world trade, factories, highways, cars, and modern conveniences of all kinds ought to be junked so we can get back to a simpler, agrarian, local-economy life.

The problem is that we've been there. It meant poverty and cramped existences, and you can still find it in third world countries in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

There are others who would not quite go that far, but watch out for their proposed anti-pollution, climate-change policies of scrapping use of fossil fuels and relying solely on ``green" technologies for energy production, the favored ones being wind and solar power.

It won't work. These technologies will replace only a small fraction of the energy we get from fossil fuels. When the wind doesn't blow, the blades on windmills don't rotate and it's lights-out time. Solar power is also intermittent: no sunshine, no electricity. And that's not the end of it.

Wind farms are wilderness destroying and ugly ― the late Ted Kennedy fought like the dickens to keep such an operation from defacing his state of Massachusetts.

It takes something like 800 square miles of one wind farm to produce as much electricity as can be produced in a nuclear plant on a single square mile. And wind-power transmission lines are hugely expensive and still another environmental assault.

Nuclear power is the answer, and not just for clean energy but also as a means for a still more productive, efficient industrial base and higher standards of living.

Despite yelping to the contrary, it is safe. There's a superstition that it's not, and yes, we had an accident at Chernobyl in 1986 that killed 56 people directly and may have killed thousands indirectly, but that was because of operations so pathetic you would only find them in the Soviet Union.

We have lost not a single life because of radiation in a nuclear plant in the United States, and the thought that these plants might be subject to a terrorist attack releasing death for miles is pure science fiction.

For a period, we will still have a waste disposal problem that could have been easily enough solved if the perfectly sound and reliable Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada was not being de-funded by the Obama administration for political reasons. It now plans to keep waste instead in some 60 sites spread hither and yon.

The good part is that we're ultimately going to be able to recycle nuclear fuel into new plants, causing the waste issue to go away if still failing to shut up certain exaggerators.

In the long run, the cost of building new plants won't be overly high, either. For a time in this country, it was, owing to regulatory mayhem.

Because opponents had images of Hiroshima dancing in their heads, they kept cooking up ways to keep anyone from building a plant at an affordable cost. A silly regulation here and another one there and the deed was done.

But now the Obama administration figures that a loan guarantee program increased to $54 billion will demonstrate how new reactors can be built at a reasonable price in accordance with reasonable regulations utilizing widely acclaimed new technologies and bringing us to the point where subsidies won't be needed.

It's a bold, smart, promising move that first needs Congress to go along in approving the funds in the 2011 budget, and it still won't produce immediate results.

Nuclear reactors don't spring up overnight. But proposing this move is one of the wisest steps the administration has taken on the energy front.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.