FOOD
Food in America has pesticides. Without them, we would have terrible products filled with bacteria and such. We love the way they kill all those pests that get on our corn. However, these things, designed to kill, do so without aim. The classic example is DDT, which caused many defects in predators at the top of a food chain. Chemicals like it are persistent pollutants, that either do not degrade easily or are really hazardous. How hazardous? Well lets just say that organophosphate compounds which America now uses frequently because they are not persistent, were originally used as nerve agents. (Used in WWI.) These traits make them rather nasty things to be placing all over our food.
There has been a solution to this however, actually since the 1930's, which is to irradiate food. This process, which uses radiation to kill bacteria and pests, does not have the problems of creating pollutants or toxic substances like pesticides. The big problem with it, is that any company that has to perform such decontamination must label their food irradiated. Most people are freaked out by anything to do with radiation, but it's this fear that is completely unfounded. When a food is processed by irradiation, it is simply passed by a source of high energy particles. This is most commonly X-rays, as they pass through most materials readily. These high energy particles hit off electrons from atoms in a molecule, causing it to become charged, which for living things is a bad occurrence. Commonly the organisms DNA is disrupted, their body no longer functions properly, and they die. (Basically major skin cancer.) The good thing here is that radiation does not damage things that are already dead, like food. It does not produce harmful chemicals, as it is not actually adding anything to the food. (Passing something by a radiative source does not make it radioactive.) Another plus, is that a radioactive source is a relatively easy thing to deal with, you don't even have to produce a large amount of chemicals for it to do it's job, which would save us money.
ENERGY
Most people hate nuclear power plants. Why, I'm not sure, maybe lots of people have an image of a nuclear explosion going off. (Which really have nothing to do with power plants.) Boom = Nuclear = Bad.
Sound Logical? HELL NO, THIS IS AMERICA!
We prefer dumping 5,389,59 tons (as of 2006.) of sulfur dioxide into the air than producing 2580 tons (Estimated waste to produce the same amount of energy as the coal plants in 2006.) of Radioactive materials. Granted that radioactive materials may seem bad but much of it can be reprocessed to produce more fuel, removing contaminants. Even the contaminants could have some use, if we weren't so desperate to never use them, ever. In short were producing over 200 times more waste (in just sulfur dioxide, there's other things coming out too.) than if we were using Nuclear power. Worse, this waste is very light compared to the heavy metals produced in a nuclear power plant, which corresponds to 191664203 m^3 Sulfur Dioxide to 122 m^3 of Radioactive waste. (Using above values and densities at room temp.) Or >1.5 million times more volume.
The sad thing is that we would go out of our way to produce other forms of energy, solar/hydro/wind/etc, which have been proven, from an engineering standpoint, to be far inferior to our current methods. Nuclear is the only solution that really has enough power to push over natural resources, but everyone just hates it for no reason.
There are other applications, but I'm feeling less angsty now.
In summary: I went on a rant because most people are idiots, or we need to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.
None.