Even as early as the 1940s and 50s, people worried about peak oil and the inefficiencies of every day life.  Back in the 50s, however, there was one clear solution: we could take the same technology that had provided nuclear bombs and turn it into a clean and efficient source of energy that could meet all of our growing energy needs. In 1955, an international conference was called in Geneva in which countries openly exchanged previously top secret information on nuclear technologies, it’s leaders calling this the first step towards a new world peace and cooperation. Earlier, the legendary physicist Niels Bohr pressured Roosevelt and Churchill to work together with the Russians on nuclear technology to prevent a deadly arms race, promote cooperation, and push nuclear technologies in a beneficial direction (they refused). All around the world people developed an immediate fear of nuclear weapons and intense hope for nuclear power.  It could save the world or it could destroy the world.

Now new technologies like genetically modified foods (GMOs) and nanotechnology are being heralded as  the next saviors of the world (just read a bit of Kurzweil) even as we find that the problems of fifty years ago are becoming the emergencies of today.  The world is still fragmented, nuclear proliferation happened, global warming is getting worse, we’re running out of oil, and too much of the world still lives in conditions of poverty and sickness. What happened to nuclear power? Wasn’t it supposed to save us? Wasn’t it supposed to yeild tremendous solutions, even bringing world peace?

The reasons why nuclear power failed to deliver even a fraction of its promise is complicated but there are five major highlights that people who were involved and know the history will tell you all contributed to the radical failure of this amazing new technology. These things serve as lessons for our current technologies and also as we try to resurrect nuclear power as a viable alternative source of energy.

1) Nuclear has an automatic dread-factor
A lot of research has gone into understanding why in the 70s and 80s, people insistently opposed nuclear power.  For the past two decades, hundreds of papers have been published by psychologists, philosophers, and political scientists trying to understand why the public became suddenly outraged and set against nuclear power. Many experts simply declared the public irrational. Others, however, realized what should have been obvious: nuclear power is scary.

Nuclear technologies started up with two cities getting obliterated in an instant, using a single bomb.  Following that the entire world exploded into an arms race that led to bomb shelters and world-wide fear. How can you expect someone to trust something that uses the same technology that you are most deeply afraid of, that a good portion of the population is convinced they will die of (at least this is the general impression I get from talking to people who lived during the time)?

If the connection to Nuclear weapons isn’t enough, then the fear of nuclear waste will be.  Nuclear waste has been called the “Achilles Heel” of nuclear power.   It is radioactive, it doesn’t go away, and no one wants to have it near their home.  In the field of risk management this is called Nimby-ism. Not-In-My-Back-Yard.  Over the past two decades, the US has spent over $90 billion just preparing for the Yucca Mountain waste depository in Nevada, only to shut the project down due to controversy.  We still don’t have a place to put the waste so we store it on-site at the nuclear reactors. For a while, members of the U.K. were just dumping it into the sea.  That’s just what we need, radioactive fish!  Or at least that’s what anyone will think when they hear about it.

The first reaction of experts is to point out statistics and tests to say that this stuff isn’t nearly as dangerous as it seems and that we really shouldn’t be afraid of it.  Nuclear power is far safer than many other technologies, including the automobile, and it’s waste is much less toxic than most alternatives, including coal and oil burning plants.  Their reaction was to try to correct the naive public, shouting loudly that the technology was safe and there was nothing to worry about.  But it was the scientists who were being naive. There is much more to the public’s dread of nuclear power than mere statistics. For instance, renowned risk-psychologist Paul Slovic, points out that a large portion of the public judges risk based on the level of Dread they feel over it and the level that the risk is Unknown.  Nuclear power is a classic case of an unknown, dreaded risk–you never know when there might be an accident or what is being done to prevent an accident and if there is an accident the results will be catastrophic.

But instead of reacting to mitigate and reduce the level of dread and unknown, scientists simply tried to convince people it was safe, which made the public even more suspicious of the scientists, engineers, and managing elite. And in the end it is the public concerns that win out in a democratic society, rational or not.

By the time Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl washed over the news, most people wanted nothing to do with nuclear power.

A picture of the Genkai Nuclear Power plant by dominiekth via Flickr

2) Nuclear Power isn’t completely safe.
Three-Mile Island was proclaimed very loudly to be a freak accident. In fact, if you look over the incredible number of odd coincidences that led to the accident it is hard to disagree. Some of the stuff was just bizarre, like the fact that there was a manufacturing tag hanging over one of the warning lights that could have let the operators know that there was a problem.  The supporters of nuclear power made sure that they played up this fact, insisting that such bizarre chains of events were incredibly unlikely and could easily be prevented if we were careful. (To see a full video of the Three-mile island incident, I’d recommend viewing the 1999 PBS documentary on it)

Following the accident, the government asked a few prominent scientists and academics to explore why the accident happened and what could be done about it. Two theories became prominent, both put forward by sociologists. LaPorte developed the high-reliability theory that suggested that the nature of a system is what makes it dangerous (it’s a nuclear power plant!). To make it safer we need to develop a system that has what is called “engineered safety,” in which the machine shuts down safely in the event of a problem, normally with multiple backups and feedbacks to handle problems. If the system fails, you simply add more backups and checks to make it safer. Eventually you have a highly reliable system that with sufficient safegaurds to be considered safe.

In contrast to this, Charles Perrow proposed the Normal Accident Theory.  This states that it is because systems are complex that accidents happen and that these accidents are normal and therefore will continue to occur.  Accidents are inevitable when you have a system that is interactively complex and “tightly coupled.”  This means that anything that has many parts working together, with operators having little understanding of what is going on and little or indirect control over the results, you are bound to have some sort of unanticipated events that will not be handled. For example, they talk of normal accident theory in regard to spaceship accidents like the Challenger accidnet. It is easy in retrospect to know that an O-ring failed, allowing rocket fuel to breach the external fuel tank and cause an explosion. But the system was too complicated for them to predict before hand. A rocket ship simply has too many parts and there were too many unpredictable factors. For example, the day was particularly cold, which allowed the O-rings to contract and let the fuel through.  Furthermore, there was no way for anyone to know why the accident happened or to prevent it from happening from the beginning. It is also important to note that the O-ring itself was a safety mechanism that failed, so simply adding more would not necessarily prevent the accident. Even if it could have, it is only possible to know that in retrospect.

The same idea is applied to Nuclear Power plants. This is an immensely complicated system; just take a look at the diagram below.  This system is incredibly complex and has many parts working together to ensure the safety of the whole.  If one fails, others might as well, despite redundant protections. Three-mile island occurred because of a string of unpredictable events that failed despite and in some instances because of the protective measures put into place.

There is one hope that nuclear power could be safe but it predates the major nuclear era to a time when academics were still toying around with the earliest reactors. This is a concept called “inherent safety.”   As Freeman Dyson explains in Disturbing the Universe,

“Inherent safety” [means] that its safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature and not merely by the details of its engineering. It must be safe even in the hands of an idiot clever enough to by-pass the entire control system.

In other words, the goal was to make it so that a Nuclear plant simply couldn’t melt down.  The odd thing is, if you were to toss this idea around today people would probably think its ridiculous. But that is what Dyson and his colleagues did over a summer through a company called General Atomic all the way back in 1956. The result was a small “safe reactor” called the TRIGA that was sold to hospitals and universities for the purposes of creating radioactive materia for treatments and study.  While it was not 100% safe (what is?) the way it was built dramatically reduced the likelihood of a meltdown because the radioactive core automatically and quickly stabilized even when the control rods are pulled out rapidly from the core. To accentuate the difference, for an engineered safe system, when an emergency happens you put systems in place to handle the problem. For an inherently safe system, the possibility of the emergency is counteracted by the way it is built. In this case it completely takes out the possibility of a meltdown due to the control rods being removed.   However, the core concepts of the TRIGA were never implemented on a large scale into Nuclear Reactors, nor was this central aim of “inherent safety” applied to other reactors.  In our new generation of Nuclear Reactors we need to revive this concept if we are to build reactors that can be considered safe.

3) Nuclear lost its innovative drive.
TRIGA is evidence that a group of enthusiastic scientists, engineers, and businessmen can get together and create innovative ideas that overcome the initial problems seen in a new technology. It is this excitement that surrounds a new technology that provides rapid innovations and a flourishing of new ideas. We saw this with the computer industry and now with the Green technologies and hopefully we are starting to see it again with the auto industry. It doesn’t necessarily have to be young people just getting out of college (the people working on TRIGA were all established scientists who had worked on the nuclear bombs a decade earlier) but there has to be a fundamental air of innovation. It is well known in the business world that a company that gets stale and static will not last long. Innovation is the key and the key to innovation is that you have people who actually enjoy what they are doing. To again cite Dyson:

The fundamental problem of the [nuclear] industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiasts could assemble in a schoolhouse (as they did to build TRIGA) and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor…Sometime between 1960 and 1970, the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, teh experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control…The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors. So the weird reactors disappeared and with them the chance of any radical improvement beyond our existing systems.

Because of this loss of excitement, Nuclear Power quickly became a static technology stuck in an era of inefficiency and expense. It sounds an awful lot like what happened with our space program or the auto industry. Just look how much of a struggle it has been to get electric cars on the market?  As we’ve seen with the electric car, a lockdown on innovation will perpetually make it appear like it just isn’t “possible” to have a “cost efficient” electric vehicle.  On the other hand, if GM had not crushed its EV-1 (see Who Killed the Electric Car?) we might actually have had the innovations for efficient battery-powered vehicles by now. Likewise, if Nuclear Power hadn’t been so locked down and constrained by the mass of bureaucracy sucking all the life out of the industry, we might have a much safer, cheaper, and environmentally friendly Nuclear reactors by now.

4) Nuclear could never handle its political weight
The nature of nuclear technologies means that this bureaucratic intervention was virtually inevitable.  The political importance internationally and internally was too great to leave it to the hands of the free-market. This has always been the stance with nuclear technologies and most likely always will be. The same knowledge and technology to build a nuclear power plant can be applied towards building a nuclear bomb. Therefore, Nuclear Power inevitably means a lot of state control, secrecy, and protection.  Nuclear Power becomes easily identified with “The Man” to the young hippies frustrated over increased government control, a sentiment that has largely continued today.

This was exacerbated by the political backing that nuclear power received early on, developing into what is known in political science as an “Iron Triangle.”  An Iron Triangle is a monopoly of power on any policy due to intense cooperation between a congressional committee, a regulatory agency, and the producers (For example, there is a current Iron Triangle in agriculture preventing any change in subsidies)  This nuclear Iron Triangle consisted of The Atomic Energy Commission, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, and the large utility companies who built the reactors. They prevented any major changes in the legislation on Nuclear power for twenty years before opposition forced its break-up.  So not only did nuclear involve big government but it had tight control over the industry, thereby becoming perfect targets for a politically frustrated new generation.

Now that generation is leading the world and the suspicion still lingers.

5) Nuclear took too long to fulfill its promises
When a technology is as hyped as nuclear power was, people get tired of hearing of it after a little while.  If they keep hearing about it before too long they begin to get suspicious.  This is already happening today with GMOs, people are beginning to think that modified foods are just a new way for companies to control farmers and force into new markets (see The Future Of Food@Hulu).  It is natural for people to be suspicious whenever the people who are proclaiming a new technology will save the world are the only people who seem to be benefiting.  This is a particularly touchy situation with technologies that take thirty, forty, or fifty years to start to finally flower.  For instance, there was a lot of excitement around AI during the 60s and 70s but after two decades of only minor accomplishments, people don’t even take forecasts of intelligent robots seriously even though weak forms of AI permeate our society.

Once again we find that Dyson sums it up beautifully

If we had been wiser, we might have foreseen that after thirty years of unfulfilled promises a new generation of young people and of political leaders would arise who regard nuclear energy as a trap from which it is their mission to liberate us. It is only natural that the dreams of thirty years ago should not appeal to the young people of today. They need new visions to keep them moving ahead.

So it is that Nuclear Power faded away and for a good thirty years no new nuclear reactors were built in the United States. Now, after all that time, the first new nuclear reactors are being built just a few miles away from where I live here in Columbia, South Carolina. Perhaps our new generation is finally breaking through these problems that have plagued this otherwise remarkable technology. Perhaps this time around we can use Nuclear Power with a little more wisdom and with a little more caution and care than we did previously. The promise of harnessing nuclear energy has not changed and the problems of peak oil and a crowded world has only gotten worse. If we are to move forward towards a sustainable earth we must use everything in the playbook, and nuclear energy is the best item we’ve got there for the time being.  So it goes that this old technology may redeem itself in the eyes of Americans and finally fullfill its potential to improve our lives.

This article was written using notes from lectures by Neil Woods, Political Science Dept. University of South Carolina. Prof. Woods does not endorse any of the statements in this article. It was also written using research paid for by the University of South Carolina’s Nanoscholar program which I participated in during the 2008-2009 school year.

Picture Credits: Three Mile Island Diagram via World Nuclear Association; First Nuclear Picture by mandj98; Last nuclear picture by koert michiels