Credit: Joe Gough
In the summer of 1981, Ken Caldeira found himself in jail after protesting the slated opening of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, NY. Caldeira, then a freelance software developer working on Wall Street, was an ardent member of the anti-nuclear movement: In 1979, he was arrested at a weapons demonstration just a few blocks away from his office, wearing the same suit he had worn to work. As part of a group called Mobilization for Survival, he helped coordinate a 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park on June 12th, 1982, against nuclear weaponry and power.
Fast-forward 20 years: Caldeira is a climatologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University, and a specialist in energy and global warming. And he has flip-flopped his stance on nuclear power in the face of the mounting dangers of climate change, though his change of mind comes with some ambivalence.
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"I'm kind of a reluctant supporter to the expansion of nuclear power," Caldeira said. "It's not my favorite choice, but it's not as bad as burning coal,"
Caldeira is not alone. He is part of a new guard of nuclear supporters made up of climate change scholars and environmentalists who fear that the impact of fossil fuel emissions on the Earth's ecosystems is so dire that they are willing, if hesitantly, to regard nuclear power's own environmental offenses—such as waste and the risk of contamination—as the lesser of two evils.
"We are already in a situation in 2006 where alpine glaciers are melting; we've lost about half the ice in the Arctic ocean, the tundra is melting at high latitudes," said Martin Hoffert, a retired NYU physicist and expert on alternative energy technologies, who is another reluctant supporter of developing nuclear power. "If that's what's happening now in 2006, how bad are things going to be by 2020? How bad are they going to be by 2050? We think they're going to be very bad. We think the second half of the 21st century is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen."
Public opinion towards nuclear power has been largely negative since the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, in 1979, and Chernobyl, which occurred 20 years ago today. In fact, in the mid-'70s, prior to the Three Mile Island accident, the US government pulled back on the construction of approximately 40 new facilities. A Washington Post-ABC News nationwide poll taken in 1980 found a tepid 47% approval for building more new power plants. Nuclear's popularity unsurprisingly dipped to an all-time low of 19% in a Washington Post-ABC News poll just after Chernobyl, but since that nadir, the percentage rose gradually, peaking at 42% in 2001, though as of the middle of 2005, only 35% of Americans supported new plants.
However, following President Bush's announcement during his January State of the Union address that the US is "addicted to oil," support for nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels rose to 44% from 39% in September of 2005, according to a Pew Center poll.
Governments around the world are responding to this reluctant interest in nuclear power. Finland is in the process of constructing a new reactor, the first built in Western Europe in over a decade. English Prime Minister Tony Blair is believed to favor building new power plants as part of a UK scheme to cut carbon emissions by almost 20%. China has announced plans to build 25 to 35 new plants by 2050, and projections based on their current energy needs suggested that many more will be necessary as the country's population swells.