Wired : "hysicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen."
Perhaps there is a possible way to have safe-ish nuke energy? Perhaps opposition is realy to water-cooled rod reactors? Read and make up yur own mind. Certainly this seems to deal with the meltdown and escaped water vapour issues that bedevil the conventional reactors. I like that way that this method is incapable of heating to meltdown and that water is not used and that terrorist attacks are not a huge issue in terms of the dirty bomb effect.
Downsides are that there is still a need to contain spent fuel [how long for?] and that presumably there are security and civil liberties implications for the transporting of so much uranium.
Note too that it's the Chinese doing this; huge population, massive economic growth and struggling with the effects of climate change and other forms of pollution ... it's hard to get a hold of the sheer scale of the problem they are facing.
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