Have you read Steve Milloy's book Green Hell? He makes the case, and I think it's a good one, that environmentalists want electricity to be expensive as much as they want it to be clean. (They never talk about the former because it would make them extremely unpopular.) The reason is because as long as we have cheap electricity, we will use it to generally raise our standard of living and consume still more natural resources. This is why, while they may pay lip service to nuclear's non-carbon property, they really need to fight it because it also has the potential to be cheap.

Missouri, where I live, passed a law recently that requires some percentage of the state's electricity to be generated by various "clean" methods - excluding, of course, nuclear. It's especially ironic, because nuclear's low physical footprint means it may actually be a "greener" source of power than wind or solar.