The Last Word
Wasserman, Harvey
I UK I AS I WORD Harvey Wasserman The Industry that Couldn't Peace seems less tangible than war, somehow, and nuclear power plants that never get built seem less tangible than those that dot the...
...For years an army of well-heeled reactor backers fought to get at the Federal trough for the Big Check that would save the industry—only to be blocked time and again by environmental lobbyists and public interest groups...
...But without the years of civil disobedience, the lobbying and organizing that had gone before, or the making of The China Syndrome, TMI could have been covered up so quickly that it might never have been more than a quick footnote on the evening news...
...What it boils down to is that the de facto moratorium on new domestic nuclear reactor orders that followed TMI now appears to be a permanent halt...
...We still must face the twin nightmares of uranium mining and radioactive waste disposal...
...And the campaign against the nuclear arms race has barely begun...
...We inherited a lingering worry about radiation from the ban-the-bomb movement and revived it to the point where a reborn disarmament campaign can pursue its cause with a vastly expanded base in the 1980s...
...I UK I AS I WORD Harvey Wasserman The Industry that Couldn't Peace seems less tangible than war, somehow, and nuclear power plants that never get built seem less tangible than those that dot the landscape...
...The utilities assumed they could routinely levy huge rate increases—and were stopped by a consumer revolt that slashed their capital projections and forced innumerable projects off the drawing boards and into the paper shredders...
...It is a triumph of historic dimensions...
...They will cite unrealistic growth projections, uncontrolled inflation, Harvey Wasserman, a leader in the anti-nuclear movement, is co-author of "Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation," just published by Delacorte Press...
...But here we are...
...It's an event to which millions of citizen-activists can and should point with pride...
...We have, in essence, put a hundred-billion-dollar industry to rout...
...But the one thing that stands out is the one thing people in power hate most to admit—citizen action made the difference...
...overregulation," rampant bureaucracy, incompetent engineering...
...It means thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and irreplaceable resources will not be put at risk...
...Movement work does exact a personal toll...
...If it became a turning point, it was because the nuclear opposition had paved the way...
...But for the moment, a victory has clearly been won over the nuclear industry's plans for domestic expansion...
...Getting to this stage of victory over nuclear power was neither easy nor inevitable...
...The reactor builders chose the most absurd sites imaginable—fault lines, delicate salt marshes, aquifers, rivers that provide drinking water—only to see the sites aswarm with dedicated, disciplined, nonviolent occupiers who hammered the issue into the national consciousnesss...
...One New Jersey reactor has been scrapped after expenditures of almost $400 million...
...The anti-nuclear campaign, like any other undertaking, has had its frustrations and mistakes...
...They may even, in time, concede that the technology was inherently unworkable...
...But three years after the accident at Three Mile Island, we can point to a quiet but real outbreak of peace...
...Unless I miss my guess," says economist Charles Komonoff, "there will never be another order for a commercial atomic power plant in the United States...
...The 2,000 reactors anticipated by some Atomic Energy Commission planners in the 1960s, the 1,000 promised by Richard M. Nixon in 1974, have shrunk to roughly 175 on line, under construction, or on order—and the number is not rising but falling...
...Jamesport, Long Island, and many other rural communities will remain free of nukes that were planned but will not be erected...
...But all the sites I have mentioned, and others never identified, were saved from nuclear incursion because people did persevere, did fight the odds—and won...
...Most important of all, we proved again that an aroused citizenry can move mountains...
...Seabrook, Diablo, TMI-1, and 175 other domestic reactors on line or under construction need to be dealt with, as do several projects lined up for export, not to mention some 400 others operating worldwide...
...We have yet to win the acceptance of a national-scale plan for solar energy...
...If it sounds as if I'm proud of what the movement has accomplished, it should...
...Pebble Springs, Oregon...
...Montague, Massachusetts...
...We were told time and again that the nuclear industry was just too powerful to stop, and that our efforts would be futile...
...The industry's troubles culminated in the Three Mile Island accident...
...We've reached a milestone in the history of both nuclear power and political organizing...
...Merrill Lynch has recommended that more than a dozen expensive projects already under way be abandoned...
...It means that such places as Tyrone, Wisconsin...
...Charlestown, Rhode Island...
...The industry was never able to get its mega-bailout...
...In the process of fighting nuclear power we have taken a core of people with ecologist/conservationist concerns and built around it an unlikely coalition of conservative rural Americans, urban ratepayers, and an impressive cross-section of local and international labor unions that were once considered a bulwark of industry support...
...The industry cut corners on engineering safety and radiation protection, only to find itself facing irate intervenors backed by top-level engineers and scientists prepared to challenge corporate reassurances...
...Three years after Three Mile Island, the American elite has been forced to abandon the future of a technology into which it had poured enormous prestige and capital...
...Government and industry apologists will find many ways to rationalize the collapse of nuclear power...
...That's music to the ears of thousands of us who have been active in the anti-nuclear movement...
...Let them eat yellowcake...
...Even people in the nuclear industry agree...
...Bailly, Indiana...
...There is, of course, much that remains to be done...
...But it also offers incomparable rewards to keep us going, and this moment is one of them...
...Says pro-nuclear economist Louis Perl, "If I were a utility executive today, either with a nuclear plant a short distance under way or with one I hadn't started building, I'd get out of it and I'd never build another...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
