Ford is making a 65mpg diesel car, but not selling it in the US. Why? A number of reasons explained in the article, but I suspect the underlying cause is that Americans are scared of diesel; they associate it with big polluting trucks and like the idea of the fancy new technology of hybrids despite the fact that there are many diesel cars in Europe that get better mileage than available hybrids for less money. My hope is that Mercedes and Volkswagen bringing diesel cars back to the US will do something to undo this, but I think it's unlikely that it will do that much. People seem to have an obsession with all-new technologies over tech that's already here and has been improved over the years.

I think the situation is the same with nuclear power. People are irrationally scared: nuclear power is dangerous, and we don't have any way to deal with the radioactive waste. Nuclear power is in fact less dangerous than most of what is currently used. Compare nuclear plant deaths to coal plant deaths, you might find that in the US there have been zero related to nuclear power (and then factor in the deaths related to coal mining vs. uranium/plutonium mining). Further, while it's true that we don't have a way to permanently get rid of radioactive waste, we can contain it, which is much more than can be said of the emissions from coal, oil, and gas plants.

But hey, what do I know. "Nuke-ular" and diesel are scary words, apparently.