Mike the Mad Biologist points me to an interesting article in Wired, Uranium Is So Last Century -- Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke. Of course Wired is a booster of many things which never take off, but in general I think it's probably safe to bet on nuclear power becoming more prominent in the near-to-medium-future. I recently have been reading a bit about oil, stuff that's not written by Daniel Yergen, and was fascinated by this chart of long term crude prices:
The inflation adjusted values are of interest. But look at the lack of volatility before 1974! My whole life has been characterized by volatility of crude oil prices, so I simply assumed that that was the nature of the beast....
