Global warming makes strange bedfellows.

Thirty years ago, the U.S. nuclear industry was a victim of junk science. Media and green fear-mongering in the wake of Three Mile Island led Americans to believe nuclear energy was unsafe, could cause a “China syndrome,” and even a nuclear holocaust (a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Herblock of the Washington Post in 1979 showed a mushroom cloud emerging from a TMI cooling tower). As a result, nuclear energy was shunned and not a single power plant has been built in the U.S. since.

But now, as the same media and green fear-mongers attempt to destroy the coal industry for causing global warming, killer hurricanes, and coastal flooding, the nuclear industry has jumped aboard the junk-science bandwagon.

The industry’s trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute has launched a public-relations campaign exploiting the current political climate and urging Americans to go nuclear in order to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming. “Any credible program to address climate change must include carbon-free technologies such as nuclear energy,” reads NEI literature now being disseminated to media outlets and state capitols around the country.

Yet, even with federal loan guarantee subsidies, nuclear power still suffers from cost problems. Nuclear fuel costs are cheaper than coal — and more stable than natural gas — but the costs of building a nuke are astronomical. Building a new plant today costs upwards of $6,000 per kW while coal comes in at $2,100 per kW. That means a new, 1350 kW nuclear plant planned in Houston, for example, is estimated to cost $10 billion versus $3 billion for a similar-size coal facility.

Yet NEI spokespersons deny that nuclear is more expensive. Why? Because they are banking on huge carbon taxes (some estimate the cost would have to be $60 a ton of CO2) to drive up the costs of coal.

On Page 13 of its “Nuclear Energy: Just the Facts” handbook extolling the virtues of nuclear energy, NEI still feels the need to add a chapter entitled “Background on the Accident at Three Mile Island” to dispel the myths that nuclear power has caused widespread injuries and death due to radiation.

Then the report gets right back to spreading the myths of coal power and global warming.