U.S. Liberals on Nuclear: "It’s Complicated."

Conservatives have long alleged that liberals and environmentalists have knee-jerk negative views of nuclear power, and twist science to support this prior ideological commitment. Indeed, they're making the allegation right now. Expecting as much, I hazarded a few weeks back that Fukushima might be a test case for whether a leftwing tendency to reject nuclear power based on an overblown sense of its risks is really a problem in the present. It's certainly true that since then, we have since seen a lot of anxiety and fear--much of it whipped up by the media, which in its frantic coverage has imparted a very skewed perception of the dread-to-risk ratio in the current case. By far the worst display of this phenomenon was Nancy Grace. It's also true that many liberals who opposed nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s seem to be reliving much of that era. And there has ...