[Earw0rm]

The opposition to nuclear waste hazards isn't so much about "now" as about the far future. Hot alpha emitters which stay that way for 2K, 10K, 100K years.

Granted, there's other stuff in deep mines and mountains whose chemical toxicity and carcinogenicity is perhaps the equal of plutonium's radioactivity (lead, asbestos, mercury) and whose harms are similarly subtle and hard for unsophisticated people to detect, but as an environmental pollutant it's worse if it gets out due to sheer persistency.

And also granted, where long-term views are a concern, CO2 is going to continue to screw things up for at least 200 years, maybe not 2000.

But most of the eco-folk have argued for energy efficiency, for not treating the planet like something we can just do whatever we want to. Unfortunately the trend is in the other direction, with capitalism demanding endless growth even when the gains are negligible. So people buy trucks even when the marginal utility over a compact car with 25% of the energy consumption is wafer-thin, and fly long-haul for almost no advantage over a short-haul trip.