Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just don’t understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when compared to other energy sources. What is is the problem with nuclear? Is it the cost of maintaining these power plants ?

Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No" criticality.

After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.

It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.

"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?

Well, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US and Soviet governments told a lot of lies about nuclear energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of the science on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn't actually available publicly, even today, only to people whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will lie if the government orders to.

So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.

I'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?