BusinessWeek Debate Room Nuclear Power: A Bad Reaction

Nuclear Power: A Bad Reaction
Thanks to new evidence showing nuclear energy as more of a polluter than previously thought, the U.S. should reconsider approval for new plants. Pro or con?
Pro: Peril Then, Peril Now

by Jim Riccio, Greenpeace USA

The nuclear industry and its friends in the Bush Administration have been attempting to change the nuclear industry’s image. With the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters fading from most Americans’ memories, industry lobbyists are anxious to paint this most dangerous and volatile energy source as the answer to U.S. oil addiction and global warming.

The unproven assertion that atomic energy can solve global warming has helped further the collective amnesia about the past business failures of nuclear energy. In February, 1985, Forbes magazine declared that “[t]he failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent.”