Nuclear Transformations 459
States, nuclear energy is responsible for 21 percent of generated electricity, slightly more than
the world average; there are 103 reactors in 31 states. Yet for all the success of nuclear
technology, no new nuclear power stations have been planned in this country since 1979.
Why not?
In March 1979, failures in its cooling system disabled one of the reactors at Three Mile Island
in Pennsylvania and a certain amount of radioactive material escaped. Although a nuclear reac-
tor cannot explode in the way an atomic bomb does, breakdowns can occur that put large pop-
ulation at risk. Although a true catastrophe was narrowly avoided, the Three Mile Island incident
made it clear that the hazards associated with nuclear energy are real.
After 1979 it was inevitable that greater safety would have to be built into new reactors,
adding to their already high cost. In addition, demand for electricity in the United States was
not increasing as fast as expected, partly because of efforts toward greater efficiency and partly
because of a decline in some of industries (such as steel, cars, and chemicals) that are heavy
users of electricity. As a result of these factors, new reactors made less economic sense than be-
fore, which together with widespread public unease led to a halt in the expansion of nuclear en-
ergy in the United States.
Elsewhere the situation was different. Nuclear reactors still seemed the best way to meet the
energy needs of many countries without abundant fossil fuel resources. Then in April 1986, a
severe accident destroyed a 1000-MW reactor at Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine, then part
of the Soviet Union. This was the worst environmental disaster of technological origin in his-
tory and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over 50 tons of radioactive material
escaped and was carried around the world by winds. The radiation released was nearly 200 times
the total given off by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs in 1945. Radiation levels in
much of Europe rose well above normal for a time and a quarter of a million people were per-
manently evacuated from the vicinity of Chernobyl. A number of reactor, rescue, and cleanup
workers died soon afterward as a result of exposure to radiation, and thousands more became
ill. Widespread contamination with radionuclides, particularly of food and water supplies, sug-
gests that cancer will raise the total of people affected manyfold in the years to come. Already
about a thousand children, who are especially susceptible, have developed thyroid cancer as a
result of ingesting the radioactive iodine isotope^131 I; a third of all the children living near Cher-
nobyl who were under 4 years old in 1986 are expected to come down with thyroid cancer
eventually.
As in the United States after Three Mile Island, public anxiety over the safety of nuclear pro-
grams grew in Europe after Chernobyl. Some countries, for instance Italy, abandoned plans for
new reactors. In other countries, for instance France, the logic behind their nuclear programs
remained strong enough for them to continue despite Chernobyl.
Quite apart from the safty of reactors themselves is the issue of what to do with the wastes
they produce. Even if old fuel rods are processed to separate out the uranium and plutonium
they contain, what is left is still highly radioactive. Although a lot of the activity will be gone in
a few months and much of the rest in a few hundred years, some of the radionuclides have half-
lives in the millions of years. At present perhaps 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is being stored
on a temporary basis in the United States (not to mention the vast amount of highly radioactive
waste left over from nuclear weapons manufacture that is also awaiting safe storage). Burying
nuclear wastes deep underground currently seems to be the best long-term way to dispose of
them. The right location is easy to specify but not easy to find: stable geologically with no earth-
quakes likely, no nearby population centers, a type of rock that does not disintegrate in the pres-
ence of heat and radiation but is easy to drill into, and not near groundwater that might become
contaminated.
From today’s perspective, nuclear energy has important advantages not fully appreciated in
the past: it does not produce the air pollution that fossil-fuel burning does, nor the huge quan-
tities of carbon dioxide that are the main contributor to global warming via the greenhouse effect.
Together with the rising cost of fossil fuels and increasing demand for electricity, these factors
seem likely to lead to the construction of new nuclear reactors in the United States after a delay
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