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Anti-nuclear |
| Anti-nuclear movement |
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The anti-nuclear movement is a loosely-linked international social movement opposed to the use of nuclear technologies. The chief focus of the movement is opposition to nuclear power (see Nuclear debate), but also includes other issues such as:
Historically, this opposition has come from both political organizations and grassroots movements. Common political targets are new nuclear plants (see EPR image to right), waste repository sites, transport of waste, nuclear reprocessing, uranium mining, or any other nuclear-connected technology, because of perceived and real environmental consequences of these activities.
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A symbol of the anti-nuclear movement is a smiling, traditionally red sun, usually on a yellow background. There are several variations, such as pugnacious raised fist or angry face. It is often accompanied by the slogan "Nuclear power? No thanks!" This symbol has its roots in the Danish anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and has since gained worldwide usage.
The Free Republic of Wendland coat of arms, which is not recognized internationally, shows an orange sun on a dark green background.
A symbol of resistance against nuclear waste transport is a (mostly yellow) X. This symbol is newer than the smiling sun. It originated in the German anti-nuclear movement.
 The "Smiling Sun" icon of the anti-nuclear movement. Originated from the Danish Antinuclear Movement (OOA).1 |
 A possible predecessor to the smiling sun logo. |
 Another high profile anti-nuclear symbol, which is a variation on the international radiation symbol. It is used and recognized in at least Australia. |
 Anti-nuclear poster from the 1970s American movement. |
The roots of the anti-nuclear movement stem mainly from three sources:
All three of these roots coalesced following the use of atomic weapons on Japan and the subsequent bomb tests, with resultant distribution of radioactive fallout. The anti-nuclear movement grew out of this convergence.2
In the 1960s, the environmental movement grew mainly in reaction to obvious deterioration of the natural and urban environments. Although some environmentalists favoured nuclear energy as a way to reduce pollution, the majority came to the movement with already-formed anti-nuclear attitudes, and at present the anti-nuclear movement and the environmental movement have considerable overlap.2
Opponents of nuclear energy used the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of 1968 to reinforce the connections between the international export and development of nuclear power technologies and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Finally, because nuclear power has always been a technology which requires and employs specialists, some individuals with little or no scientific training view it as an elitist technology.3 The public view of nuclear power is based on popular political and social perception rather than in-depth knowledge of the technology and scientific specifics of nuclear power.
Much early opposition to nuclear power was expressed in relation to environmental grounds: thermal pollution, known and postulated reactor accidents, potential release of radiation during shipments, and still-developing means for long-term radioactive waste storage and disposal. The environmental movement made such concerns well-known, whereas opposition on issues such as concentration of capital in major engineering endeavors rather than decentralized and less productive energy sources, and proliferation of nuclear weapons, did not attract much attention.
By the time of the rise of New England's Clamshell Alliance, California's Abalone Alliance, and dozens of similar regional groups dedicated to stopping the growth of nuclear power through nonviolent civil disobedience based actions, points of opposition had expanded from concerns about pollution and proliferation to include concerns about economic viability and terrorist target threats.4
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This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2008) |
John Gofman was called the father of the anti-nuclear movement by somewho?, even though his concerns over nuclear energy began in the 1960s, long after the movement started. He was, in fact, a weapons researcher and never apologized for his work on atomic bombs.567 He claimed that the consequences of exposure to low levels of radiation were much greater than previously thought. His findings were disputed by other analysts,8 but safety standards were strengthened,9 and in 2005 The National Academies of Science released a report which concluded "that the smallest dose [of radiation] has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans."10
The National Institutes of Health11 and the Health Physics Society12 in the United States and other professional health organizations internationally13 reject the hypothesis on which Gofman based his calculations, the "linear-no-threshold" formula. The International Commission on Radiation Protection and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation acknowledge that the concept is unsupported by scientific evidence but recommend the rule be applied in risk calculations in the interest of conservatism, supposing that overstating the risk leads to safer design considerations.13 Critics complain that the rule encourages unsafe decisions by driving choices toward other, greater, health risks.14
Gofman predicted that Chernobyl would cause 1,000,000 cancers and 475,000 deaths, and later, in 1996, estimated that the majority of cancers in the U.S. were caused by medical radiation.15 These estimates are widely disputed, and in 2005 a report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer), and estimated that there may be 4,000 extra cancer deaths among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed people; thus proving Gofman was significantly in error.1617181920
Gofman acted as an expert witness in several radiation-exposure legal cases and helped to establish an advocacy group, the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, based in San Francisco.21
Gofman did not play a major organizing role in the movement, and suggested that Larry Bogart is the movement's true originator.5
Anti-nuclear events have seen participation in the tens of thousands on a number of occasions. Exact counts, however, are generally impossible, and estimates may differ by large margins in some cases, making an exact ranking difficult. A likely candidate for the largest anti-nuclear protest was a nuclear weapons protest in West Berlin boasting on the order of 600,000 participants in 1983.22 The largest petition was against nuclear weapons and boasted 32 million signatures.23 The largest protest against nuclear power may have been on July 13, 1976 in Bilbao, Spain when 200,000 have been estimated to be in attendance; its platform was to have public votes on nuclear plants.24
A few injuries during protests have occurred which include a train worker who was hurt when a hook claw sabotage method was used once. No deaths have resulted from violent action, although one resulted from non-violent direct action, and one resulted from an attack by right wingers on a protest. Major instances include:
The movement was popularised in part by artists. Beginning in the 1960s, the anti-nuclear trend was escalated in the popular media by novels such as Fail-Safe and films such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Popular performers such as Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne recorded songs about nuclear or alternative power sources.2829 Along with numerous documentary film treatments, the Academy Award nominated The China Syndrome, 1979, and Silkwood films dramatised the fears of anti-nuclear activists.
A common theme among environmentalists is the belief in the need to reduce consumerism. Early anti-nuclear advocates thought that nuclear energy would enable lifestyles which would strain the viability of the natural environment. This belief reinforced their generally anti-nuclear attitudes.
If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.
—Amory Lovins, The Mother Earth - Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p. 22
Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.
—Paul Ehrlich, "An Ecologist's Perspective on Nuclear Power", May/June 1978 issue of Federation of American Scientists Public Issue Report
We can and should seize upon the energy crisis as a good excuse and great opportunity for making some very fundamental changes that we should be making anyhow for other reasons.
—Russell Train (EPA Administrator at the time, and soon thereafter became head of the World Wildlife Fund), Science 184 p. 1050, 7 June 1974
Let's face it. We don't want safe nuclear power plants. We want NO nuclear power plants.
—A spokesman for the Government Accountability Project, an offshoot of the Institute for Policy Studies, The American Spectator, Vol 18, No. 11, Nov. 1985
The movement uses a number of methods to influence policy and gain publicity. Many prominent institutionalized groups advocate Non-violent direct action. Others, individuals or anti-nuclear groups, have taken violent direct action (such as rocket attacks on the Superphénix site). Types of actions taken include:
The results of one study that investigated the relative prevalence of each kind of protests in the anti-nuclear movement in Germany are shown below.
| Type of protest | Entire German Environmental Movement |
Anti-nuclear Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Appeal | 16.1 | 7.2 |
| Procedural | 8.9 | 7.7 |
| Demonstrative | 42.3 | 44.5 |
| Confrontational | 16.9 | 24.6 |
| Light violence | 5.7 | 2.4 |
| Heavy violence | 6.2 | 10.9 |
| Other | 3.8 | 2.6 |
| Total | 100 | 100 |
| Sample size | 1,377 | 62 |
By the nation's legislation under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, all territorial sea and land of New Zealand is declared a “nuclear free zone”.36
In Italy the use of nuclear power was barred by a referendum in 1987.37 Recently, however, Italy has agreed to export nuclear technology38 and now it intends to reverse the ban on nuclear power (as Sweden did in 2005).39
Touted as a victory by the Alliance '90/The Greens political party, which positions itself as anti-nuclear, Germany set a date of 2020 for the permanent shutdown of the last nuclear power plant in the Nuclear Exit Law, although recently there have been significant discussions to extend this date.4041
Ireland also has no plans to change its non-nuclear stance and pursue nuclear power in the future.42
In the United States, the Navajo Nation forbids uranium mining and processing in its land.43 The United States has, by Presidential executive order, a ban on the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
Nuclear accidents are often cited by anti-nuclear groups as evidence of the inherent danger of nuclear power (see Nuclear and radiation accidents). Also, according to anti-nuclear organizations, rendering nuclear waste harmless is not being done satisfactorily and it remains a hazard for anywhere between a few years to many thousands of years (although the same organizations usually oppose, and lobby against, processing the waste to reduce its radioactivity and longevity).444546 The economics and nuclear proliferation issues are also primary concerns.
In general, anti-nuclear groups tend to claim that reliance on nuclear energy can be reduced by adopting energy conservation policies. Some favour changing human lifestyles to allow lower energy consumption that can be supported by renewable energy sources, believing those lifestyles would generate less pollution.
Anti-nuclear groups favour the development of distributed generation of renewable energy, such as biomass (wood fuel and biofuel), wind power and solar power, and efficiency-enhancing approaches including co-generation.47 Some favour geothermal power as well, though it isn't distributed and emits considerable amounts of air pollution and greenhouse gases.48
Greenpeace advocates reduction of fossil fuels by 50% by 2050 as well as phasing out nuclear energy, contending that innovative technologies can increase energy efficiency, and suggests that by 2050 the majority of electricity will be generated from renewable sources.49
In 2008 musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash (see No Nukes group) announced a new campaign to stop Congress from economically favouring the nuclear industry.50
Criticism comes mainly from three sources: nuclear experts with specialised technical knowledge, environmentalists, and businesses that conduct nuclear activities. The principal criticisms are that nuclear opponents overstate the impacts on human health and on the environment from nuclear energy and fail to consider the impacts of alternatives, that they make the same unbalanced comparisons with respect to economic cost, and that they ignore the practical limits of alternatives. Beyond that, critics charge that the more radical nuclear opponents argue points which are frightening but irrelevant, that they misrepresent the facts about nuclear energy and fail to substantiate their statements, and that they contradict independent analyses done by unbiased professionals.
Environmentalists criticise the anti-nuclear movement for under-stating the environmental costs of fossil-fuels and non-nuclear alternatives, and over-stating the environmental costs of nuclear energy.5152
Of the numerous nuclear experts who have offered their expertise in addressing controversies, Bernard Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, is likely the most frequently cited. In his extensive writings he examines the safety issues in detail. He is best known for comparing nuclear safety to the relative safety of a wide range of other phenomena.5354
Anti-nuclear activists are sometimes accused of representing the risks of nuclear power in an unfair way. The War Against the Atom (Basic Books, 1982) Samuel MacCracken of Boston University argued that in 1982, 50,000 deaths per year could be attributed directly to non-nuclear power plants, if fuel production and transportation, as well as pollution, were taken into account. He argued that if non-nuclear plants were judged by the same standards as nuclear ones, each US non-nuclear power plant could be held responsible for about 100 deaths per year. 55 Nuclear power, according to MacCracken, even has a better safety record than solar.
The Nuclear Energy Institute56 (NEI) is the main lobby group for companies doing nuclear work in the USA, while most countries that employ nuclear energy have a national industry group. The World Nuclear Association is the only global trade body. In seeking to counteract the arguments of nuclear opponents, it points to independent studies that quantify the costs and benefits of nuclear energy and compares them to the costs and benefits of alternatives. NEI sponsors studies of its own, but it also references studies performed for the World Health Organisation57, for the International Energy Agency 58, and by university researchers59.
Some environmentalists, including former opponents of nuclear energy, criticize the movement on the basis of the claim that nuclear energy is necessary for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. These individuals include James Lovelock,51 originator of the Gaia hypothesis, Patrick Moore52, and Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.6061 Lovelock goes further to refute claims about the danger of nuclear energy and its waste products.62 In a January, 2008 interview, Moore said that "It wasn't until after I'd left Greenpeace and the climate change issue started coming to the forefront that I started rethinking energy policy in general and realized that I had been incorrect in my analysis of nuclear as being some kind of evil plot."[2]
Some anti-nuclear organisations have acknowledged that their positions are subject to review.63 However, concern for global warming has not changed the views of some other anti-nuclear organisations toward nuclear energy. These include Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth (FoE). Nuclear opponents counter that capital resources would be spent more productively on renewable energy sources than nuclear plants, arguing further that the problem of intermittancy can be overcome through storage, biofuels, and improving the electrical-distribution grid.
But critics of the movement point to independent studies that show the opposite: that the capital resources required for renewable energy sources are higher.58 They also point out that storage and long-distance redistribution of electricity, assuming they could be accomplished, would add to the cost and that the inefficiencies of both mitigation methods would raise the costs even more. They also argue that biofuels can't even replace a major part of petroleum-based fuel for vehicles, much less generate electricity.64 Some have gone so far as to claim that incorporating renewable technologies such as wind may increase fuel consumption and carbon emissions, in places such as Denmark.65
Approval ratings of nuclear energy, which are a reflection of the anti-nuclear movement's position prevalence in the general public, vary from poll to poll. These variations can be due to news coverage of events concerning e.g. nuclear reactors, energy supplies, global warming. Some polls show that the approval of nuclear power rises with the education level of the respondents67.
The results of the polls tend to be variable, depending on the question asked: a CBS News/New York Times poll in 2007 showed that a majority of Americans would not like to have a nuclear plant built in their community, although an increasing percentage would like to see more nuclear power.68
A poll in the European Union for Feb-Mar 2005 showed 37% in favour of nuclear energy and 55% opposed, leaving 8% undecided.69 The same agency ran another poll in Oct-Nov 2006 that showed 14% favoured building new nuclear plants, 34% favoured maintaining the same number, and 39% favoured reducing the number of operating plants, leaving 13% undecided.67
In the United States, the Nuclear Energy Institute has run polls since the 1980s which had shown a general trend toward favourable attitudes on nuclear energy.70 A poll in conducted March 30 to April 1, 2007 chose solar as the most likely largest source for electricity in the US in 15 years (27% of those polled) followed by nuclear, 24% and coal, 14%. Those who were favourable of nuclear being used dropped to 63% from a historic high of 70% in 2005 and 68% in September, 2006.71
In Spain in 2007, nuclear energy received a low poll rating at 3.1 on a scale of 10. Solar and wind received the highest rating, at 8.6 and 8.3, respectively.66
Views on nuclear power have a lot to do with how people socially construct nuclear technologies. (See Social construction) In places like America, the word "Nuclear" tend to also be related to words like "Nuclear Waste", "Nuclear Radiation" and "Meltdown". In other words, the society has socially constructed the idea of Nuclear power to have a negative connotation.citation needed
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