This post represents the worst aspects of the environment industry. He's not just all hat, he advocates all hat, marketing environmentalism as nothing more than marketing, arguing that results don't matter and that image is everything. With the right metaphors anything can be sold. If we all holds hands and concentrate we can levitate the Pentagon... or not, but the point is just to hold hands anyway. Pointless poser.

As more and more serious thinkers in many nations around the world consider realistic options for reducing the use of fossil fuels, nuclear power is mentioned increasingly often as the only technology we have that can provide enough power at a fast enough rate to deflect the trajectory of climate change predicted by the models on which the whole issue is based.

Maybe the models are wrong. Maybe we don't have even a rudimentary grasp of the issues and the models are merely exercises in modelling. Perhaps we can muddle through on fossil fuels until immature technologies such as solar become viable for large scale use, even given their inherent flaws with intermittence. Maybe. There's no shortage of fossil fuels given the vast deposits of oil shale and oil sand as well as coal aplenty and clathrates. Maybe we can do this all cleanly, capturing every bit of exhaust and disposing of it in some secure manner. Maybe.

A large percentage of world power comes from nuclear sources today. Many European countries and Japan as well as the US generate significant amounts of electricity this way, and have done so for decades with fewer adverse consequences in all that time to lives and property than a single year of coal mining. Less radiation is emitted than is spewed from the stacks of fossil fuel plants. You get less radiation living next door to a nuclear plant than you do flying cross country at 35K feet.

Fear of nuclear is the result of a marketing program rather than a sober consideration of the facts or insightful risk analysis. It isn't that the use of nuclear power is risk free, it is that the risks are less than possible alternatives. Fantasy alternatives exist in marketing brochures, but here and now the alternative is fossil fuel.

Nuclear is cheap but made expensive by thickets of red tape intended to discourage its use. It's not that plans and sites do not require close scrutiny to avoid mistaken construction and siting, it's that this is merely an excuse to bleed developers of funds and lengthen the permitting process in an attempt to wreck their business plans and force them to choose fossil fuel alternatives.

Consider this collection of marketing hype.

Clean energy advocates argue nuclear power presents the wrong answer for a bunch of reasons: it spews out radioactive waste which will be with us for a longer time than human beings have been farming;

Well, no it won't. Radiation diminishes over time so that very little remains for long. It is still detectable for a long time but radiation levels fall to low levels that we can detect with good equipment. More importantly, we will not remain at this technological level any more than those early farmers of 10,000 years ago did. Just 100 years ago we used beasts of burden for the majority of our transportation, and 100 years from now this whole energy issue will seem quaintly anachronistic, our fears and puzzles trivial.

We only need to manage the next few decades with existing technologies as it is incomprehensible that we will not progress greatly in that time as we have in the past few decades, at an increasing rate. The attempt to portray this as a 10,000 year problem is intellectually bankrupt, ethically impoverished and aesthetically a very drab shade of brown that only a few would confuse for green.

with the need to mine uranium, build the plants themselves and build storage facilities, there are questions as to both how much nuclear power can be brought online how quickly and how much CO2 will actually be saved;

Every type of construction requires mining, building and storage. In the next 50 years world power demand will triple. A lot of building is in progress now and will continue for decades no matter what energy system is used. This is just more obfuscation, sloppy thinking and marketing hype. No sale.

nuclear is actually already more expensive that windpower, when subsidies are removed;

Do we get to remove the wasteful and expensive road blocks too? A level playing field would do wonders for cost reduction. More importantly this is an apples and oranges comparision - comparing old nuclear facilities with proposed alternative power facilities - since emerging nuclear facility designs such as pebble-bed reactors are very much cheaper as well as being inherently safe.

the nuclear industry is, based on its record, one of the least trustworthy business groups around;

Nonsense. This is a total fabrication that makes no sense at any level. It's pure, mean-spirited FUD that seeks to exploit the basest motives and abject ignorance of a vulnerable audience.

and nuclear power -- as we're seeing with concerns in Iran -- is tied at the hip to nuclear weapons.

No, it isn't, as Japan has proved to the world. The ability to refine and concentrate fissionable materials is required for both nuclear power and weapons, and power plants create the more desirable materials for bombs in small quantities that can be concentrated by further processing, but equating them makes no more sense than equating fertilizer and TNT. Yes, there have been fertilizer bombs exploded in anger as well as ignorance, and people have used bicycles to attack their enemies and stuffed animal toys to smother babies. We are ingenious in our selection and use of weapons but this is no justification for banning either tools or toys.

"This preservation of the [nuclear] status quo denies America the opportunity of a century: A chance to build an “innovation economy” that delivers not only energy independence but a booming era of growth—growth in large part made possible by transforming our energy infrastructure.

Rubbish. The evolution of nuclear power, both fission and fusion, is one of the most fertile paths to innovation open to us in coming decades. Emerging techniques such as the use of helium-3, rare on the earth but abundant on the moon, suggests an interplanetary future with all of the possibilities for space based innovation in manufacturing and basic research outside the gravity well with abundant energy, easily funded by supplying earth with these materials for its own energy needs. Miniaturization, already here with micro-nuke fission plants, opens distributed and mobile power possibilities. It's not the only path to innovation but it certainly is an attractive one able to achieve every stated goal of competing energy generation methods and many more in addition.

We need an intellectually honest and open public evaluation of these issues free of the demagoguery and marketing hype of posers peddling their drab wares. Those who are truly concerned with environmental remediation and preservation, including climate management, as well as the requirements of a rapidly growing and developing world population that those with democratic and egalitarian values seek to help achieve humane levels of material well being, and so integrate them into the social mind at long last, need to speak out against these hustlers and charlatans pushing their drab wares on the world. They are not green, they are a grayish brown color - lifeless, cold and barren.

Update:

See this post and this post at Knowledge Problem for more commentary and pointers from someone who thinks about energy for a living.