A slightly different version of this article was written in November 2006 for Counterpoise Magazine by Peaceworks Director and Missourians for Safe Energy co-founder Mark Haim.

Nuclear Power: Failed Technology or Candidate for a Comeback?

By Mark Haim

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. Back then, in the era of “Atoms for Peace,” nuclear power was sold to the American people as our future. We were moving forward into an age of limitless, clean energy that would be so abundant, it would be “too cheap to meter.” By the time I became a young adult in the early 1970s Richard Nixon was telling us that the United States would have 1,000 large nuclear plants installed by the year 2000. By then, I’d learned not to trust what people like Nixon were telling me, however.
By the mid-1970s the once bright hope sold to a generation of baby boomers and our parents came crashing down as the realities of nuclear safety, routine radiation releases, worker contamination, potential melt downs, mill tailings and the unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—nuclear waste quandary began to sink in to public awareness. Soon, instead of cheering crowds at ribbon cuttings, there were mass demonstrations, legal interventions, public debates, civil disobedience actions and a diverse network of grassroots safe energy organizations springing up all across the nation.

All this happened well before the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident which, in the words of former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Peter Bradford, turned “a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion cleanup job in about 90 minutes.” The utility industry, which already had its doubts—as nuclear plants were proving to be far more costly than anticipated—basically pulled the plug on the nuclear option.

The last nuclear plant to be completed in the United States was ordered in 1973. Dozens of plants—many partially built—were canceled. Not wanting to throw good money after bad, the utilities wrote off billions already invested. Writing in  Forbes Magazine  in 1985, James Cook labeled “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program” as “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.”