ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, Three Mile Island riveted attention on the hot debate over reactor safety and future energy needs. The 1980s did not begin with such an atomic drama. Civilian nuclear power was moribund by then; its ultimate fate uncertain. By mid-decade, however, nuclear power was again front-page news with the horror of Chernobyl, renewing the fear of fallout that rocked an earlier generation. As usual, hope, promise, and risk told the tale of atomic power in the 1980s and the decade which followed. Some of the issues debated were startlingly similar. Was a reactor accident a terrible aberration or something to anticipate again? Could commercial nuclear power live up to the dream of an abundant (and clean) new source of electricity? But other questions introduced new or seldom considered issues: Beyond reactor safety what do we do with other potentially risky elements of the fuel cycle such as waste? These concerns, the familiar and the unfamiliar, made it clear that atomic energy was woven tightly into the fabric of the coming decades as it had been since the 1940s. This chapter examines the post-TMI world of commercial nuclear power to the end of the twentieth century, pointing toward its uncertain future in the twenty-first.
