Nuclear power is still a divisive issue among EcoGeeks. It's clean, at least from a fuel cycle carbon emissions standpoint. But it's a reasonable question whether it is truly cost-effective once all the issues of mining and processing the fuel, and treating and storing the spent material and waste, along with the security and the public safety concerns (which carry their own not-insignificant costs).

There are many who claim that nuclear power is the greenest short-term alternative to coal to reduce carbon emissions from electrical power generation. And, on the other hand, we have seen some countries move to phase-out nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.

However, Fukushima-style boiling-water reactors are not the only way to use nuclear power to produce electricity. For that matter, uranium isn't the only nuclear fuel that could be used. There are other reactor designs and fueling methods have been explored and are under development.

Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to take a look at several alternative nuclear power technologies with an EcoGeek persepctive. We aren't going to draw any final conclusions with this one way or the other. We are advocating neither in favor of nor against any of these alternatives, nor are we for or against nuclear power, in general.

This article is part of a series on alternative possibilities in nuclear power.
Previously at EcoGeek: Lesson of Fukushima: No-Nukes or Pro-Nukes?

The green jobs debate rages on. Some argue that all the stimulus money being poured into green efforts - like renewable energy and building retrofitting – will create millions of new jobs, and will revitalize the economy. Others are not so sure. The latest opinion to be voiced comes out of the Institute for Energy Research, which just published a study challenging the rosy predictions of people like the Center For American Progress (who predicted that $100 billion worth of green investment would create 2 million jobs).

One criticism is that the term “green job” is ill defined. This is certainly true, although the root of the problem is that “green” is pretty ill defined to begin with. There is no “green” sector – all sectors of our economic infrastructure are part of the problem, and fixing all of those parts will have to be part of the solution. And so, a construction worker weatherizing a house has a green job just as much as a solar energy technician.

And so it is difficult to make predictions in the first place, let alone specific numbers like 2 million. But the IER also points out that for all the new jobs that will be created when we start building wind turbines, we will lose jobs at coal power plants. In fact, the impact will go far beyond just the power sector. People talk about how the economy needs to be “restructured”; to be blunt, “restructuring” means that a lot of industries that people depend on to put food on their table will become discouraged, and eventually useless.