Could God have created a radioactive-free world?

Those who believe him omnipotent would certainly say so. And those who don't believe him to exist would certainly say that he had nothing to do with it. Regardless of my own personal stance, there is room for both beliefs, I think.

This article touches on religion and nuclear power (sorta) and so it touches on two topics of endless interest to me. As a disclaimer, I generally like Slate.com, question the existence of God in a Buddhist "we can't know" kind of way, and support nuclear power. I believe there there are certainly good questions about God. This is not one of them:

Those who believe that suffering and evil can be explained, even justified, by the fact that man has free will and thus the ability to choose evil (the "blame-it-on-the victim" school of theodicy) and argue that courage and goodness would not mean anything if mankind did not have that free choice, still have to answer the question: Is this really the best of all possible worlds? Couldn't God have made it a little better? A little less suffering, fewer of those earthquakes, say, a slightly smaller number of childhood cancers, a little less heartlessness, a little more humanity in human nature? Whenever I hear people echo Voltaire's mocking (in Candide) of Leibniz's assertion this is "the best of all possible worlds," I hear Leibniz with a different, sardonic, anti-Candide questioning tone: "This, THIS is the best of all possible worlds?" This is the
best you could do, God, Mr. Big Shot burning-bush guy?

Asking questions like "couldn't God have made it a little better" begs the question. And while we are at it, couldn't he have made it a little worse? It's a juvenile argument, as far as I'm concerned. It really adds nothing to the conversation. If you think God is silly (as the author appears to), you should consider how silly discussing whether or not he could have created a "little better" world is really dumb. Even allowing that the author concedes the existence of God for this discussion, the discussion itself is entirely myth-based and unknowable.

"Could God have created a "little better" world by not including radioactivity" strikes me as a smoke-filled dorm-room/freshman philosophy question.