In case you missed it, from John Tierney's Oct 6 piece...

Findings - Energy Lessons From the ’70s - Hard Power vs. Soft Power - NYTimes.com

“Even when greens give grudging support to nuclear power,” he says, “they add the caveat, ‘But first we have to make sure the plants are absolutely safe’ — as if reactors haven’t been operating safely for 25 years. Nobody recognizes the complete overhaul that has occurred in the industry or how it’s now pumping out twice as much electricity from the same plants with a vastly improved safety record.”

By scaring people about the tiny levels of radiation emitted during the normal operation of a nuclear plant, Mr. Tucker says, greens have effectively encouraged the construction of coal plants that actually release more radiation because of the traces of uranium in coal dust. He argues that the risks of terrorist attacks and nuclear waste have been exaggerated, particularly by the environmentalists who objected when the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste depository was being designed to guarantee a level of safety for only 10,000 years.

They successfully sued to enforce a safety standard extending one million years — which, in an ideal world, would be a very nice standard. But if you believe global warming is a planetary crisis that must be addressed immediately, should you really be obsessing about hypothetical dangers near one mountain in A.D. 1,000,000? If there’s already a proven technology that doesn’t spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why fiddle while coal burns?