The study described in the web page accessible from the login-protected link (which is not the primary source) has been published on the Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ar... (protected too, but at least is the real thing).
Here the AMA news release about the results, sufficiently informative: http://media.jamanetwork.com/n...
While in principle you could be right, fact is that a country relying on nuclear energy like USA is the greatest producer of CO2 in the world (per capita). While Italy is not the best in this sense, still produces less than half (per capita) comparing to USA. So, it is difficult to directly relate nuclear energy usage to better environmental impact and global warming.
I'm one of those that voted against going back to nuclear (because we already closed our few plants years ago).
Progress is not a single, straight line in one direction. In particular, believing that your own direction is the only one is slightly arrogant. So is the original post.
There is room for research and development in many different technologies, and you should be glad someone other will try other ways, because differentiation is more productive than dependence on one single technology.
Since activating a new power source (whatever kind) needs enormous long-term investments, it is correct to ask taxpayers in which direction to invest. Here we have sun and wind, supposedly to last a little bit more than some year. We already have more than 5 Gwatts of solar plants (~ 5 nuclear plants), for which great investments have been made in the last years that is better to exploit even more.
Last, if in some parts of Italy (e.g., Naples) is hard to manage regular garbage, I prefer not to investigate our ability of managing nuclear debris.
A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation.
