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Nuclear Energy, Climate Change, and the Fission of the Environmental Movement
Introduction
What They Used to Say
What They're Saying Now
Not Every One is Saying It
Conclusion
References & Links
Comments & questions to:
Laura Bartolomei-Hill lbartolomeihill@macalester.edu
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Nuclear Energy, Climate Change, and the Fission of the Environmental Movementby Laura Bartolomei-HillIntroduction
Nuclear energy
represents many different things to different groups of people. To some, it is
clean, carbon-free energy. To others, it is toxic waste and irresponsible
energy development. But for decades, the environmental community agreed on what
nuclear energy meant to them: an expensive, potentially dangerous, and ill-conceived
source of energy. During the 1970s and 80s, the United States environmental
community mobilized against nuclear energy. Fear of exposure to radiation,
unpredictable consequences from complicated technological systems, and toxic
waste topped the activists’ concerns. Citizen protests, as well as the exorbitant
costs associated with building a nuclear plant, essentially halted construction
of new nuclear energy power plants for two decades. As the Wall Street Journal recently put it, “by the end of the 1980s, the
nuclear-power industry appeared to be heading for a meltdown.” But
now, what was long considered not only bedrock of mainstream environmentalism
but also one of the most powerful successes of the movement is now under
serious re-consideration. Many key figures and organizations which were once leaders
of the anti-nuclear movement are rethinking their stance and are the very
forces calling for the revival of the industry they so fervently opposed; they
are even re-framing it as an environmental solution to climate change.
Through this website, I will examine the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s,
the re-framing of nuclear energy today by politicians and organizations, and
the potential rifts between the environmental justice and mainstream
environmental movements around nuclear energy. Increasing numbers of
environmental groups and politicians are embracing nuclear energy as a solution
to climate change even though they fought against it decades ago, because they
have identified first and foremost the cause of climate change as carbon
dioxide emissions.Climate change
has been called the primary environmental problem of the twenty-first century.
Concerns about energy production and carbon emissions have driven
environmentalists and policy makers to search for new, cleaner, carbon-free
technologies. The re-emergence of nuclear energy as a “clean and renewable”
alternative to carbon-heavy fossil fuels such as coal and oil has enchanted some
in the environmental community. Nuclear has the capacity to produce massive
amounts of energy without producing global-warming causing carbon emissions.
Over the past decade, as climate change has come to dominate environmental
concerns, prominent mainstream environmental organizations and politicians have
embraced nuclear energy as a “green” technology and as a solution to climate
change, an attitude which has been adopted most publicly and most viably by
President Obama in speeches and directives beginning with his 2010 State of the
Union address. As a burgeoning movement in the 1970s, environmentalism used
nuclear energy as a rallying point to mobilize communities to action; decades
later, nuclear energy has become a controversial issue not only outside of
environmental circles but within them as well. Because President Obama has
adopted the language of the pro-nuclear environmental groups and publicly
committed to investing in the nuclear industry, the controversy and the power
struggle between environmental factions to define the environmentalist
perspective on nuclear has acquired urgent and contentious dimensions.
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Above
(Figure 1): An Anti-Nuclear Rally and Below (Figure 2), a coal plant
that may be eliminated with incresaed investment in nuclear energy
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