There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green data centres...
Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at this?
Have you reverified recently?
I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing, geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to their datacenter.
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reig...
If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation.
So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean", and they will not be convinced otherwise.
The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on staff to maintain and operate.
Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely destroyed.
