Llewellyn

King

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September 30, 2008

Why Nuclear Power Has Languished

There is a joke of no known authorship that 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-holding in the proposed plant, could have standing and start the process of delaying a technical decision with lay arguments.

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.

Here, they could get standing in the proceeding with just a smattering of knowledge. And after that, they could stand the proceeding on its head. Myron Cherry, a Chicago lawyer, could make a mockery of any scientific hearing. Newly minted “environmentalists” cloaked themselves in moral rectitude and spoke, without proof or having been elected, for the public.

They also found that opposing nuclear was a route to funding. One celebrated mailing began, “Are you for safe nuclear power?”

This moveable feast of objections was shameless. In the early days of the anti-nuclear 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 the income of your organization, by emphasizing radiation and cancer. And then the nuclear opponents got onto emergency core cooling, double-pipe ruptures and the China Syndrome.

The fertile fields of fear were being cultivated. And the embattled regulators decided to hold a generic hearing on the emergency core cooling issue.

So began the biggest forensic circus since the Moscow show trials. The interveners were represented by the aforementioned Myron Cherry, who behaved in such unorthodox and disruptive ways that a criminal judge would have cited him for contempt, and possibly recommended disbarment.

For nine long months, the hearings endured the tactics of the interveners and granted them courtesies that were not returned.

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. As it happens, I see Nader quite often now. But we never mention our contentious past.

Yet, it was Nader who delivered the nuclear issue to the Democratic left, and 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?

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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