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Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and the United States

University of California Press

Few would disagree that a central feature of the American state is its weakness. Abhorring the feudal states of Europe, the Founding Fathers wrote a constitution with separated powers and a complex arrangement of checks and balances that should "weaken any one set of public officials relative to others and the state as a whole vis-a-vis society" (Nordlinger 1981, 184). If there is one exception to this "fragmentation and dispersion of power and authority" (Krasner 1978, 62) and low profile of the American state, it is the early history of the nuclear power sector.

Civilian nuclear power is the only commercial technology in American history that was deliberately created and promoted by the state. David Lilienthal (1963, 94), first chair of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), naively eulogized in the early days what later became the source of bitter controversy: "For the first time in our history a new technical development became a monopoly of government, its future entrusted not to normal competitive forces but to a single government agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, armed with billions of dollars and the broadest of powers."

Growing out of the military Manhattan Project, the civilian nuclear power sector never lost the air of secrecy and centralized control that had been necessary to produce the atomic bomb. The collusion between the emergent nuclear industry and the state violated a fundamental principle of the American political tradition. This placed the nuclear sector in a

precarious position from the very start and subsequently strengthened the antinuclear movement, which could lay claim to the cherished political center view that state power should be controlled and minimized.

The early decision to build a civilian nuclear industry stirred little public attention at the time (DeLeon 1979; Del Sesto 1979; Heertsgaard 1983). The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 put an end to military control of nuclear affairs and established the civilian AEC to promote and regulate the military and civilian uses of the atom. The act also created the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) to provide for congressional control of the executive branch agency. The "apotheosis of the Congressional committee" (Green and Rosenthal 1963, 25), the JCAE was the only joint committee with legislative powers. Instead of subjecting the AEC to democratic controls, the JCAE effectively removed the nuclear policy arena from the scrutiny of the full assembly. As a result, the new technology developed along "abnormal, if not aberrational, lines" (Green 1982, 59).

The Atoms for Peace initiative of the Eisenhower administration became the watershed in the development of civilian nuclear power. Whereas his Democratic predecessor Harry S Truman had considered nuclear power "too important a development to be made the subject of profit-seeking," Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act in 1954 that privatized the new technology, subjecting the latter to the "genius and enterprise of American business" (quoted in Ford 1982, 41). If there was conflict at this early point, it was between the Democrat-controlled JCAE and the Republican executive. The JCAE advocated a state-owned nuclear industry and tried to accelerate the growth of civilian nuclear power, while the AEC took a more cautious, market-oriented approach. The defeat of the Gore-Holifield bill in 1956, which would have directed the AEC to construct and operate six large-scale demonstration reactors, put an end to the public versus private debate (Green and Rosenthal 1963, 256).

Political motives drove the Atoms for Peace initiative (Lowen 1987; Clarke 1985). The "peaceful" atom allayed bomb guilt and provided a cover for the further development of the military option. Most importantly, civilian nuclear power appeared as the preeminent frontier technology, indispensable for national prestige and economic world leadership—particularly in the cold war competition with the Soviet Union (Boyer 1985). The prospect of "energy too cheap to meter" made nuclear power the consensus technology of the future, cutting across the established ideological cleavages.1

AEC chair Lewis Strauss coined this famous phrase in 1955.

Shielding the nascent nuclear industry from the vagaries of the insurance market was the next significant move by the federal government to get the new technology started. In addition to the anomalous centralization of power, the partial abolition of market controls was the second violation of American political principles that would be relentlessly attacked by the antinuclear movement. Frightened by the first AEC-sponsored risk evaluation, WASH-740, which exposed for the first time the catastrophic impact of a worst-case accident, the nuclear industry demanded protection from legal liabilities.2

WASH-740 described a worst-case scenario with three thousand immediate casualties, more than forty thousand serious injuries, and property damage of $7 billion over an area of 150,000 square miles (AEC 1958).

Movement leader John Gofman calls Price-Anderson "a vicious corruption of the free market system" (Interview, 21 October 1987, San Francisco).

Finally, the choice of the problematic light-water reactor (LWR) design and its commercialization at breakneck speed became crucial determinants of the later controversy because they sparked the ongoing debate over accident risk (Perrow 1984, ch. 2; Campbell 1988, ch. 4). The AEC-sponsored Power Reactor Demonstration Program of 1955 still entailed subsidies for a variety of reactor designs (Mullenbach 1963, 127–140; Del Sesto 1979, 50–61). But the availability of enriched uranium, the success of a small LWR to propel nuclear submarines, and, above all, the privatization of the nuclear business, which forced the young technology to compete with established forms of power generation from early on, brought an early victory for the LWR. Less accident-prone reactor designs were relegated to oblivion. The decision for an economical, rather than an inherently safe, reactor design constituted the root cause of the nuclear power controversy, not only in the United States but also in every country that adopted the light-water technology (Morone and Woodhouse 1989).

For reasons to be elaborated, the commercial breakthrough of civilian nuclear power occurred without major public opposition. In the early 1960s, in response to an AEC deeming nuclear power "at the threshold of...