The Lieberman aide is stating the obvious -- any carbon constraint bill is going to be an incentive for nuclear because nuclear power, for all its major flaws, is low-carbon. In fact, if you read the full article, the aide is arguing against adding even more nuclear incentives as Sen. McCain wants to do.

Attack Lieberman-Warner all you want, but pulling stuff out of context to do it? Major party foul.

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This my usual goals vs. paths rant, but suffice to say that the history of legislation that tries to craft exceptions to itself is decidedly poor.  (After all, as soon as you exempt nuke, you open the door to excepting all sorts of other things).  Witness RPS rules for a great example of what a clusterf*&k these things quickly become, as renewability gets tied up into criteria pollutant issues (so biomass is never quite as loved as solar), ancillary environmental consequences (big vs. small hydro), etc.  But the examples are far from limited to energy & environmental rules (witness any public school trying to figure out whether % of students going to colleges trump test scores trump free lunch programs trump desegregation concerns).  

Bottom line: define the rule and get out of the way.  Not just because it's better policy, but because it makes it more likely to get something done.  I met with several senators 6 months ago, talking with them specifically about the importance of going to output-based standards in carbon legislation, and their immediate response was "but wouldn't that create benefits for the nuclear industry"?  (Read: doing something right for carbon is hard precisely because of the pressure to bundle a bunch of other ideas into the regulation.)  I say who cares?  Isn't the purpose of carbon cap & trade to reduce the freaking carbon emissions? Deal with nuke externalities elsewhere - but don't defer good carbon policy just because we can't figure out how to glue unrelated concerns onto the same legislation.