COMMENTARY
There is a joke of no known authorship which says, “No good deed shall go unpunished.” So, alas, it has been with nuclear power. The gift was given to the world by the storied Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which wrote and promoted legislation that gave the public unique access to the licensing procedure for new nuclear plants.
The idea was that this openness would encourage the public to take a greater interest in nuclear science and the civilian uses of nuclear. No other licensing procedure was so open or, as it turned out, so subject to distortion and abuse.
The net effect of the licensing regime established for nuclear was that any member of the public, without technical background and without any identifiable stake in the proposed plant, could have standing and start the process of delaying a technical decision with lay arguments.
The public had no standing in approving a new drug, the airworthiness of a new aircraft or the certifying of a bridge. But in nuclear proceedings, the public had unprecedented access. Weak licensing boards, cowed by the threat of legal action, contributed to the debacle and led to the evolution of a class of professional nuclear opponents.
Coming out of the turbulence of the 1960s, and the sense in that decade that experts were not to be trusted, nuclear licensing was heaven-sent for a new breed of angry and articulate activists, whom Irving Kristol dubbed “The New Class.” They were the anti-institutionalists who felt they were betrayed by the institutions.
The great events of the 1960s were for them:
1) The environmental movement, launched with Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring.”
2) The civil rights movement with its marches, imprisonments, assassinations, cries for social justice and riots.
3) The women’s movement with its belated recognition that women had been held back and exploited in the workplace over the decades.
4) And, above all, the war in Vietnam, which had soured the young intellectuals against their elders.
In all of these areas, inflaming the new class was the shadow of national institutions. It was institutions which had mishandled the environment; institutions which had abetted racial segregations; institutions which had erected a glass ceiling over women; and it was institutions which had supported the war in Southeast Asia. All institutions were suspect; corporations, universities, local government and national government.
For some, it was a protest against the way they felt society had betrayed them; and their solution was dropping out, dropping acid and dropping the sexual mores of their parents. Others who really wanted to change society had to find the levers of power and the sympathy of the press. Often, they did not have to look much further than the licensing of the neighboring nuclear power plant.
Here, they could get standing in the proceeding with just a smattering of knowledge. And after that, that they could stand the proceeding on its head. Newly minted “environmentalists” cloaked themselves in moral rectitude and spoke, without proof or having been elected, for the public.
Their moveable feast of objections to nuclear also was shameless. In the early days of the antinuclear movement, it was not a nuclear argument at all, but an argument over once-through cooling, and the effects of thermal pollution in rivers and estuaries. Then they found you could terrorize the public, and up funding for your organization, by emphasizing radiation and cancer. And then the nuclear opponents got onto emergency core cooling, double-pipe ruptures and the China Syndrome.
As useful to their purpose, which had matured from a way of challenging society to a pathological hatred of nuclear, the big issue had not yet arisen: waste. Ralph Nader became a partisan, and once declared that a reactor could burst open like a rotten melon. He famously described nuclear power as a “technological Vietnam.”
More silliness was to come. The late Ralph Lapp, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and I decided we needed an incontrovertible scientific statement to stop the nonsense. We approached Nobel laureate Hans Bethe to lend his name to the statement; and with that, we went for Nobel laureates with physics or engineering backgrounds. We signed up 24 of the most eminent and presented their views at a press conference in the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Nader was not to be outdone: he assembled 36 scientists. As far as I can remember, none of his scientists had nuclear credentials. One of them was Linus Pauling, who was at the height of his infatuation with vitamin C. On balance, we lost that one.
It was Nader who delivered the nuclear issue to the Democratic left, gave it a political identity. As a result, honest conservatives tend to think well of nuclear and dedicated liberals tend to oppose it. The tragedy is that this prejudice is handed on to new generations who take it up without question.
Nuclear power is green power, but no utility dare include it in its green portfolio. As fossil fuels dwindle, as the Earth heats up, and as oil imports hollow out our economy, the case for nuclear is pressing, critical, essential. If we are to have the benefits of the nuclear navy, the protection of nuclear weapons and the benefits of nuclear medicine, why not plentiful nuclear-generated electricity at a predictable price?
The electric industry is waiting for a whole new market with plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. But without nuclear, they may not be able to service that market. With nuclear we can have electricity for all time; after the coal, the oil and the gas are gone.
The wind blows well out of Texas and up to the Intermountain West. But on the East Coast, where so many of us live, the wind is not to be found in the summer. Nuclear and wind are a viable partnership. Alas, a lot of the proponents of “alternatives”—of which wind is the mainstay—are really those who have a visceral hatred of nuclear,
Nuclear is a tool, not a cause. Sadly, it is the most maligned tool we have. Even fluoride in water had an easier introduction.
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