At a time of soaring oil prices and increasing worries about global warming, even some of today’s leading environmentalists are touting nuclear power as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to traditional fossil fuels. Patrick Moore, the former co-founder of Greenpeace, and Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, were among the well-known enviros who ended up in the pro-nuclear corner.

Meanwhile, those worried that more reactors will result in more potential targets for terrorists and more toxic nuclear waste found their concerns dismissed. 

As a result, the pro-nuke crowd won as much as $5.7 billion in federal incentives for the creation new nuclear power plants in the Senate energy bill—the Energy Policy Act of 2005—passed last July 29th.

Although no nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since the near-disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979, energy utilities can now begin to queue up for their share of the federal largess to build their own plants.

The debate about just how dangerous nuclear energy really is, however, is far from over. Memories of the Soviet fiasco at Chernobyl may have faded for some but not all. Hundreds of people living within 10 miles of the nuclear plant at Clinton, Ill., lined up to get their radiation pills when the state made them available in 2002.

In fact, grave issues concerning safety, waste disposal, and security have yet to be solved by the nuclear industry—even as it uncorks champagne purchased on energy shortage fears. The government agency designed to protect us--the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—is all but inert and considered by many as an apologist and defender of the plant owners. 

Tests have raised serious doubts that on-site security forces are capable of protecting a nuclear plant from a determined terrorist attack. Many fault the commission for failing to remedy the deficiencies. 

Furthermore, most of the country’s 100+ nuclear utilities lack space to store spent fuel, and a Yucca Mountain federal dump in the deserts of Nevada is the target of an on-going legal and regulatory dispute that threatens its opening. What to do with nuclear waste, scattered across 39 states and having a "shelf life" of 10,000 years, remains one of the industry’s most vexing problems.

The month before the Senate’s folly, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) a Washington, D.C. watchdog group, released a study on the radioactive contamination of public areas around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southwest Washington State.

The GAP report found plutonium-tainted clams and pike minnows in the Columbia River and radiation in mulberry bushes, river mud, and deer and mouse scat. Radioactive dust was also found in the attic of a home that is miles away from the multibillion-dollar Hanford cleanup site.

Since its creation during World War II as the home of the planet’s first large nuclear reactor and source for atomic bomb materiel, the586-square-mile site has been the source of air-borne radiation and billions of gallons of waste dumped into the earth, with radioactive groundwater still leaching into the Columbia River.

It is estimated that it will cost some $60 billion and take thirty more years to clean up the site.

Gaylord Nelson was fond of quoting former President Dwight Eisenhower: ``As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.''

Panicked reactions in favor of nuclear energy as a replacement for a deliberate and wise energy policy focusing on alternative fuels and conservation form part of a plundering response that not only mortgages our grandchildren’s future, as well as their political and spiritual heritage. It also poisons them.

Edwin M. Andersen, a former Kenosha County supervisor, was a frequent critic of the dangers posed by the now-shuttered Zion, Ill., nuclear power plant. His son, “Mick” Andersen is a writer living along the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.