NUCLEAR POWER

Utilities Go Nuclear

In 1954 the government authorized private ownership of nuclear reactors as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace initiative, paving the way for utility companies to build nuclear power plants. By the mid 1960s many had "gone nuclear," though the cost of building reactors had proved far more than the early hopes that they could provide power for pennies a day. There was some public opposition to the plants—after all, most Americans' sole experience with the power of the atom was the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In California residents demanded the cancellation of the planned Bodega Bay reactor, sited on a geological fault, after an earthquake disrupted construction. Inhabitants of New York City resisted the siting of a plant in that densely populated area.

Energy Independence

Nevertheless, most people liked the idea of building atomic energy plants. The country was using increasing amounts of electric energy, and nuclear power promised to be cheaper and cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which created air pollution. Moreover, nuclear power had the aura of a neat, high-tech solution to complicated problems that people had come to expect from science and business. When an oil embargo by countries in the Middle East in 1973-1974 created shortages and high prices, atomic energy seemed to offer a way for the nation to achieve energy independence. Support for nuclear power was high, and its opponents were ridiculed. The antinuclear movement carried forward the traditions of the anti-Vietnam War movement and demonstrated against power plants, most visibly at the proposed site of Seabrook Station in New Hampshire, with what seemed ludicrously inadequate tools: sit-ins, civil disobedience, celebrity concerts, and rallies. To many, protesters' fear of radiation made them appear to be nature-loving cowards, and their opposition to nuclear power seemed to be vaguely un-American. One writer caricatured them as "vegetarians in leather jackets who drive imported cars to Seabrook listening to the Grateful Dead on their Japanese tape decks amid a marijuana haze."

Three Mile Island

At 4:00 A.M. on 28 March 1979 a mechanical failure of the cooling system at the Three Mile Island plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was compounded by operator error. Technicians in the control room of the Unit 2 reactor, misunderstanding the nature of the problem, shut off all water to the reactor. With no water cooling it, the reactor became extremely hot—in excess of five thousand degrees—and began to melt. Within hours there was enough radiation in the containment dome to kill a person in minutes, and some radiation began leaking into the environment. It was another two days before the public learned how serious the accident was and officials began talking about a meltdown. Pregnant women and small children were evacuated. Ironically, the worst danger of a meltdown passed before the evacuation order was given—by then the reactor was underwater again. Nine days later the core had cooled sufficiently so that public officials felt safe in encouraging nearby residents to return to their homes; but the reactor was still hot even a year later.

MELTDOWN

A meltdown is the out-of-control melting of a superheated reactor core, which would become so hot that nothing could contain it. Experts differ on what would happen next. One early theory was that the core would fall through the earth and just keep going, "all the way to China." This scenario was later pushed aside, though not before it spawned a nuclear disaster movie starring Jane Fonda called The China Syndrome (1979). Now, some believe that it would simply wind up encased in volcanic glass about one hundred feet below the ground, sealed safely. Others disagree, suggesting that the breach of the containment dome would release fantastic amounts of radioactivity into the surrounding area, killing thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. One thing is clear: Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant came perilously close to a full-scale disaster. The Presidential Commission report suggests that if the reactor had remained uncovered another twenty minutes, it would have melted down.

The Aftermath. While there were no apparent injuries at Three Mile Island, it dealt the nuclear power industry a blow that sent it sharply into decline. In April 1979 a Gallup poll found that 66 percent of the nation believed nuclear power to be unsafe. Although that number declined to 50 percent nine months later, the accident created an enduring pessimism about the industry. In 1980 environmental crusader Ralph Nader noted the changed climate of debate. "When I first began speaking against nuclear power," he said, "the audiences would ask me how I could prove that nuclear reactors were badly designed and poorly run. Now the audiences accept these problems without question and ask what alternatives we have to nuclear power."

RACE AND BIOLOGY

After fifteen years of civil rights struggle to assure black Americans of the full rights of citizenship and four decades of work by scientists to dismantle the notion of a biological basis for racial difference, Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley became a controversial figure in the 1970s when he argued that black Americans were genetically endowed with inferior intelligence. He was rebuffed by the National Academy of Sciences in 1970, when it refused to conduct a study along these lines. Shockley was increasingly unpopular on U.S. campuses by late 1973, when he was prevented from fulfilling speaking engagements by students who protested that he was a racist and a Fascist. In 1974 anthropologist Peggy Sanday offered a study many believed discredited Shockley's views, arguing that IQ differences were "exclusively a matter of environment."

Sources:

Carrol W. Pursell, Jr., ed., Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, second edition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990);

Mark Stephens, Three Mile Island: The Hour-by-Hour Account of What Really Happened (New York: Random House, 1980).