...all factors considered
Except that you haven't come close to considering all factors. Once again, another advocate for nuclear power conveniently disregards the pesky problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste in making the claim that nuclear is 'the cleanest form of energy'. This a huge problem that has yet to be solved, and until it is, there will remain many tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods littering our landscape for thousands of years to come. This one issue pretty much shoots down every one of your arguments for 'clean' nuclear power, including your 'small footprint' claim. How many acres of land are we now using to store this stuff, and how many more acres will we need?

Astrophysicist Dr. Louis Frank first proposed the existence of small dark comets in 1986. In 1990 he wrote 'The Big Splash' where he theorized that most of the Earth's oceanic water, and probably life itself, resulted from small comets that enter the atmosphere at the rate of more than 20 per minute. It's an intriguing read that needs to be taken with many large grains of salt. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed for his theory and these days he doesn't talk much about it anymore. His current profile at the University of Iowa makes no mention of his dark comet research.

The guy is no lightweight. He worked with James Van Allen and co-wrote with him several papers describing what we now know as the Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth. Is he about to be vindicated?

speaking of stupidity...any instructor of software development that still doesn't know about the GPL should probably NOT be teaching software development. this is a person who doesn't care enough about the subject to stay abreast of the latest in her field, and the GPL is by no means a late-breaking development. the GPL and open source in general is such a hot topic these days that there is absolutely no excuse for her ignorance. unfortunately, this only underscores the difficulty you will have convincing your school to invest in Linux. BTW, for those who insist that Linux is harder to install than Windows: i installed Mandrake 7 over the weekend. the install detected and installed drivers for both NICs and had me connected to the Internet to download crypto packages before the install was even finished. exactly one reboot later my network was up and running, my SB Live! was working, and I was printing. one reboot. period.