Hey, Two Tenners:
I'm an an American hippie (to a certain extent) myself, and I'm not advocating the de-industrialization of the US.
As a peace offering, here's yet another little piece of American hippie culture: (OK, so it has a lot of photos of Grace, but the female singer in this song is actually our beloved Signe:
Anyways, there's realy no reason to have nuclear power plants anywhere on earth, given the safety of clean-burning coal plants and the plentiful global supply of coal. My chief concern here is for the criminal neglect of safety among coal mine operators in the US, apparent from the film "Harlan County USA" available here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pa80stR7U0&feature=related(You see, most American hippies derive from the middle class, whereas I'm a working class boy, which I believe makes a difference.)
And I can definitely sympathize with your life story, as my family moved out of my neighborhood in Milwaukee in 1972, and, in the ten years following that move, every single housewife in that neighborhood died of cancer. My own mother didn't (she died of an obviously genetically caused disease decades later), so whatever was buried beneath that neighborhood obviously didn't spring a leak until after my family moved out.