Nuclear Power: Time to Choose

Nuclear power. The words conjure first the hellish explosion at Chernobyl that spewed a radioactive cloud across the Ukraine and Europe five years ago this week, poisoning crops, spawning bizarre mutant livestock, killing dozens of people and exposing millions more to dangerous fallout. Then the words summon up Three Mile Island (shown here) and the threat of a meltdown that spread panic across Pennsylvania's rolling countryside seven years earlier. From these grew the alarming television programs, the doomsday books, the terrifying movies, even the jokes (What's served on rice and glows in the dark? Chicken Kiev). Could any technology survive all that? It seemed this one couldn't. U.S. utilities ordered their last nuclear plant in 1978 -- and eventually canceled all orders placed after 1973. Nuclear power looked as good as dead.

Yet it lives. More than that, it is reasserting itself with great force. A survey of high-level policy leaders and futurists by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, released this month, shows a sudden upsurge in support for nuclear power following a decade of rejection. As the world worries about global warming and acid rain, even some environmentalists are looking a bit more kindly on the largest power source that doesn't worsen either problem: nuclear. New reactor designs would make accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island impossible, or so the engineers say, and while much of the public is skeptical, some scientists are persuaded.

The sometimes theoretical debate is becoming intensely practical. As summer approaches and electric companies around the U.S. warn of periodic brownouts, people wonder, Where will we get more juice?

Nuclear power has a long way to go before it becomes the answer to that ! question. The public is afraid of it. Wall Street doesn't even want to hear about it. Most environmental groups are still virulently antinuclear. Yet here, there, in more places every day, support is building. The National Academy of Sciences called this month for the swift development of a new generation of nuclear plants to help fight the greenhouse effect. The new atomic plants already on the drawing board (see box) would replace power stations that burn coal and oil, fossil fuels that belch heat-trapping carbon dioxide -- the primary greenhouse gas -- into the atmosphere.

Many scientists applauded the findings of the independent academy, which conducted a 15-month federally funded study of the greenhouse problem. Says Ratib Karam, director of the Neely Nuclear Research Center at Georgia Tech: "Nuclear energy is now the only major source of power that does not produce CO2. In terms of global society, nuclear power plants are essential."

Even before the academy released its report, George Bush put forth an energy plan in February that proposed greatly speeding up the procedure for licensing the new generation of nuclear plants. That is critical: public challenges to plant construction have stretched out licensing to as much as 20 years and raised building costs to such intolerable levels that many utilities have been forced to abandon plants before they ever opened.