Nuclear Power

In spite of all the systems developed by nuclear engineers, the general public has long had serious concerns about the use of such plants as sources of electrical power. In France, for example, where more than half of the electrical power supply comes from nuclear power plants, public support for nuclear power has declined in recent years; France has now placed a moratorium on the construction of new plants. Germany, which relies on nuclear power for approximately 30% of its electricity, has decided to phase out all of its nuclear power plants as quickly as it can obtain replacement power from other sources. In the U.S., enthusiasm for nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s faded in the 1970s, giving way to widespread—but often unscientific or ill-founded—public unease about nuclear dangers, a vigorous antitechnology and antinuclear activist movement, and investor concern over the high monetary cost of nuclear power; no new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the U.S. for over 20 years. The nuclear-power industry remains strongest in Asia, where approximately 25 new plants are now under construction.

One concern about nuclear power plants, of course, is an echo of the world's first exposure to nuclear power, the atomic bomb blasts. Many people fear that a nuclear power plant may go out of control and explode like a nuclear weapon. In spite of experts' insistence that such an event is impossible, a few major disasters have perpetuated the fear of nuclear power plants exploding or failing catastrophically in some other mode. Although commercial nuclear power plants cannot explode, they have a demonstrated potential to pass out of the control of their operators, with unpredictable consequences. By far the most serious of those events was the explosion that occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev in the Ukraine in 1986.

On April 16 of that year, one of the four power-generating units in the Chernobyl complex exploded, blowing the top off the containment building. (The explosion was caused by hydrogen gas released by the overheating core; it was not a nuclear explosion.) Hundreds of thousands of nearby residents were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and were evacuated from the area. Radioactive clouds released by the explosion were detected downwind in Scandinavia and western Europe. More than a decade later, the remains of the Chernobyl reactor remain far too radioactive for anyone to spend more than a few minutes near the former reactor core. The Soviet government had, of course, always insisted that such a disaster was impossible. In the U.S., the most famous nuclear incident to date is the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979. The reactor suffered a partial meltdown that was contained by the giant, pill-shaped steel vessel containing the core; some radioactive gas was released to the environment, and a hydrogen explosion raised pressures inside the containment dome to within a few pounds per square inch of the dome's design pressure. Again, experts had reassured the public that the chances against such an event were literally astronomical—comparable to those of a giant meteor striking a major city.

Critics of nuclear power also worry about the amount of radioactivity released by nuclear power plants on a day-to-day basis. This concern is probably of less importance than is the possibility of a major disaster; studies have shown that nuclear power plants are so well shielded that the amount of radiation to which nearby residents are exposed is no more than that of a person living many miles away. Nevertheless, some epidemiological evidence hints that the small amounts of radioactive material released during routine operation may have detectable medical effects on nearby populations. These claims are, of course, intensely disputed.

In any case, safety concerns in the United States have been serious enough to essentially bring the construction of new plants to a halt in the last decade. Licensing procedures are now so complex and so expensive that few industries are interested in working their way through the bureaucratic maze to construct new plants. However, it should also be noted that orders for new nuclear power plants in the U.S. had practically ceased in the late 1970s, years before the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island accidents or the regulatory response to them. Some analysts argue that the stagnation of the nuclear-power industry should be attributed primarily to economics, rather than to political opposition.