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Although very little happened, Nov. 24 was a red letter day for the nation’s nuclear power industry. No new nuclear reactors were purchased, no breakthrough in treating nuclear waste was announced, and the Obama administration did not declare that it would pay for new reactors.
Instead, the source of the industry’s happiness was The Washington Post leading Page One with an article that detailed how the environmental movement, after 40 years of bitter opposition, now concedes that nuclear power will play a role in averting further harm from global warming.
Mind you, not every environmental group has come around, but the feared and respected Natural Resources Defense Council has allowed that there is a place for nuclear power in the world’s generating mix and Stephen Tindale, a former anti-nuclear activist with Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom, has said, yes, we need nuclear.
For the nuclear industry which has felt itself vilified, constrained and damaged by the ceaseless and sometimes pathological opposition of the environmental movement, this changing attitude is manna from on high.
No matter that the environmentalists, in opposing nuclear since the late 1960s, have critically wounded the U.S. reactor industry and contributed to the construction of scores of coal and gas-fired plants that would not have been built without their opposition to nuclear.
In short, the environmental movement contributed in no small way to driving electric utilities to the carbon fuels they now are seeking to curtail.
Nuclear was such a target of the environmental movement that it embraced the “anything but nuclear” policy with abandon. Ergo its enthusiasm for all forms of alternative energy and its spreading of the belief —still popular in left-wing circles — that wind and solar power, with a strong dose of conservation, is all that is needed.
A third generation of environmental activists, who have been preoccupied with global climate change, have come to understand that a substantial amount of new electric generation is needed. Also some environmentalists are beginning to be concerned about the visual impact of wind turbines, not to mention their lethality to bats and birds.
Of all of the deleterious impacts of modern life on the Earth, it is reasonable to ask why the environmentalists went after nuclear power. And why they were opposed to nuclear power even before the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the catastrophic 1986 Chernobyl reactor failure in Ukraine. Those deserved pause, but the movement had already indicted the entire nuclear enterprise.
Having written about nuclear energy since 1969, I have come to believe that the environmental movement seized on nuclear first because it was an available target for legitimate anger that had spawned the movement in the ’60s. The licensing of nuclear power plants gave the protesters of the time one of the only opportunities to affect public policy in energy. They seized it; at first timorously, and then with gusto.
The escalation in environmental targets tells the story of how the movement grew in confidence and expertise; and how it added political allies, like Ralph Nader and Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.
The first target was simply the plants’ cooling water heating up rivers and estuaries. That was followed by wild extrapolations of the consequences of radiation (mutated children). Finally, it settled on the disposition of nuclear waste; that one stuck, and was a lever that turned public opinion easily. Just mention the 240,000-year half-life of plutonium without mentioning how, as an alpha-emitter, it is easily contained.
It is not that we do not need an environmental movement. We do. It is just that sometimes it gets things wrong.
In the days of the Atomic Energy Commission, the environmental groups complained that it was policeman, judge and jury. Indeed.
But environmental groups are guilty of defining environmental virtue and then policing it, even when the result is a grave distortion, as in the nuclear imbroglio. Being both the arbiter of environmental purity and the enforcer has cost the environment 40 years when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
I checked in on your environmentalist/nuclear piece-–a good one. The play that the Post gave that story truly was historic.
I’m as fascinated as you are about the history of the opposition to nuclear power. It’s amazing to look back at the first Earth Day, in 1970–you essentially can’t find any mention of nuclear power. The focus was autos and belching factories. Not long before that, the Sierra Club, Pete Seeger, Tom Haydn/SDS and other liberals had been promoting nuclear power. But the incipient movement didn’t know how to react to it.I’m convinced that the biggest impact was the scale-down of the Vietnam War. The anti-war movement needed another target. They discovered the ‘environment’, and Earth Day, but it was too unfocused, and not nearly emotional enough. But they soon realized that there were something like 100 big nuclear plants being licensed or built around the country, and they recognized a gift from the heavens: here was a technology that was not just about to consume all that land and water, and produce radiation, but that was integrally connected to the capitalistic industrial/defense complex, had a mushroom-cloud shadow hovering over it, and was made for hysterical reaction.
The smarter ones (especially Lovins) recognized that nuclear could fuel an economic boom that would lead to more production, consumption, population, all the things they opposed. He was honest enough to admit that if someone invented an energy source that was free and clean, he’d oppose it because of the great damage it would do in terms of economic growth. Nader was also attracted for reasons that went way beyond the environment or safety.
It’s all ancient history now, and largely irrelevant. Kids today (in their 30s, even) can’t imagine that nuclear power was once at the center of a national or international movement, bringing together activists from environmental, public health, ‘gray panthers,’ women’s rights, consumerists, labor, anti-capitalist, anti-war, economic conservatives(the most effective), rock musicians, Jane Fonda, civil rights, religious groups (remember the battles with the National Council of Churches?), Margaret Mead–and all that was before TMI.
There’s a good book in there somewhere, but nobody would care.
I checked in on your environmentalist/nuclear piece-–a good one. The play that the Post gave that story truly was historic.
I’m as fascinated as you are about the history of the opposition to nuclear power. It’s amazing to look back at the first Earth Day, in 1970–you essentially can’t find any mention of nuclear power. The focus was autos and belching factories. Not long before that, the Sierra Club, Pete Seeger, Tom Haydn/SDS and other liberals had been promoting nuclear power. But the incipient movement didn’t know how to react to it.I’m convinced that the biggest impact was the scale-down of the Vietnam War. The anti-war movement needed another target. They discovered the ‘environment’, and Earth Day, but it was too unfocused, and not nearly emotional enough. But they soon realized that there were something like 100 big nuclear plants being licensed or built around the country, and they recognized a gift from the heavens: here was a technology that was not just about to consume all that land and water, and produce radiation, but that was integrally connected to the capitalistic industrial/defense complex, had a mushroom-cloud shadow hovering over it, and was made for hysterical reaction.
The smarter ones (especially Lovins) recognized that nuclear could fuel an economic boom that would lead to more production, consumption, population, all the things they opposed. He was honest enough to admit that if someone invented an energy source that was free and clean, he’d oppose it because of the great damage it would do in terms of economic growth. Nader was also attracted for reasons that went way beyond the environment or safety.
It’s all ancient history now, and largely irrelevant. Kids today (in their 30s, even) can’t imagine that nuclear power was once at the center of a national or international movement, bringing together activists from environmental, public health, ‘gray panthers,’ women’s rights, consumerists, labor, anti-capitalist, anti-war, economic conservatives(the most effective), rock musicians, Jane Fonda, civil rights, religious groups (remember the battles with the National Council of Churches?), Margaret Mead–and all that was before TMI.
There’s a good book in there somewhere, but nobody would care.