Atomic Dreams
(Page 2 of 9)
January / February 2008
by Jason Mark, from Earth Island Journal
Such sentiments reveal the degree to which the all-consuming threat of planetary climate change is altering green politics, forcing environmentalists to reexamine their beliefs about how best to fight global warming. The debate over nuclear power is, at its heart, part of a larger argument about how to balance ecological sustainability with our lifestyle expectations. Whether environmentalists decide to support nuclear power will influence the shape of the emerging green economy.
RELATED CONTENT
Escalators are such commonplace conveniences that riders rarely give them a second thought. The for...
Greg Watson and the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust have the job of allocating $140 million to...
Neighborhood “energy raisers" -- organized barn-raiser style that bring together neighbors, acquain...
The nuclear power industry knows that the term "nuclear" is, from a public relations vantage point,...
Got Solar? March 7, 2003 Issue By Special Report, Greenpeace “Aluminum foil is expensive.” “Yeah, ...
“It’s a metaphor for how our country will move into the future,” says Betsy Taylor, former head of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and founder of the Center for a New American Dream. “It gets back to the debate about whether we want an economy and an energy system that are highly centralized and benefit the few, versus an economy and an energy system that are more locally rooted and that unleash the creativity and the economic ownership of our energy by many more small owners, businesses, and even households. . . . There has been a fight over who benefits and who matters. With nuclear power, there was this idea that a small group of people would take care of everything.”
By the mid-1990s, it appeared that the U.S. nuclear industry was destined for a funeral. Federal officials had not licensed a new plant since 1973, and the last plant to come on line, Watts Bar in Tennessee, had taken 23 years to build. Memories of the 1979 Three Mile Island scare, combined with the long shadow of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, had the industry on the defensive. Public support for nuclear power was near an all-time low, with just 40 percent of respondents to an industry poll saying they were in favor of atomic energy. Major cost overruns in plant construction had made the industry unpopular on Wall Street.
Then the George W. Bush administration threw nuclear power a lifeline. Embedded in the 2005 Energy Bill was a provision granting the nuclear industry $13 billion in new tax credits and loan guarantees; $2 billion was set aside for the first utilities that filed applications for new plants. The subsidies allowed utilities, insurance companies, and investors to begin rethinking nuclear power’s future.
The industry now had the money; what it needed was an argument. According to a 2005 ABC News survey, only one-third of Americans approved of “building more nuclear plants at this time.” Nuclear proponents needed a way of convincing people that atomic energy deserved a second shot. Enter climate change. While nuclear power generation isn’t entirely carbon neutral—uranium mining and enrichment require vast amounts of fossil fuel energy—atomic plants are cleaner from a carbon standpoint than natural gas or coal-fired power stations. Posing nuclear energy as a response to global warming seemed a useful way to reintroduce nuclear power to a public that hadn’t been forced to think about it for years.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>