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"Nations have gathered at the United Nations in New York to review the 40-year old Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which spells out commitments for halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In addition to supporting efforts to halt further weapons production, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has enlisted regional support in proposing that the meeting also show international recognition of testing impacts. Speaking before the NPT plenary meeting last Thursday, RMI UN Ambassador Phillip Muller told the Parties to the NPT agreement that the 67 nuclear tests conducted in RMI took place with UN approval through two UN resolutions, passed in 1954 and 1956, after the UN rejected petitions by traditional Marshallese leaders. Nations have gathered at the United Nations in New York to review the 40-year old Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which spells out commitments for halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In addition to supporting efforts to halt further weapons production, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has enlisted regional support in proposing that the meeting also show international recognition of testing impacts. "

PETER A. BRADFORD, adjunct professor, Vermont Law School, and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: * For an even-handed recent overview of most nuclear power issues, see "Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding," a June 2007 report by the Keystone Center, a non-profit organization that brought together a cross section of parties interested in nuclear energy - including environmentalists and consumer advocates, industry representatives and government officials - to create a base of agreed-upon knowledge about the costs, risks and benefits of nuclear power. www.keystone.org/spp/documents/FinalReport_NJFF6_12_2007(1).pdf * For a responsibly skeptical look at nuclear power's rapidly rising costs in comparison to available low carbon alternatives, see "The Nuclear Illusion" by Amory Lovins and Imram Sheikh in the November 2008 Ambio, the Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. https://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf The Journal Report * See the complete Energy report. * The Web site of the Nonproliferation Education Center, maintained by WSJ op-ed contributor Henry Sokolski, features an ongoing collection of thoughtful conservative pieces skeptical of nuclear power. http://www.npec-web.org/ * For an excellent short critique of reprocessing and the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, see Victor Gilinsky and Alison Macfarlane's Minority Opinion from the National Academy of Science's Review of DoE's Nuclear Research and Development Program, http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11998&page=73 * For an even-handed look at how nuclear construction went astray in the U.S. in the 1970s, the best book remains "Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved, Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian. * Another good overview text is Megawatts and Megatons, Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak.

Amory Lovins is on the warpath against nuclear power, battling the industry PR push that says nuclear is a viable climate solution. He's got a new report, co-authored with Imran Sheikh, called "The Nuclear Illusion" [PDF]. Spinning off from that report are a Newsweek article called "Missing the Market Meltdown" and an article on the RMI site called "Forget Nuclear."

Nuclear power, we're told, is a vibrant industry that's dramatically reviving because it's proven, necessary, competitive, reliable, safe, secure, widely used, increasingly popular, and carbon-free-a perfect replacement for carbon-spewing coal power. New nuclear plants thus sound vital for climate protection, energy security, and powering a growing economy.

nlike oil and gas extraction, pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact. The Environmental Protection Agency in a filing on Monday noted that hard-rock mining has impacted 40 percent of all western watersheds and that nationwide 28 percent of the toxic pollution generated in the United States comes from the mining industry -- the most of any sector. The EPA also concluded mining represents a major taxpayer burden because of cleanup costs.