Recently, physicist James McKensie and his colleagues at the World Resources Institute decided to hold a conference on nuclear energy.
This didn't seem like an unusual thing -- the group often hosts conferences on energy sources, and it thought that talking about nuclear power would be a good idea, considering it accounts for 20 percent of electricity in America.
So the WRI made the preparations. It put out a notice soliciting scientific papers on nuclear energy, and it started looking for sponsors.
"And we couldn't find anybody," McKensie said. "We had to scrap the conference."
This anecdote summarized the view of nuclear energy that's been pervasive in America for many years -- it's old-tech, people said. It's dirty and dangerous, and nobody is interested in going back to that. But that view might be changing, at least since the Bush administration and the nuclear industry have recently been calling nuclear power a "green" source of energy.
In a policy speech delivered last Monday, for example, Vice President Cheney said that nuclear power is one of "the cleanest methods of power generation that we know."
He emphasized that nuclear plants do not produce greenhouse gases, which scientists believe contribute to the warming of the planet.
"If we're serious about environmental protection, then we must seriously question the wisdom of backing away from what is, as a matter of record, a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source," Cheney said.
Predictably, the nuclear energy industry welcomed this view, saying that nuclear power has for too long been ignored as a "clean" way to power the country.
"We're very optimistic at what's been said so far," said Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry trade and lobbying group. "Some of the legislation looks very promising."
And with all this newfound good feeling surrounding nuclear power, Singer said that many in the nuclear industry are convinced they can get a new U.S. nuclear plant online within the next decade -- which would be a considerable accomplishment, considering that the last time that occurred was in 1986.
The debate over nuclear power is marked by passion; if there's one thing that opponents have in common with proponents, it's that they both hold to their views as tightly as a uranium atom holds its protons.
Those in favor of increased nuclear power say opponents are driven by fear -- fear of a repeat of past accidents and fear of nuclear waste. But Cheney and the NEI paint an increased reliance on nuclear power as simply one aspect of a rational, common-sense energy policy.
The first advantage of nuclear power, said Singer, is cost. "The rising price of natural gas has dramatically increased electricity costs in America. The price of nuclear fuel is very stable -- nuclear offers forward-market stability," he said.
Singer said that the fuel costs of nuclear energy -- the cost of the uranium and other compounds that produce the electricity -- is only 1.83 cents per megawatt hour, which is lower than any other fuel.
But opponents say there's a bigger cost to nuclear energy than the price of the fuel. The WRI's McKensie, for example, pointed to the price of building and maintaining a nuclear plant. "It's much cheaper to build natural gas turbines," he said, "and those don't take years to build."
And then there are the environmental costs. Opponents of nuclear power say that while nuclear plants produce no emissions, they significantly damage the areas in which they are situated, and they produce radioactive waste that we still don't know how to dispose of.
"For every unit of energy produced in a nuclear plant, there are two units dissipated as heat," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nuclear plants must consequently take in vast quantities of water from their immediate surroundings, "and this devastates all the aquatic life around the plant."
"And of course," Lochbaum added, "there's a lot of radioactive waste. So to say that this is a green technology is true, as green is the color of money."
When representatives of the nuclear industry hear such comments, they dismiss them as fear-mongering. "The problem is that you have a lot of virulent, extremist environmental groups out there," said the NEI's Singer. "They're not only against nuclear. They're against anything. It's not only NIMBY -- it's BANANA."
Singer was referring to the anti-power plant acronyms that have recently been in vogue in California: NIMBY is "not in my backyard," and BANANA is "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything."
"The fact is, when it comes to the environment, there are no consequences of nuclear plants -- no carbon gases, no sulfur dioxides. And the nuclear wastes -- every bit of it has been accounted for, and the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain (in Nevada) will be a viable place to store it. So that's a waste, but it's not a pollutant."
He added that "communities that are situated around nuclear plants are the ones that most love it. You should see these places. They're like nature preserves."
Obviously, there is a vast disconnect between both sides of the debate over nuclear power, and the final decision over whether new nuclear plants are built in the United States may come down to public opinion.
For many years -- ever since the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and with the release of movies like The China Syndrome -- the public's opposition to nuclear power was predicated on the assumption that it is dirty and unsafe.
But given the rising cost and scarcity of electricity, Americans seem to be taking a new look at nuclear power. An Associated Press survey released in April showed that 50 percent of Americans support nuclear power, half of whom wouldn't mind having a plant built within 10 miles of their homes.
