An Inconvenient Truth: Gore doesn't even say the word "nuclear"

I saw An Inconvenient Truth on Sunday. It's great, and you should see it if you haven't already. Gore engagingly (yes, engagingly) surveys the latest research on climate change, research that has made a lot of progress since the last time I studied it, about ten years ago. I think the biggest impact of the film (I hope, at least) is that journalists will realize that they no longer have to "balance" their coverage by citing the fringe pseudo-scientists who question the overwhelming scientific consensus. Gore very effectively demonstrates that there is absolutely no credible difference of opinion about the facts of global warming.

Anyhow, what I was really struck by was the fact that Gore didn't once mention nuclear power. Since it's largely how so many European and other nations have reduced their carbon emissions, it seems odd and conspicuous that he ignored it.

Perhaps he thought a discussion about nuclear power would be too complicated (he has, after all, given this lecture hundreds or thousands of times over the years), but it seems like a lost opportunity. He had an audience of engaged people who might still think of nuclear technology from the 80s as the standard, who hear "nuclear power" and think either "Chernobyl" or "Homer Simpson." He had an opportunity to change the debate about nuclear power, and he skipped it. I wonder why.

UPDATE:

Environmental journalist David Roberts explains why in the comments below: nuclear power is just a bad idea. For one thing, it could only be used on a small scale, for various reasons elaborated in this excellent article (basically, we would quickly run out of uranium and the alternatives to uranium just wouldn't work on a large scale).

Apparently, as Gore himself explained in this interview with Roberts in May, "There are serious problems [with nuclear power] that have to be solved, and they are not limited to the long-term waste-storage issue and the vulnerability-to-terrorist-attack issue. Let's assume for the sake of argument that both of those problems can be solved. We still have other issues. For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal -- which is the real issue: coal -- then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale."

So now my only gripe with Gore's omission of the word nuclear is that if I was under the impression that nuclear power is a viable solution to global warming, then a lot of other well-intentioned people probably are, too, so it would have been worth debunking that myth while he had our attention.