ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Secondly, a range of operational problems has undermined the political
case for nuclear energy; in particular, it has failed to deliver on its promise
tobe reliable and safe. Many nuclear plants have been beset by malfunctions
that have put them out of action for long periods of time. Public fears have
been repeatedly rekindled by the frequency of accidental releases of low-
level radioactive materials and heated debates about the potential dangers
(e.g. links with cancers) of living in close proximity to nuclear plants. In
theaftermath of the Cold War, there was widespread concern in the West
about the safety of the large stock of Russian-designed reactors in Eastern
Europe, prompting the German government to close all the plants in the
former East Germany immediately after unification. Austria – a non-nuclear
state that closed its sole nuclear power-station after a 1978 plebiscite – tried
unsuccessfully to make the closure of the unreliable Czech Temelin power-
station, close to the Austrian border, a condition for the accession of the
Czech Republic to the EU in 2004 (Axelrod 2004 ).
Perhaps most important is the still largely unresolved problem of how the
growing stockpile of spent fuel and waste – some of which will be active for
1,000 years – should be safely stored. In the USA, where most waste is stored
on site, there have been long-running and unresolved disputes over plans to
build a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and
interim sites elsewhere (Rogers and Kingsley 2004 ). In Britain, despite the
identification of several hundred possible sites for the storage of nuclear
waste (Guardian,11June 2005), all efforts to provide a long-term repository
for the 100,000 tonnes of existing nuclear waste have failed. Indeed, only a
handful of such facilities have been completed anywhere.
Thirdly, external changes have opened up pro-nuclear political communi-
ties and led to serious challenges to the economic case for nuclear energy.
The policy communities managed to conceal the true costs of nuclear power
behind the veil of state ownership and regulatory structures for many
years, but privatisation and liberalisation of European electricity markets
have made this more difficult. Most existing nuclear power-stations were
built either directly by state-owned companies or by private developers in
receipt of huge state subsidies; today those options are often unavailable. For
example, proposals by the Conservative government to privatise the British
nuclear power industry in the late 1980s unintentionally helped break up
thenuclear policy community because the exposure to financial scrutiny
required for market flotation revealed the true (i.e. enormous and previously
unquantified) costs of the industry (Greenaway et al. 1992 ). Although ura-
nium fuel is cheap and plentiful, the capital cost of building a nuclear
plant – which may take ten years to complete – is enormous compared
to, say, a gas-firedpower station. In the USA, the failure of the completed
$5.5 billion Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, New York, to open,
after the local authorities rejected evacuation plans, means that any com-
pany considering building a nuclear reactor runs the risk of its credit rating