The 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown this past week had me playing "How Would You Rather Die?" with a new and intriguing set of parameters. You know the game. We've all played it at one philosophical moment or another. I personally like to play just after an airplane takes off, at that lurching moment when the pilot tips the wings to set the appropriate course and it feels like we're about to fall back out of the sky.

"Okay," I think, "Dying in an airplane crash isn't so bad. Thirty seconds of sheer terror and then, wham, it's all over. Much better than, say, being tortured to death."

Yes, I decide, plane crash beats torture, hands down. By then, the plane has straightened out, the view is lovely and I, a little calmer, can settle down to a good book.

This past week, in honor of Chernobyl, I found myself playing the "How Would You Rather Die"game with these choices: thyroid cancer caused by a nuclear power plant meltdown? Or drowning in a category 5 hurricane?

My choices had been inspired by William Sweet's April 26 New York Times op-ed piece, "The Nuclear Option." Sweet is the author of Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy.

He was one of several pundits who seemed to have decided that the anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy might make a good "Rehabilitate Nuclear Power's Image Day." Oddly, global warming may just make this unlikely rehabilitation possible.

Yes, nuclear power plants cost billions of dollars to build. And yes, there is that pesky problem of used radioactive fuel and the possibility of meltdowns and terrorist attacks. But there are new technologies available that make nuclear power safer and cleaner than ever before. Most important, nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gasses.

To promote the "new nuclear energy," the industry is bankrolling the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, headed up by ex-Bush administration Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Todd Whitman and one of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore.

That a former Republican EPA chief (albeit one who, when she got a good look at President Bush's environmental policies, had enough integrity to quit) should turn up as the head of a pro-nuke group isn't so surprising. Moore's involvement, though, if all you know of his bio is that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, seems perplexing.

But sometime in the mid-'80s Moore had a falling out with the organization and an epiphany, he says, about "sustainable development." He founded Greenspirit Strategies, a business that, according to its website, "works with leading organizations in forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture, plastics and mining, developing sustainability messaging in the areas of natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change."

Someone who wanted to cut the good doctor a little slack might call him a "green marketer." Someone who wanted to be unkind (and there are many of these, from writers at Salon.com to his old Greenpeace colleagues) would call him a corporate shill trading on his long-dead association with the environmental movement.

A shame

Patrick Moore's gig these days involves talking-head appearances on various media outlets, lecturing at conferences and penning columns, all pitching nuclear power as the solution to global warming. His April 16 op-ed in the WashingtonPost, "Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case," was as much ballyhooed by conservative bloggers as it was reviled by their liberal brethren.

It's unfortunate, I think, that the Post didn't apparently do so much as a Google search on their guest writer.

I don't know how else to explain the appearance on its editorial pages of a piece written by a man who is paid by the nuclear power industry to green up its image. The Post's ombudsman is doubtless getting an earful.

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