Nuclear Energy

nuclear power plant accident, in our opinion, a certain event. The only question is when, and
where.” The three GE engineers announced that announced that they would now work full time for
Project Survival, the organization coordinating the anti-nuclear referendum drive in California.
These men were engineers who had spent most of their working life building reactors, and their
defection galvanized anti-nuclear sentiment across Europe and America. xxviii
And then, soon after, their occurred the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters. The
catastrophic consequences led to an explosion of protests against nuclear power plants the world
over. They succeeded in not only bringing new nuclear plant ordering to a halt, but also forced
cancellation of plants whose construction had already begun. In the US, all nuclear plants ordered
after 1973 were eventually cancelled. xxix Many Western European parliaments (e.g. Italy, Germany,
Sweden, Belgium) imposed a moratorium on new nuclear reactors and on phasing out existing ones.
World-wide, more than two-thirds of all nuclear plants ordered after January 1970 were eventually
cancelled. xxx
The nuclear industry went into a tailspin. To give a few examples of the multi-billion losses
suffered by the nuclear industry (much of which was transferred to the public): in 1983, the
Washington Public Power Supply System abandoned three nuclear plants after sinking $24 billion
into them; next year, a new nuclear reactor at Shoreham in Long Island, completed at the cost of
$5.3 billion, could not be licensed and had to be scrapped. xxxi By 1985, Forbes magazine was
calling nuclear power “the largest managerial disaster in history”; xxxii while energy expert Amory B
Lovins, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has termed it the greatest failure in the industrial
history of the world, which has lost more than $1 trillion in subsidies, losses, abandoned projects
and other damage to the public. xxxiii
The result was that since the late 1980s, worldwide nuclear capacity has risen very slowly:
from roughly 320 GW in 1990, it reached just 366 GW in 2005, and has been hovering around that
figure ever since. xxxiv
Funding a “Nuclear Renaissance”
By the beginning of this century, it was apparent that the nuclear power industry had entered
into a long period of stagnation, and nuclear power was becoming a technology without a future. In
a desperate attempt to revive its sagging fortunes, over the last decade, the global nuclear industry
has launched a massive funding effort and propaganda drive to revive its fortunes. Helping it along
has been the rise of deeply conservative currents in the politics of some developed countries, from
the USA to Germany and United Kingdom, due to the deepening economic crisis there. (Discussing
the reasons for this shift is beyond the scope of this essay.)
In order to convince the people about the benefits of nuclear energy, the nuclear industry
took advantage of the growing crisis of global warming and the increasing public awareness and
concern about it, and launched a multi-billion dollar public relations campaign claiming that nuclear
energy is the answer to global warming. It has been so successful in its propaganda campaign that
today, every political leader in the world – from the President of the United States to the Prime
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