EDWARDS ONLY TOP DEM WHO OPPOSES NUCLEAR POWER

HUFFINGTON POST - On the brink of a nuclear power resurgence in America, the once-vilified industry is buoyed by a slate of presidential candidates who seem ready to embrace -- or at least consider -- a nuclear energy future. Already enjoying strong support in the White House, nuclear-fueled electricity is championed by all of the Republican front-runners. And, while the top contenders on the Democratic side cite serious concerns about safety, waste disposal and plant security, only former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina flatly opposes construction of new nuclear plants.

LA TIMES - Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) - all presidential candidates - support legislation that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and provide incentives to power companies to build more nuclear plants. Opponents of nuclear power say that because a terrorist attack on a plant could be catastrophic, it makes no sense to build more potential targets. And radioactive waste still has no permanent burial site, they say, despite officials' three decades of trying to find one.

JASON MARK, EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL - By the mid-1990s, it appeared that the U.S. nuclear industry was destined for a funeral. Federal officials had not licensed a new plant since 1973, and the last plant to come on line, Watts Bar in Tennessee, had taken 23 years to build. Memories of the 1979 Three Mile Island scare, combined with the long shadow of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, had the industry on the defensive. Public support for nuclear power was near an all-time low, with just 40 percent of respondents to an industry poll saying they were in favor of atomic energy. Major cost overruns in plant construction had made the industry unpopular on Wall Street.

Then the George W. Bush administration threw nuclear power a lifeline. Embedded in the 2005 Energy Bill was a provision granting the nuclear industry $13 billion in new tax credits and loan guarantees; $2 billion was set aside for the first utilities that filed applications for new plants. The subsidies allowed utilities, insurance companies, and investors to begin rethinking nuclear power's future.

The industry now had the money; what it needed was an argument. According to a 2005 ABC News survey, only one-third of Americans approved of "building more nuclear plants at this time." Nuclear proponents needed a way of convincing people that atomic energy deserved a second shot. Enter climate change. While nuclear power generation isn't entirely carbon neutral - uranium mining and enrichment require vast amounts of fossil fuel energy - atomic plants are cleaner from a carbon standpoint than natural gas or coal-fired power stations. Posing nuclear energy as a response to global warming seemed a useful way to reintroduce nuclear power to a public that hadn't been forced to think about it for years.

"If you're serious about carbon emissions, you have to be serious about nuclear power," says Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for Exelon Corp., a Chicago-based company that plans to apply for a license to build new reactors. "You can't meet carbon goals without nuclear power. It cannot be done. There is no other technology that can do what nuclear does: produce large amounts of electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no carbon emissions."

To help make this argument more compelling, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, gave public relations firm Hill & Knowlton an $8 million contract to reframe the issue in the media. The PR consultants manage the NEI's Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and enlisted former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman and Greenpeace cofounder (and corporate consultant) Patrick Moore to chair it. Hill & Knowlton helped Moore and Whitman disseminate opinion essays that ignited a torrent of other media stories.

Moore has been an especially effective voice for the nuclear industry. By highlighting his rabble-rousing days with Greenpeace, Moore has portrayed his embrace of nuclear power as a road-to-Damascus-style conversion. "Yes, I was an opponent of nuclear energy all through my Greenpeace years," Moore says. "But when I do the math, it's very clear to me that renewables can't do the job themselves, and that's why nuclear has to be part of the mix. . . . As an environmentalist, I choose nuclear."

Moore's pretensions to high-mindedness may be disingenuous; he is, after all, a paid flack for the nuclear industry. And - as his public support of pesticide spraying, genetically modified organisms, and logging make clear - he is a long way from his Rainbow Warrior days. Some in the environmental community have labeled Moore an "eco-Judas," to which he responds that no one has a right "to define who is and who is not an environmentalist."

Regardless of Moore's green credentials, his carefully calculated stumping in favor of nuclear power has helped shift discussion on the issue. Twenty-five years ago, the buzzwords in the nuclear debate were safety and sustainability; today they are coal and carbon.

That, at least, is how Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog founder, sees it. While Moore's support of nuclear energy seems like little more than sophisticated greenwashing, it's more difficult to dismiss Brand's carefully considered arguments.

"Some people have said it's nuclear versus renewables or it's nuclear versus conservation," Brand says. "But it's the [electricity] grid we are talking about, so it's nuclear versus coal. Across the board, comparing the problems of spent nuclear fuel and spent coal fuel, it's 1,000 or 100 to 1, in terms of nuclear being more safe. . . . Climate change is the worst thing that can happen to biodiversity. It puts the environmental movement in a different situation. It changes priorities. Suddenly, worrying about radiation 6,000 years from now goes down the list."

A chorus of pundits, among them New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, have said that it's time to expand nuclear power production to head off carbon emissions. Some members of Congress are rethinking their positions. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, long a skeptic of nuclear energy, appears to be shifting. She recently said in a statement that "if we can be assured that new technologies help to produce nuclear energy safely and cleanly, then I think we have to take a look at it." Al Gore says nuclear energy should be a "small part" of the climate solution.