The nuclear industry, for years a target of environmentalists, now is talking green.
With growing concerns about the reliance on fossil fuels that affect everything from meeting new smog regulations to global warming, the industry is playing a new card: environmentalism.That pitch has not escaped some environmental activists who consider nuclear power - and its piles of deadly radioactive waste - as much a threat to the planet as global warming or polluted air.
"All this means is you're replacing one serious environmental problem with another," scoffs Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club. He compares increasing nuclear power to deal with global warming to "giving up smoking while taking up crack."
Even so, nuclear reactors, which account for 22 percent of the electricity generated in this country, do not pollute the air with smog-causing chemicals or release greenhouse gases as do those burning coal, oil or even natural gas.
"The United States can't meet President Clinton's goals on global warming without expansion of nuclear," maintains Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group.
He cites these statistics: America's 110 nuclear reactors last year prevented the burning of 268 million tons of coal, 62 million barrels of oil and 983 billion cubic feet of natural gas. That has kept 147 million tons of carbon dioxide from getting into the atmosphere - not to mention tons of sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen that cause smog.
But critics counter that at the same time the reactors produced 2,000 tons of waste as spent fuel rods that will remain highly radioactive for thousands of years. More than 30,000 tons of waste now sit at reactor sites, an amount expected to double by 2010.
"You can't address global warming by spreading nuclear waste all over the world," argues Jim Riccio of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project.
But others outside the nuclear industry contend that nuclear cannot be so easily dismissed when addressing global warming or meeting more stringent air pollution standards announced recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Paul Portney, an analyst for Resources for the Future, says he is not necessarily pro-nuclear, but adds: "To have a vigorous national debate about these two issues without at the same time debating the role that nuclear power should play is disingenuous."