Time to Go Nuclear

The tragedy of the 13 trapped coal miners highlights the value of nuclear energy. Jerry Pournelle put it best: there are more people killed annually at grade crossings by coal trains than ever died from nuclear power Except for Chernobyl, of course, but you can't base anything on Soviet debacles, and even the death toll there was fairly limited. Just last year over a dozen died in a refinery explosion in Texas. Then there is the environmental damage done by mining and burning coal and oil spills. Hydroelectric power is also damaging to the environment. Nor does nuclear energy release greenhouse gases. Aside from the hot water to run turbines and whatever negatives accrue from any large construction project, nuclear energy's only negative environmental side-effect is waste disposal, which really only presents a problem thousands of years into the future by which time humanity presumably will have learned to solve such problems or vanished from the face of the earth anyhow.

The only negative to eliminating coal mining would be the loss of yet more decent-paying industial jobs for men to do. Still, while coal mining is one of those folkloric occupations, unlike, say, truck driving, it's hold on the imagination (as shown in song) is hardly romantic. Merle Travis's Dark as a Dungeon lays it out starkly:

Where it's dark as a dungeon
And damp as the dew
Where the danger is doubled
And the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls
And the sun never shines
Oh it's dark as a dungeon
Way down in the mine