That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root cause: The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of

That's the proximate cause, but you need to go back one level to the root cause: The environmental movement of today is a political alliance between a group of essentially science-oriented types who see a looming problem and want to solve it most efficiently, and an essentially anti-scientific group who have a philosophical objection to aspects of modernity that they see as being opposed to a desirable state of nature. This alliance happened more than a generation ago, and like most close political alliances, it has resulted in a lot of cross-pollination of ideas from the two camps. So now you'll see people who are fundamentally anti-science use scientific arguments on, say, climate change. But nuclear power, GMO food crops, and geoengineering are none-the-less dead issues for the modern environmental movement because about half of that movement is not interested in the science of whether or not those things are on balance good: they are ultimate expressions of the un-natural modernity that that half of the movement wants to get rid of. They aren't being irrational, and they aren't just waiting to hear the right argument for why nuclear power is less likely to provoke a catastrophe that will lead to the loss of human life than the status quo. They are opposed to nuclear power per se, for what it inherently is, not for the specific effects it will have on humans or particular animals or anything. This isn't going to change unless the current big tent breaks up, and it's not clear that, like, scientific environmentalism has enough political clout to pass any part of its agenda if the current tent does break up. Edit: To make it more explicit, there are people within the environmental movement who prefer solar and wind power to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels to nuclear, not because they believe that the damage to current living things goes renewable < fossil < nuclear, but rather because the sun and the wind go on around us all the time even in a state of pure nature, and we're just redirecting the energy a little with windmills and solar cells, whereas fossil fuels are in a state of nature sitting around underground and should remain there, but at least they are in and of themselves natural objects, whereas nuclear power creates isotopes and elements that simply do not exist in any measurable quantity in a state of nature. It's about being as close as possible to that state of nature, not about the harm to humans or animals that nuclear waste does versus the harm that fossil fuel waste does.