Exelon, with a major presence in Illinois, was an early backer of President Barack Obama's. "Barack has one of his biggest supporters in terms of funding, the Exelon Corporation, which has spent millions of dollars trying to make Yucca Mountain the waste depository," then-rival Sen. Hillary Clinton noted in a debate in January 2008 in Nevada, a charge PolitiFact deemed "mostly true," noting that in fact Obama, like Clinton, did not in fact support the Yucca Mountain project.

Last week, the company announced it was shedding 500 jobs, blaming the sagging economy and saying it hoped to trim $350 million in operating costs.

"While we do stand to make money when carbon legislation goes into effect, we've been advocating hard for allocation of free allowances to local utilities," Exelon spokeswoman Kathleen Cantillon said in an interview. Allocating free allowances to utilities wouldn't directly benefit Exelon, said Cantillon, but the company backs them out of concern that prices would rise too quickly otherwise, undermine support for the law and perhaps facilitate a repeal.

Nuclear power is among the lowest carbon-emitting sources of energy, which helps to explain Exelon's enthusiastic embrace of a carbon cap.

I, personally, like the idea of the Waxman-Markey bill, but only like a duck would be satisfied with a half loaf of bread. The bill has been butchered, but it's a baby step in the right direction.

With that said, please look at the last sentence in that quoted piece above. Once again, the "carbon neutral" attitude is taken, and it's taken straight from the nuclear industry's play book. When a nuclear power story comes out with a statement that this industry is "among the lowest carbon-emitting sources of energy," then the writer has divorced the nuclear power industry from the one thing that fuels it - uranium.

Uranium mining and milling makes nuclear power one of the most carbon-intensive industries available.