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The truth is that nuclear power could help slow global warming if there were a concerted international effort to replace coal plants with reactors. Critics are right to challenge the industry's more self-serving forecasts, but nuclear power is a proven technology that can reliably produce large quantities of energy without contributing to climate change. That said, the effort and expense required to expand nuclear power to the point at which it substantially reduced the growth of carbon emissions would be enormous--and worthwhile only if we could control the accompanying proliferation threat.
That means limiting the spread of enrichment and reprocessing facilities even as the demand for nuclear fuel increases. Essentially, we would need to deny states the opportunity to develop such facilities, regardless of whether they were doing so for purely commercial purposes (like Australia) or for malicious ones (like Iran). Unfortunately, the current international regime doesn't give the International Atomic Energy Agency anything close to that kind of power. Indeed, according to its institutional mandate, the iaea cannot refuse nuclear assistance to states that are complying with the Nonproliferation Treaty.
One answer, albeit an ambitious one, would be to require all states to forgo uranium enrichment and reprocessing. That is, ownership and operation of existing facilities--whether held by private, quasi-private, or government entities--would be transferred either to the iaea or to a new institution, and the facilities themselves would be granted extraterritorial status, like the U.N. headquarters in New York. A moratorium would be placed on new reprocessing facilities, and any new enrichment plants that were built to meet growing fuel demand would have to be internationally controlled.
