Environmentalists Are Rethinking Nuclear. Should They?
The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake, also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Great Sendai Earthquake, struck the island of Honshu. The shock, which registered 9.1 on the Richter scale, was so powerful that it knocked the island eight feet closer to Hawaii and generated a tsunami that sloshed all the way to Antarctica.
That afternoon, three of Fukushima’s six reactors were up and running; the other three were down for maintenance. The quake tripped the plant’s emergency-response system, and control rods were automatically inserted into the fuel assemblies in the units numbered one, two, and three. Even so, the reactors continued to give off heat. When the tsunami hit, about forty-five minutes later, it flooded the plant’s backup generators, along with the batteries that were supposed to back up the backups. As a result, Fukushima’s cooling pumps failed. Within hours, the temperature inside Unit 1 rose to five thousand degrees, and the fuel assembly started to melt down. Everyone living within a mile and a half of the plant was ordered to evacuate.
Setback followed setback, in what one report would refer to as a “chain reaction” of crises. On March 12th, exploding hydrogen destroyed much of Unit 1 and exposed the pool that housed spent fuel rods to the air. The evacuation zone was extended to six miles, then, later that day, to twelve miles. Workers at the plant tried frantically to contain the damage, by, for example, spraying seawater from fire hoses and rigging up car batteries to supply power. On March 13th, the fuel assembly in Unit 3 melted. On March 14th, that unit suffered an explosion. On March 15th, there was another explosion, this time in Unit 4, where highly radioactive waste was being stored. (The reactors’ containment domes remained intact.)
As radiation-dose rates soared, Fukushima’s owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, considered pulling its workers from the plant. The Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, met with aides to assess the consequences of such a move. They concluded that without workers the situation would spin further out of control and that eventually all of Tokyo, which is a hundred and fifty miles south of Fukushima, might have to be emptied. Kan grew so alarmed that, reportedly, he stormed into TEPCO’s offices to demand that the workers stay at their posts. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, according to press accounts.
In the immediate aftermath, the lesson of Fukushima seemed clear. On March 15th, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced a shutdown of the seven oldest of the country’s seventeen working reactors.
“The absolutely improbable became reality,” Merkel, who had previously been staunchly pro-nuclear, said. “That changes the situation.” A few weeks later, her government decided to decommission all of Germany’s nuclear facilities. In short order, Switzerland, Belgium, and Japan announced phaseout plans. In earthquake-prone Italy, which had already shuttered its reactors, voters overwhelmingly rejected a government proposal to allow new ones to be constructed. “I am really happy,” one Roman voter told Reuters. “We do not want nuclear plants.”
But, with time, the accident’s significance has faded. When, in 2023, Germany fulfilled Merkel’s promise and shut the last of its reactors, her successor as head of the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz, mourned the event, calling it a “black day.”
“It raises the question of who here is driving in the wrong direction,” Merz said. By now, Switzerland, Belgium, and Japan have all backed away from their phaseout goals. Many countries, including Canada, France, and the United States, have signed on to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. Google has teamed up with a nuclear startup called Kairos Power. Amazon is investing in another nuclear startup, X-energy. Microsoft wants to reopen a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island, in central Pennsylvania. Fourteen years after Fukushima, fission, for better or worse, is back in fashion.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, a freelance journalist, was brought up in the nineteen-nineties on whole-wheat sandwiches packed in reused paper bags. Her environmentalist parents opposed nuclear power and might well have marched at anti-nuclear protests had the U.S. not mostly given up building reactors by then. Influenced by what she calls “years of indoctrination,” she became worried about environmental problems, particularly climate change. As an adult in Southern California, she helped organize her neighbors to install solar panels. She still viewed nuclear skeptically—until she learned that some prominent climate scientists were calling it the world’s best hope for limiting warming.
“Could it really be true that something that had once threatened to doom us was now needed to save us?” she wondered. She set out to learn more, and chronicles her journey of discovery in “Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy” (Algonquin).
“For reasons I don’t understand, I could absolutely annihilate a tomato juice right now.”
Cartoon by Tommy Siegel
Prominent among the book’s “evangelists” are Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, who founded a group called Mothers for Nuclear. (The organization’s logo shows a mother cradling a baby, encircled by rings of electrons.) Hoff and Zaitz both work at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, in central California. They are athletic and adventurous, and Tuhus-Dubrow clearly admires them.
“The two women seemed like more outdoorsy and capable versions of me, the kind of person I sort of wished I were,” she writes. But, recognizing that they are being paid by the nuclear industry, she also tries to maintain her reportorial distance: “I knew to be cautious about accepting their claims at face value.”
As it happens, Hoff was in the control room at Diablo Canyon the day of the Great East Japan Earthquake. According to Tuhus-Dubrow, Hoff’s initial reaction to the meltdowns was much like everyone else’s: “her confidence in nuclear power was shaken.” Gradually, though, Hoff recovered her faith. Yes, every nuclear operator’s nightmare had come true at Fukushima. But what had been the actual consequences? No one living close to the plant, or anyone working inside it, had died from acute radiation syndrome. As the years passed, there was no discernible rise in cancer deaths in the area around Fukushima. Meanwhile, a great many people—it’s been estimated at more than two thousand—had died prematurely as result of the disruptions caused by the evacuations. (Most of these victims were sick or elderly or both.) On the Mothers for Nuclear website, Hoff eventually summarized her view as follows: “Our fears were largely misdirected.”
In her travels with nuclear evangelists, Tuhus-Dubrow hears versions of this argument over and over. The problem is not that nuclear plants are prone to catastrophic meltdowns; it’s that people are prone to catastrophic thinking. “You see time and time again that fear of radiation, fear of nuclear, has been more dangerous than nuclear itself,” Eric Meyer, a former opera singer who heads a group called Generation Atomic, tells her.
Much of “Atomic Dreams” is devoted to the plant that employs Hoff and Zaitz. This is partly a function of Diablo Canyon’s location—it’s the only working nuclear station in Tuhus-Dubrow’s home state—and partly a function of its history. No nuclear facility in the U.S., and perhaps none in the world, has been the subject of more wrangling.
The fight began all the way back in 1961, when Pacific Gas & Electric proposed siting a nuclear reactor in Bodega Bay, a fishing village north of San Francisco which Alfred Hitchcock once described as “picturesque.” (He shot “The Birds” there.) At that point, the Sierra Club had yet to take a position on nuclear power, but it opposed P.G. & E.’s plan out of concerns that cooling towers would mar the scenery. P.G. & E. then proposed moving the plant three hundred miles south, to the Nipomo Dunes. This was where Cecil B. DeMille had filmed “The Ten Commandments,” and the Sierra Club objected again, for similar reasons. The Diablo Canyon site—a bluff on the Pacific roughly halfway between San Francisco and L.A.—was also spectacular. This time around, the Sierra Club was willing to compromise. In 1966, its executive board declared the bluff a “satisfactory alternative.” Ground was broken on Unit 1 two years later.
In 1969, geologists discovered the Hosgri Fault just offshore from Diablo Canyon. Mothers for Peace, a San Luis Obispo group originally formed to protest the Vietnam War, swivelled to take on P.G. & E. (“Mothers for Peace are fighting another war” is how the local newspaper put it. ) The organization filed motion after motion aimed at halting construction. This slowed but did not stop the work. Then, in 1979, Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown. The ranks of Diablo Canyon’s opponents swelled. In 1981, protesters blocked the only paved access road to the plant. Within two weeks, more than nineteen hundred people were arrested.
Diablo Canyon Unit 1 finally went online in May, 1985. Unit 2 followed in March, 1986. A month later, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in northern Ukraine, melted down and caught fire. (The accident, which resulted in more than a hundred cases of acute radiation syndrome and several thousand cases of thyroid cancer, is still considered the world’s worst nuclear disaster.) Mothers for Peace members took to wearing badges that said “Remember Chernobyl: It can happen here.”
For the next couple of decades, the mothers kept fighting and Diablo Canyon kept operating, more or less uneventfully. This was the case even though several additional earthquake faults were discovered nearby. All the while, though, the glow was coming off the atom. Nuclear power had been promoted as affordable—according to one famous prediction, it would be “too cheap to meter”—but was instead proving too expensive to sustain. By contrast, other forms of energy, such as solar and wind, were falling steeply in price. In 2016, P.G. & E. announced that it would close Diablo Canyon when the reactors’ operating licenses expired, in 2025. The utility promised to replace the power with other forms of carbon-free energy. Gavin Newsom, then the state’s lieutenant governor, called the arrangement one “we can all be proud of.”