Nuclear Comes Back To the Party

Most of us know what torture it is to be a wallflower, so it's hard not to feel at least a slight frisson of sympathy for the nuclear industry. Once considered "most likely to succeed," this promising power source found itself stumbling in the 1970s. It was bad enough after Three Mile Island in 1979 -- particularly when Jane Fonda got to work in The China Syndrome. But this wallflower status was taken to an altogether different level in 1986, in the wake of an event whose ongoing repercussions will provide some of next year's great news hooks.

After Chernobyl, nuclear folk worldwide found themselves not just wallflowers, but actively disinvited wherever people came together to dance around the subject of sustainable energy. It was rather like Cinderella's coach and horses turning back into something a lot more mundane. And when the ill-fated Chernobyl site was shut down for good in 2000, some critics hailed the closure as the beginning of the industry's end.

Was it? Hardly -- and not just because of the high-level waste that will undoubtedly outlive our civilization by several hundred thousand years. In fact, this industry that was once consigned to the corner seems set to become the belle of the business world's ball.

Sting Your Partner

The sheer horror of the statistics that will no doubt be rolled out in 2006 would give even a nuclear engineer pause. Take thyroid cancer, normally a rare disease, with just one in a million children falling victim; a third of children who were younger than 4 when exposed in the main Chernobyl fallout zone are thought likely to develop the disease. In Belarus -- where 60 to 70 percent of the fallout landed, contaminating some 25 percent of the country's farmland and forest -- nearly 1,000 children have come down with thyroid cancer, compared to seven in the 10 years before the accident.

This type of thing has made the nuclear industry a darned unattractive prospect for NGOs and anyone else wanting to fill their partnership dance card. Today, anti-nuclear folk point with glee to the trend line for reactor construction starts -- which, having sketched the spiky outline of a pine forest from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, plummeted over the subsequent 20 years to the stuttering outline of melting snowdrifts. If the message weren't so gloomy for the nuclear folk, it might have made a nice Christmas card.

But irony of ironies, the industry is back, thanks in great part to environmental concerns. In 2004, for example, greens were shocked when one of their idols -- James Lovelock of Gaia hypothesis fame -- warned that only a massive expansion of nuclear power would save our current industrial civilization from rapidly advancing climate change. The peak-oil debate has been another driver, and it's all left environmentalists wondering: should we open our arms to the industry?

It's a complicated question. Much of the 20th century was spent in a hate-love-hate relationship with nuclear technology, mainly thanks to the shadow of the A-bomb. One of us remembers his father shipping off in 1957 to fly monitoring missions around the British H-bomb bursts above, yes, Christmas Island. On the upside, we were told we were going to zoom around in nuclear cars, trains, and planes. Energy too cheap to meter, we were promised, and a glowing cornucopia of atomic toys and gadgets. Now, again, nuclear is being dangled as the great, white-hot hope.

Even as today's giant companies like BP and GE begin to tilt to windmills and other renewable-energy technologies, countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are thinking seriously of going nuclear. The World Energy Council claims that the industry is "poised to expand its role in world electricity generation. Plant life will be extended in some markets, such as Finland or Sweden; new plants will be built in Asia; governments and voters will accept the inevitability of new nuclear power stations in Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, and even the Middle East."