Nuclear Energy

Nuclear Energy: From Slowdown to “Renaissance”
Chapter 1
It was in December 1953 in his famous Atoms for Peace speech before the UN General
Assembly that President Eisenhower of the United States first spoke of the peaceful uses of the
atom, including the generation of electricity from nuclear fission as a solution to the world’s
growing energy needs. xxiii In 1955 the United Nations' "First Geneva Conference", then the world's
largest gathering of scientists and engineers, met to explore nuclear power technology. In 1957, the
European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) was launched alongside the European
Economic Community (the latter is now the European Union), as a special organization for nuclear
power. The same year also saw the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Those were the heydays of nuclear power. It was claimed that nuclear power would be
abundant beyond belief and help the globe decisively overcome its dependence on fossil fuels. It
would be safe, clean and self-sustaining. Above all, nuclear power would be eminently affordable
and universally economical – in the words of Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States
Atomic Energy Commission, “too cheap to meter”. xxiv
Early Years
On June 27, 1954, the USSR's Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the world's first
nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, and produced around 5 MW (megawatt)
of electric power. The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Sellafield, was
opened in England in 1956 with an initial capacity of 50 MW (later 200 MW). With nuclear energy
from fission appearing to be very cheap and safe, installed nuclear power capacity rose quickly:
rising from less than 1000 MW or 1 GW (gigawatt) in 1960 to 100 GW in the late 1970s, and 300
GW in the late 1980s. xxv The IAEA euphorically forecast that global combined installed nuclear
capacity would reach up to 4,450 GW by the year 2000! xxvi
Problems and Slowdown
Soon, the problems started becoming evident. As nuclear plant construction costs mounted,
the claim that nuclear energy was going to be ‘too cheap to meter’ went through the roof. It became
clear that finding a way of safely disposing of the rising mountains of nuclear waste was going to be
very difficult, if not impossible. Several scientists started challenging the prevailing view that the
small amounts of radiation released by nuclear power plants during normal operation were not a
problem. One of these was John William Gofman, professor emeritus of Medical Physics at UC
Berkeley, who emphatically stated in the late 1960s that any amount of radiation, howsoever small,
causes damage to human genes and health. xxvii
In 1976, four nuclear engineers -- three from GE and one from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission – resigned, stating that nuclear power was not as safe as their superiors were claiming.
They testified to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that: "the cumulative effect of all design
defects and deficiencies in the design, construction and operations of nuclear power plants makes a
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