AlterNet: Environment: Is Fear About Climate Change Causing a...

The case for Dominion as a friend of the Earth is based on a few simple facts: It generates 45 percent of Connecticut's electricity and 30 percent of Virginia's without taking a huge toll in smokestack-emitted global warming gas.

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Nuclear advocates will be the first to tell you that their U.S. plants avoid the emission of almost 700 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Worldwide, it's two billion metric tons. Given this reality, some prominent environmentalists have signaled a cautious détente with the nuclear power industry.

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As worldwide emissions soar, people wait for a white knight. Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote recently, "We Americans want it all: endless and secure energy supplies; low prices; no pollution; less global warming; no new power plants (or oil and gas drilling, either) near people or pristine places. This is a wonderful wish list, whose only shortcoming is the minor inconvenience of massive inconsistency."

Growing awareness of this inconsistency makes it difficult to dismiss the technology out of hand.

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A Standard and Poor's report last year priced nuclear at $1,500 per kilowatt -- twice the cost of a new coal plant. And cost overruns, it said, "are highly probable." The base price for a plant is $3 billion today.

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