ABSTRACT
As an energy source, nuclear power was not technologically feasible nor economically viable when it was embraced by the US in 1946. Despite the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the near meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, over 200 “precursors” to core meltdown accidents in the brief period of the technology’s commercial use, and an industrial history worldwide of massive cost overruns, nuclear power continues to be evaluated in the “future tense,” that is, in terms of what it will bring rather than what it has already wrought or what it requires from society to maintain operation. Since industrialization, Western ideas of progress have equated social success with national wealth and scientific and technological prowess. Nuclear enthusiasm long ago transcended what, at least at one time, was thought to be the most fundamental ideological division among industrial societies, namely, the contest between capitalism and socialism.
