- 7/4/2025
Richard Rhodes looks at how the general public's aversion toward nuclear power has derailed its progress as a vital energy source.
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00:00No technology in history has generated more passion.
00:22No technology in history has evoked such suspicion and fear.
00:27It is the most evil, most health-degrading type of energy that there is.
00:33It's just the stupidest way I ever heard of to just boil water to generate electricity.
00:40America's nuclear power industry is failing.
00:44Crippled by public opposition, mounting costs, and a politically intractable nuclear waste problem,
00:50its critics have already declared victory.
00:54Nuclear power is dead.
00:56There will not be another nuclear power plant built here, ever.
00:59I mean, it's nothing that we really have to argue about.
01:02Nuclear power is unsafe, it's uneconomical, and it's opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
01:09Citizens distrust the technology.
01:12Wall Street distrusts the economic gamble.
01:15Nuclear power is dead. It's over. It's that simple.
01:18If the critics are right, the final resting place for the waste from four decades of commercial nuclear power may well be here,
01:27buried under a remote stretch of the Nevada desert called Yucca Mountain.
01:33I'm Richard Rhodes.
01:35I spent 15 years studying the history of nuclear energy.
01:39I wrote about it in my book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
01:42I find it extraordinary that half a century after the discovery of this new source of energy,
01:49I'm standing on what may become its burial ground.
01:52How did it happen that the nation that first harnessed this awesome new source of power is about to abandon it?
02:00What is it about this technology that stirs our passions?
02:13Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
02:20And by annual financial support from viewers like you.
02:26This is Frontline.
02:30Additional funding for this program was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of the role of technology.
02:42The Foundation also supports the Sloan Technology Series,
02:45a collection of books chronicling the major technologies of the 20th century.
02:50Atomic energy burst upon the world 52 years ago in the New Mexican desert.
03:07In July 1945, scientists in the top secret Manhattan Project prepared to test an atomic bomb.
03:16They knew they were unleashing a force of mythic proportions.
03:20Physicist Robert Oppenheimer paid homage in the words of a Hindu god.
03:29Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
03:33A few weeks later, the world learned about atomic energy when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
03:46I remember the awe I felt as a boy when I heard about the destruction these new bombs caused.
03:53They shocked the world and ended a long and terrible war.
04:01Once discovered, this astonishing new technology could not be forgotten.
04:05The atomic age had begun.
04:12But instead of destruction, scientists dreamed of harnessing the power of the nucleus,
04:18offering humankind a source of limitless energy.
04:21By 1951, American scientists had taken the same nuclear power that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki
04:29and used it to turn the lights on.
04:31It was a very exciting field.
04:36We thought it would be the leading method of making electricity throughout the world.
04:41You have a very small amount of space, 12 feet tall, 12 feet in diameter,
04:47and you produce enough electricity to run a large city in that small space.
04:53So the energy source is extremely concentrated, which is one of its great benefits.
04:56The source of nuclear fission is uranium, a naturally occurring metal.
05:02Before the war, scientists discovered that a small fraction of the uranium atoms found in nature,
05:09less than 1%, have a special property.
05:12When they're hit by neutrons, they split, releasing more neutrons that in turn can split other uranium atoms.
05:18Each split or fission releases large amounts of energy.
05:25By fabricating thumb-sized uranium pellets, loading the pellets into fuel rods,
05:33and assembling the rods into a core, scientists were able to produce a self-sustaining chain reaction that yielded enormous quantities of heat.
05:42The core's energy heats water, producing steam that drives turbines, which generate electricity.
05:55Proponents argued it was a dream form of clean energy that would be too cheap to meter.
06:01This new type of power reactor supplied city-wide the kind of energy which will someday power man's factories.
06:08But this rosy view of a nuclear future always had to compete with darker images.
06:15From terrible explosions and the end of civilization,
06:20to nightmarish mutations induced by radiation run amok.
06:25Do not panic! Do not panic!
06:35By the 1970s, nuclear power had become a political target.
06:42Its leading critic was Ralph Nader.
06:44The Atomic Energy Commission is licensing unsafe reactors operating near major metropolitan areas,
06:52and that they clearly have been aware of this lack of safety.
06:56The press wasn't critical. The Congress bought into the Atomic Energy Commission party line.
07:03There was a huge taxpayer-funded propaganda about how good nuclear power was going right into the high schools and elementary schools in our country with traveling road shows.
07:14The scientific community was part of the industry itself, and there was no outside critique, there was no government critique, and there was secrecy above it all.
07:25Then in 1979 came Three Mile Island.
07:29Good evening. The world has never known a day quite like today.
07:33It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age.
07:40It seemed to confirm our worst fears, that in trying to exploit nuclear fission, we had opened a Pandora's box.
07:47A series of technical and human errors led to a partial meltdown of one Three Mile Island reactor.
07:56The accident riveted America. Nothing would ever be the same.
08:01While no one was injured or killed in the accident, the experience helped forge a generation of hardened anti-nuclear activists like Eric Epstein and Mary Osborne.
08:12They are convinced beyond doubt that nuclear energy is dangerous, that it kills people in an invisible and insidious way.
08:22They want to wipe it off the face of the earth.
08:26I don't trust these people. These people got away with murder. They killed people.
08:31And, you know, radiation is difficult to pin down. It's not like I put a gun to your head and shoot you.
08:37You know, with radiation, it's going to be difficult to determine, you know, if a certain disease was caused by it.
08:44Since Three Mile Island, researchers have studied public attitudes extensively.
08:50They've found that people's doubts about nuclear power have increased with time.
08:55But let's go back now to your word association associated with nuclear power.
09:00And I want to just go around the table and we'll start with Leo and go that way.
09:04What's your first image?
09:06Disaster.
09:07Disaster. David, what's your first image?
09:09The first image I had was trouble.
09:11Trouble. Disgusting.
09:13The first word was dangerous.
09:15The first thing I thought of was radiation.
09:17Radiation.
09:18I'm going to read...
09:19Strong nuclear reactions.
09:21Like this focus group, many people fear radiation.
09:25But scientists like John Mulder, who work with radiation every day, feel differently.
09:30If we knew what they knew, they argue, we might feel less afraid.
09:35Biologists measure radiation in small units called millirems.
09:40Whether or not it's dangerous depends on the dose.
09:43A sufficiently large dose of ionizing radiation, and here we're talking of millions of millirems, will actually kill you on the spot, within seconds.
09:54Getting down to somewhat more reasonable doses, hundreds of thousands of millirems, these can also kill people.
10:03It takes a while, typically 7 to 21 days.
10:07There were people in the Chernobyl accident, some of the firefighters, who got doses in this range.
10:13200,000 to maybe 600,000 or higher millirems.
10:18And they died as a result of this.
10:20This is called acute radiation poisoning.
10:22Once you get below roughly 200,000 millirems, this doesn't happen.
10:28People do not get acutely sick as a result of radiation exposure.
10:32What they are, however, is at an increased risk of sometime in the future developing cancer.
10:39Much of what's known about the effects of radiation was learned in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
10:46In one of the largest studies ever conducted, 50,000 Japanese bomb survivors were followed up for 50 years
10:54to see if their cancer rates increased and whether they passed on genetic mutations to their children.
10:59Much to the scientists' surprise, there was no increase in inherited mutations.
11:07Despite the science fiction films, this fear proved unfounded.
11:12Cancer rates did increase, though, especially among those exposed to more than 10,000 millirems.
11:17Of those 50,000 people, about 5,000 of them have developed cancer.
11:27Based on what we know of the rest of the Japanese population, you would have expected about 4,500 of them.
11:35So we have 5,000 cancers over 50 years where we would expect 4,500.
11:40So we assume that those extra 500 cancers were induced by the radiation.
11:47Two, three, go!
11:50Not surprisingly, some of the citizens living near Three Mile Island see parallels with Hiroshima.
11:56Good job!
11:57At the time of the accident, we left the area, and when we got to my mother's home, my son went into the bathroom and threw up.
12:07He had thrown up a vile green slime. There was no other way to explain it but that. No food, just heavy, thick mucus.
12:14And it was the color of a commercial cleanser.
12:21Approximately six months later, some doctors came in who dealt with the victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
12:29I told him this story about my son, and he said, well, that's a classic case of radiation sickness poisoning.
12:35But Mulder is skeptical because the dose at Three Mile Island was so much lower than Hiroshima.
12:43In the case of Three Mile Island, it makes no sense whatsoever.
12:47We have a very good idea what the doses to the population were around Three Mile Island.
12:54Most of the population got something in the neighborhood of 2 to 10 millirem.
12:58To get radiation sickness, you need 200,000 millirem.
13:02But could the authorities have lied about the amount of radiation that was released?
13:09There is no way in a technological society you could conceal radiation exposures that high.
13:16A dose high enough to cause radiation sickness would, for example, have fogged common photographic film for hundreds of miles.
13:25Any photographer would have noticed it.
13:28Any hospital that did x-rays would have noticed it.
13:31Any dental studio would have noticed it.
13:34The Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the State Boards of Health,
13:41all concluded that extremely small amounts of radiation were released.
13:45Small compared to what?
13:48Certainly compared to Hiroshima.
13:50But also compared to the radiation we got from nature.
13:53The average American, myself included, gets about 350 millirems of radiation each year, most of it unavoidable.
14:06Cosmic rays shower down on us from outer space, giving us about 30 millirems per year.
14:13If you live at higher altitudes, like Denver, you get 60 millirems.
14:17Then there are the rocks beneath our feet.
14:22Since the beginning of time, radioactive elements in the Earth's crust have been decaying, giving off radiation.
14:28Because our building materials come out of the ground, they are slightly radioactive, giving us about 10 millirems a year.
14:37Some materials, like granite, give more.
14:42New York's Grand Central Station, for example, emits hundreds of millirems per year.
14:48We get about 50 to 80 millirems each year from medical sources like CAT scans and x-rays.
14:56And another 30 millirems or so comes from within our bodies.
15:00So when we eat food, a certain part of the molecules in that food, the hydrogen, the potassium, even the oxygen, are very mildly radioactive.
15:11So all of us and all animals and plants are mildly radioactive.
15:16And this has nothing to do with any man-made source of radiation.
15:20They always were and they always will be.
15:22But there's one source larger than all these combined.
15:27It came to light at this nuclear facility thanks to the efforts of this man, Stanley Watrous.
15:33A few years after the Three Mile Island accident, Watrous, an engineer, was helping bring Eastern Pennsylvania's limerick reactor online.
15:43Watrous showed us what happened next.
15:45All the alarms went off, sirens went off, red lights went off, came out on a digital display that I was highly contaminated throughout my entire body.
15:57So obviously that kind of set me back.
16:00Watrous was decontaminated and went home.
16:03The next day it happened again.
16:06It happened for two weeks.
16:09You again.
16:11Yeah, same old, same old.
16:13Come on over here, let's see what we got.
16:15Okay.
16:16Watrous didn't seem to be picking up radiation in the plant.
16:19So eventually he persuaded the health physicists to check out his home.
16:24They took air samples, little grab samples, was the standard norm back in 1984.
16:30They took these samples down to the chemistry lab and they found out that it was, that the place was highly contaminated with background radon radiation.
16:37Radon.
16:40It had long been known as a danger faced by uranium miners.
16:44It's a gas produced by decaying uranium in the soil.
16:48But no one suspected that significant amounts built up in houses.
16:52Ironically, Watrous had been carrying radiation from his house to the limerick plant, not the other way around.
16:59While few homes have as much as Watrous's, radon collects in all our basements, sticks to all our furnace filters and air vents.
17:13How does this source compare with what we got from a nuclear power plant?
17:16Well, typical house in the United States, the annual dose from radon is about 200 millirem, compared to, for the average person in the United States, the dose they get from nuclear power is a small fraction of a millirem.
17:32The annual dose from radon is hundreds of times bigger, probably thousands of times bigger.
17:39What dose would somebody get if they were living 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at the closest part of the boundary fence?
17:48That's not very realistic, but that's beside the point.
17:52They would get a couple of millirem per year.
17:55It would be very small compared to the background radiation.
17:58And ironically, the area around Three Mile Island is exceptionally high in radon radiation, four times the national average, yielding 800 millirems per year.
18:09This fact leads nuclear physicist Bernard Cohen to a startling conclusion.
18:14As a result, people living in that area get more radiation from radon in their home every day than they got in total from the Three Mile Island accident.
18:26Many Pennsylvanians, like Linda Brash, have been actively monitoring radiation from Three Mile Island since 1979.
18:35But have they had their own houses tested for radon?
18:39I have not had my house tested.
18:44And perhaps I will someday, but I don't look at it as a, it's not a, it's not a man-made, it's not a man-made thing.
18:57Radon is part of, seeps in through, it's in the dirt, it's in the, it seeps in through our homes.
19:04And we've been building homes for many, many, many, many, many, many years.
19:11Am I, am I, you know, where's my thinking wrong here?
19:17Can human cells tell the difference between a millirem of radiation from a man-made source and one of nature's millirems?
19:24No, there is no logic to that. A millirem of penetrating radiation will do the same amount of damage essentially no matter what the source of it is.
19:36There's no logic worrying about radiation from a nuclear power plant five miles away and not worrying about the radon in your basement.
19:42Nuclear critics concede that a normally operating plant may not pose a major threat. Their biggest fear is what happens if something goes wrong.
19:53Oh my God, Ted, is that pumped?
20:01From the beginning, Hollywood exploited our dread of a nuclear apocalypse.
20:07Films like The China Syndrome have left the impression that nuclear reactors might cause devastation on the scale of Hiroshima.
20:14I may be wrong, but I would say you're probably lucky to be alive. For that matter, I think we might say the same for the rest of Southern California.
20:25Well, first, you couldn't have an explosion like a bomb, like a nuclear explosion. What you really have is a situation where you lose the cooling to the core and you have the melting of the fuel.
20:42If nuclear reactors can't blow up like atomic bombs, and no one I spoke to says otherwise, the next worst imaginable scenario is the loss of the water that cools the core.
20:55When Western reactors lose this water that moderates or slows the neutrons, the nuclear reaction shuts down. That's the good news.
21:03The bad news is that the heat from decaying fission products can't be shut off and might melt the fuel rods.
21:09The worst meltdown in history happened in 1986 at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
21:17Critics and champions alike were appalled.
21:21Chernobyl was a very large plant. It had been operating long enough that it had a large inventory of radioactive materials in it.
21:33It was open to the atmosphere for days on fire with plumes of material radioactive going up into the air.
21:43Tens of thousands of people were exposed to high levels of radiation, some of them up to 50,000 millirems.
21:52There's nothing deadlier than a long-lasting, highly toxic ingredient that does not challenge your sensory perceptions because you can't see it, smell it, taste it or otherwise defend yourself against it.
22:04And you can see that around Chernobyl now.
22:09You've got all these villages and towns that have been abandoned with the creaking doors swinging in the wind and abandoned buildings.
22:16Western utilities say it's unfair to condemn their industry because of what happened at Chernobyl.
22:22Unlike Western reactors, Chernobyl used graphite, not water, as a moderator.
22:29So the reactor didn't shut down but ran away, setting the graphite on fire.
22:34The resulting explosion spread radioactive fallout far and wide.
22:37The Soviet Union, at the time they built these Chernobyl-type reactors, they simply, they're so large that they couldn't afford to contain them.
22:48Our reactors are much smaller, the pressurized water and boiling water reactors, the light water reactors are very small, and they're all contained.
22:56They have to be contained in order to get licensed.
22:58By contained, Reynolds means that the cores of American reactors are shielded within massive steel and concrete domes.
23:07Even if an accident occurred, the argument goes, the radioactive material would be confined inside the plant.
23:14But what about a fire?
23:16No, they couldn't catch fire, and even if some of the fuel melted, that fuel cannot get out of the containment into the environment.
23:25The worst accident I can see in a Western reactor is a couple, two to five fatalities maybe, of people inside associated with the plant.
23:41I can't see the general public outside the exclusion zone.
23:46Whether you're convinced that a Chernobyl-type accident could or couldn't happen in America, one thing is certain.
23:52Chernobyl gave us a worst-case demonstration of just how bad a nuclear catastrophe can be.
24:00After Chernobyl, we don't have to rely on Hollywood to fuel our fears.
24:05We can examine the real thing.
24:08The accident was economically devastating.
24:11Thousands of people had to abandon their homes and have a slightly increased risk of cancer.
24:16Some children contracted a rare thyroid tumor.
24:20Fortunately, it's curable.
24:22Despite these tragedies, some scientists argue that the evidence from Chernobyl is reassuring.
24:29That's as bad as an accident can be in a nuclear plant.
24:34And worse than any accident in a modern nuclear plant could possibly be.
24:38The point is that that reactor was on fire for days and days and days.
24:46And yet the number of identifiable deaths from it are really only a handful.
24:51The actual death toll from Chernobyl is surprisingly low.
24:57Thirty-one firefighters died in the accident.
25:00So far, leukemia and adult cancers have not measurably increased.
25:05Terrible as Chernobyl was, there have been many more deadly industrial accidents in this century.
25:12Like the Bhopal chemical plant accident in India that killed thousands.
25:15Supporters of nuclear power complain that if the chemical industry were held to the nuclear standard, it wouldn't survive.
25:25Even in America, more than a thousand people have been killed in chemical plant accidents during the past 40 years.
25:32Nuclear executives say their safety record is much better.
25:36In this country, no one has been injured or killed in a nuclear accident involving radiation exposure.
25:46No one.
25:48But people aren't really good at assessing risk.
25:50And somehow, we've decided that nuclear power is very, very risky, is a very risky business.
25:59A non-nuclear steam explosion at a U.S. nuclear facility killed four people in 1986.
26:07But Howard is right.
26:09In America, there have been no deaths or injuries from nuclear accidents in commercial power plants.
26:17Physicist Bernard Cohen blames the media for singling out nuclear.
26:22The media don't pay any attention to risk analyses.
26:24They just say this is radioactivity.
26:28They call it deadly radioactivity.
26:30I don't know why they call it deadly.
26:32It's not killing hardly anybody, if anybody.
26:35Where nobody talks about deadly electricity, which although over a thousand people a year die from electrocution in the United States.
26:44Nobody talks about deadly natural gas, although I believe it's 5,000 people a year die from asphyxiation from natural gas.
26:54Things of that sort.
26:56Have environmental groups unfairly targeted nuclear energy?
27:00Well, you'll find actually that public citizen and other allied groups have been very active critics of the chemical industry and the aviation industry and the coal industry.
27:10So, I don't know why you're trying to distinguish among them we are safety watchdogs and we're trying to improve health and safety for the American people.
27:18And the nuclear industry's record is nothing to shout about.
27:22But still, you're not trying to shut the chemical industry or the aviation industry down, are you?
27:27Um, no we're not.
27:32The record shows that some of these industries, coal for example, are environmentally unfriendly.
27:37Burning coal generates air pollution, acid rain, greenhouse gases and cancer causing chemicals.
27:44But little protest or fear.
27:45If you think the difference is radiation, think again.
27:50Since coal contains radium, a coal plant actually emits much more radioactivity than a nuclear plant.
27:57A nuclear plant's cooling towers emit only steam, water vapor.
28:02The health effects of coal burning are thousands of times worse than the health effects of nuclear power, according to anybody's analysis, not my analysis necessarily.
28:16But, uh, they never report it. I've never seen that in print.
28:21Scientists like Cohen, who rank risks according to coal statistical danger, seem to come up with a completely different picture than the public,
28:29which assesses risks more personally.
28:32What Cohen is doing is called risk analysis, determining statistically how dangerous various technologies actually are.
28:43What ordinary people engage in is risk perception, intuitively deciding how dangerous technologies seem.
28:52Where do our perceptions come from?
28:54Why do we perceive this technology to be dangerous rather than safe?
29:00What was the source of the knowledge that you have, the ideas that you've had, the impressions that you've gotten of nuclear waste and nuclear power?
29:09I think the very little that I know I probably heard on the news.
29:13Okay.
29:15I don't know very much.
29:17I first up on the news and read it in the paper and watch TV programs based on what could happen, you know, in Hollywood.
29:22Television news, newspaper, public television.
29:27Scientists like Hank Jenkins Smith have done extensive studies of the ways ordinary people think about nuclear power.
29:34Most of what we know as a population about nuclear power and nuclear stuff in general is an amalgam of images of nuclear war.
29:43In some cases the potential benefits, the technologies that can be harnessed, the energy that can be produced, but mostly images that are quite negative.
29:53Think about popular culture, which is one of the great deliverers of information about most concepts right now.
29:59Problem in sector 7G.
30:00These bits and pieces of popular mythology feed the way that people understand facts about these things.
30:09Noise.
30:11Most times if you ask people they'll say they really don't know a whole lot, but they still have a point of reference and that is all these sort of vague linkages to awful events.
30:19It's got enormous implications.
30:30It creates this dread association.
30:33The fear that the worst can happen.
30:36Researchers say ordinary people use rules of thumb to measure risk.
30:42People tend to find technologies like nuclear power especially scary because of qualities that have nothing to do with how dangerous they are.
30:50First, there's the dread factor, the fear of a catastrophic disaster.
30:55Second, say scientists like psychiatrist Robert DuPont, an expert in fears and phobias, there's the issue of who's in control.
31:06If you feel like you're in charge, you have the feeling that you can stop the risk, you can help yourself.
31:14It's the difference between driving a car and being a passenger in an airplane.
31:18When you're driving a car, you perceive your ability to stop or swerve or stay out of a situation.
31:27Whereas when you're the passenger in 14C, then you've got to depend on the air traffic control system and the mechanics at American Airlines and the pilot and everybody else who is going to keep you up there.
31:38So you get more afraid.
31:39Now, of course, the paradox here is that in the modern world, when someone else is controlling the risk, we're actually safer than when we control the risk.
31:50Because when someone else is controlling the risk, there are social institutions in place to reduce the risk.
31:57To fly an airplane, you actually have to have training to drive an automobile.
32:01You don't.
32:02So that you're actually much safer when somebody else is controlling the risk.
32:06But the perception, the psychology is the opposite.
32:10So what happens with nuclear power, it's them.
32:12It's not me.
32:13It's somebody doing it to me that makes it unacceptable.
32:17DuPont, who was attacked in the 1980s by anti-nuclear groups for expressing these views, identifies two other important reasons we fear nuclear power.
32:26It's unfamiliar.
32:29Remote, exotic technologies are much scarier than technologies we encounter every day.
32:35Finally, there's need.
32:38Since most Americans know that the U.S. has ample supplies of coal and natural gas, they have little incentive to confront their nuclear fears.
32:46With air travel, which can't easily be replaced, people make great efforts to overcome their anxieties.
32:52On all four counts, nuclear power generates fear.
32:58It's a cataclysmic accident that people are concerned about.
33:02It's controlled by them, the utilities, or the government, or the scientists, or whoever it is that is perceived as being the bad guys.
33:09It's unfamiliar to most people.
33:11And most people feel they don't really need nuclear power, that they can get their power from coal, or oil, or windmills, or some other basis.
33:19They don't really need nuclear power.
33:23What's true for Americans is also true for Italians, Germans, and Swedes.
33:28But it's not true everywhere.
33:31There are countries where nuclear power is accepted, even popular.
33:35Parts of Asia, and especially in France.
33:38France runs on nuclear power.
33:4275% of French electricity is nuclear generated.
33:48I visited the village of Sivaux in southwestern France, the site of France's latest and most modern nuclear plant, to find out what local people like Madame Schumacher thought of nuclear energy.
34:03I asked her if she was afraid.
34:13No, I'm not afraid of nuclear.
34:15I think there's a lot less risk when I take my car in the morning, or for those who live under a barrage, or for those who work, I don't know, in very dangerous things.
34:30This is René Bark, the village school teacher.
34:34Is he afraid that the nuclear reactors half a mile away will put his students in danger?
34:40No, I'm not afraid, because I visited several times during the camp.
34:47And the explanations that I had, the maquettes, the projected films, showed me that it was a technique that was very, especially at the level of security, that was very, very, very, very...
35:00So I'm not afraid.
35:01Everyone we spoke to in the village seemed unconcerned. From the baker...
35:09...to the village hairdresser.
35:13No, not at all. I'm not afraid of nuclear. She was there before I arrived. So if I'm here, I'm not afraid of anything.
35:22Since the technology is the same, why are the attitudes so different?
35:26They're not well informed at all. They can't get the information from their government. There's the administrative state that's very, very secretive. And the industry and the government are almost indistinguishable, number one.
35:38Number two, they have no right to go to court to open it up. The courts don't have the influence in France against administrative agencies the way our courts do. They don't have a tort law system the way we do. They don't have a freedom of information law the way we do.
35:52When it comes to nuclear power, they might as well be a totalitarian society. They're as closed on nuclear power as any Soviet Union was.
36:03But are the French really so brainwashed? Or is there another explanation? Certainly since the early 70s, there's been little public opposition to nuclear power. To the contrary.
36:15Three years ago, we thought possibly it would be necessary to have a new unit. There was a fight between several sides, not to avoid the plant, but to have it.
36:28And there were a lot of members of parliament who came to see the minister. I want the plant. French people like big industrial projects. And nuclear plants are one of the most often visited plants in France.
36:47During summer, it's a place where you go, where in family and you see.
36:56More than six million French people have taken tours, like the one I took of Civeau, which explained in exhaustive detail how everything worked.
37:08Unlike Nader, I thought the French knew much more about nuclear power than Americans, not less. But I noticed a more striking difference. Unlike Americans, the French seem to trust their experts.
37:26For a long time in the families, the good thing for a child was not to become a lawyer. It was to become an engineer or a scientist. French people like their engineers and their scientists. And they are confident. They rely on them.
37:47While French citizens have no more control over nuclear power than Americans, polls show they trust the people who do. That's an important difference.
37:59But more important even than familiarity and trust, it seems to me, is the fourth attribute, need. The French have few energy resources.
38:08After the 1973 oil crisis, they concluded that their future as a modern nation depended on nuclear energy.
38:17In France, we have no oil, no gas, no coal, no choice. And for the French people, it was very positive to develop a national energy with nuclear energy.
38:30And when we built this plant, we explained much. We developed many, many presentations.
38:39To explain to France that it was very important for France.
38:51If fear is less in France, so is cost. France's centralized political system allows standardization and control unimaginable in the US.
39:03The French selected just one American reactor model and charged one agency, ADF, to run the system for the nation.
39:11But America's decentralized system meant that, from the start, it was a messy and expensive free-for-all. Many different designs managed by many different utilities.
39:24Ironically, in American hands, the energy that some dreamed would be too cheap to meter has ended up one of the most expensive ways to generate electric power.
39:34And what we have coming in this country is more competition in the electricity market. And a lot of these nuclear reactors cannot compete. Some of the existing ones will be able to compete and will keep running for a while, but they'll reach the end of their lifespans.
39:51Some of them will not be able to compete and will shut down well before the end of their projected lifespans. And building a new reactor is just a complete fantasy in this country.
40:03What do you say about a technology that wants to persist on the public dole because it can't meet a market test?
40:11I don't know anybody in Wall Street, and I don't know anybody in the electric utility industry, who wants to build any more nuclear plants.
40:19Nuclear physicists like Charles Till argue that's short-term thinking.
40:25The exciting thing about nuclear power is its ability to handle mankind's needs in the future.
40:30It's not whether today, in the 20% of electricity that it produces in this nation, whether it can produce it for two and a half cents a kilowatt hour or four cents a kilowatt hour where, you know, coal may be three and a half cents or whatever.
40:42That isn't the argument at all.
40:44Fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, says Till, may be cheaper now. But as supplies decline, that will change. Fossil fuels also produce pollution and greenhouse gases, so that many environmental groups oppose their use as well.
41:00So where do we get our electricity from?
41:03We get it from solar. Do you want me to give you a book that shows how realistic solar is? You've got wind power, you've got biomass, you've got photovoltaics, you've got tidal, you've got all kinds of technologies now moving toward commercial viability.
41:21Can the sun and the wind satisfy our energy needs?
41:28Energy has to be produced for modern society on a huge scale. The only way you can do that is with energy sources that have concentrated energy in them. Coal, oil, natural gas.
41:45And the quintessential example of it is nuclear, where the energy is so concentrated. I mean, you have something to work with. With solar, your main problem is gathering it.
42:00Few seem to share Till's long-term vision. From Main Street to Wall Street, nuclear energy is perceived to be a risky proposition.
42:09And since America, for now, has ample supplies of cheap fossil fuels, it's a risk Americans don't have to face.
42:17That still leaves the 109 nuclear plants currently in service that produce 20% of our electricity.
42:24Anti-nuclear groups want these plants shut down because of what may be the biggest nuclear issue of all. Nuclear waste.
42:33On this surreal parking lot, a few hundred yards from the Prairie Island reactor near Minneapolis, sit five dry casks filled with nuclear waste.
42:48Inside each cask are 40 intensely radioactive spent fuel assemblies that have been removed from the core.
42:56I don't keel over and die because nine and a half inches of stainless steel block the gamma rays.
43:11As you can see right here, right on the cask, it's about three millirem per hour.
43:15A cross-country airline flight is going to give you about five millirem.
43:18And a chest x-ray is in the 30 to 50 millirem.
43:22Oh.
43:25A few feet away, the level drops off to background.
43:30Of all the materials inside the casks, the one that probably causes the most fear is plutonium,
43:36a substance that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
43:41Plutonium has attained legendary status as the most toxic substance in the world.
43:48Plutonium is the most deadly substance known to man.
43:52A tiny amount on the skin will kill.
43:54The truth is less dramatic.
43:59The radiation given off by plutonium can't penetrate human skin.
44:04It can even be stopped by a thin sheet of paper.
44:07While plutonium is dangerous to ingest, it's nowhere near the most toxic substance known to man.
44:19It is, however, a highly concentrated form of energy.
44:24There's as much energy available in one gram of plutonium as in one ton of oil.
44:30So outside the United States, in France, Japan, and many other countries,
44:34they don't regard plutonium as waste.
44:37They recycle the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricate new fuel elements.
44:43By recycling the plutonium, they not only reduce the volume of waste, they also get energy.
44:53The U.S. is different.
44:55In the 70s, because of fears that reactor plutonium might fall into the wrong hands,
45:00the U.S. government decided not to reprocess plutonium, but to treat it as waste.
45:06That means it's going to be around for a very long time.
45:10When you make that decision, you're not going to recycle,
45:12then no longer are you dealing with a potential resource,
45:15but you're dealing with a waste product.
45:17And a waste product that has a tremendous half-life.
45:21I mean, we're talking about a product that's not going to be just around for a few hundred years,
45:24but thousands of years.
45:26Richard Stallings was appointed in 1993 as the federal nuclear waste negotiator.
45:32It was his job to try to find a community willing to take the high-level waste from nuclear power plants
45:38on a temporary basis until the government established a permanent repository.
45:43He found it hard-going.
45:46It was a very hard sell.
45:48When people are terrified, they're not concerned about facts.
45:51The perception was anything nuclear just scared people to death.
45:55Their thought is that it's some kind of green, oozy stuff that's spewing poison,
46:00that you get near it and you'll die within minutes or hours.
46:06Stallings discovered that public fear of nuclear waste knows no bounds.
46:11Nobody wants this stuff in their backyards or traveling on their roads.
46:16The nuclear industry claims their transportation casks will survive any conceivable accident.
46:22They've hit them with trains, dropped them from the air onto metal spikes,
46:30submerged them under water, and burned them for hours.
46:35The containers survived intact.
46:38But somehow these demonstrations don't seem to make people feel safe.
46:43Nevertheless, the waste has to go somewhere.
46:47Even if the nuclear industry shut down tomorrow, that's one point both sides agree on.
46:53This is, of course, the conundrum of conundrums.
46:55Because while you can stop nuclear power, what do you do with the waste that's available?
46:59Do you keep it next to the reactor?
47:01Do you put it in a temporary repository?
47:03Or do you put it in a permanent?
47:06The federal government wants to send all the high-level waste from all the plants to Nevada,
47:11a state that has no nuclear power.
47:14In Las Vegas, people are mad as hell.
47:18Business leaders worry that this stigma will drive tourists away.
47:23Citizens worry about the danger the waste might pose now and for thousands of years to come.
47:29How many deaths can we expect over the duration of this project?
47:33We don't want to be scapegoats again.
47:36We want to bring other people's nuclear waste into our state.
47:41How come they can't keep it?
47:46The proposed permanent repository is here at Yucca Mountain, some 80 miles from Las Vegas.
47:51The Department of Energy has been tunneling for more than two years.
47:58It's quick to say that this is just a scientific investigation to see if the site is suitable.
48:06To dig and characterize this exploratory tunnel will cost $2 billion.
48:12To build the repository itself may cost ten times as much.
48:15The repository, if it's built, will accommodate hundreds of casks of high-level waste, including plutonium, in a labyrinth of rock tunnels.
48:25The plan is to seal it up and leave it forever.
48:29Yucca Mountain is a graveyard.
48:32Nevadans want reassurance that the waste will be safe, not only this year, but for the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive.
48:41The government is not finding it easy to reassure people.
48:45I mean, you can't find any engineer that's going to sign onto a document that this hole in the ground is going to be safe for 10,000 years or safe for even 200 years.
48:53I mean, that's impossible to do.
48:56Research shows that people are even more opposed to living near a nuclear waste dump than a nuclear reactor.
49:03The difference isn't the risk, it's the lack of benefit.
49:07In the United States, of course, we don't reprocess.
49:10We don't reuse, recycle, however you want to describe it, that nuclear waste.
49:13What we've done is we've isolated all the bad attributes and packaged them up as nuclear waste.
49:20And, you know, there's not much in the way of redeeming value in there to warm people up to it.
49:25In France, people worry about waste as well.
49:31A few years ago, when it discovered the strength of such attitudes, France redesigned its high-level waste policy.
49:37Research showed that what bothered people most was the idea of a permanent geological site like Yucca Mountain, where waste would be abandoned.
49:47People felt much safer with the concept of an underground laboratory, where waste is not only carefully monitored, but where research goes forward on how to transmute it into a safer form.
49:58Remarkably, simply redefining the site completely changes people's attitudes toward the same waste.
50:07Now, if that kind of a strategy were opted for in the United States, would that seem more attractive than a place that's primarily a disposal facility, where we permanently cork it up?
50:20What's your sense about that? What's your reaction to it? Darlene?
50:22I think it would be a great idea for the simple reason it would be carefully watched.
50:28Shannon, what about you?
50:29Oh, yeah, because it means somebody is doing something with it, instead of just leaving it in the ground and forgetting about it and waiting until something happens years down the road.
50:38The research laboratory idea actually is a high-prestige kind of an entity.
50:44It brings in top-level scientific jobs.
50:46It creates the prospect that this dreadful stuff might actually be turned into something useful.
50:51Things that are seen as waste right now could be seen as the most valuable of resources in the future.
50:56I mean, we weren't using molybdenum much 150 years ago.
51:00It was in the way.
51:02Wood chips now that we use regularly as building material were a waste product not so long ago.
51:08I mean, as technologies change and as different uses are found or as other resources are used up, things that are now of no value could be of tremendous value.
51:17But U.S. policymakers don't want a laboratory.
51:20They want a graveyard.
51:22They're determined that Yucca Mountain will open sometime after 2010.
51:26And essentially, it says to this nation that we're as smart as we're going to get on nuclear materials.
51:32No one's going to get any smarter.
51:34And the fact that there might be other things that we can do with this material was completely lost.
51:39And so we just put it in a hole in the ground and thought somehow we could walk away from it and our problems would be solved.
51:43Okay, let's congregate on this end here.
51:57These children are visiting a teaching reactor in Virginia, where it's possible to see a nuclear core glowing at the bottom of a containment pool.
52:05For them, it's like a museum visit, a curiosity.
52:10If current trends continue, by the time they're middle-aged, nuclear power may be largely phased out in the U.S., though it will almost certainly continue to thrive in France and in Asia.
52:21You can see what we're doing.
52:26Throughout history, our species has encountered and mastered powerful natural forces, balancing promise and risk.
52:34In this century, when we unlocked nuclear energy, we built weapons capable of destroying the world because we thought we needed them.
52:43We haven't needed nuclear power in America, so we enjoy the luxury of investing it with our nuclear fears.
52:49Civilizations run on energy.
52:54What will our descendants make of our decision to reject this awesome source?
53:00Will they applaud us for having the courage to say no?
53:04Or will they condemn us for surrendering to our fears?
53:07The Avengers
53:10So what do you think about nuclear power?
53:19Join in the discussion at Frontline's Nuclear website at www.pbs.org.
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53:40at www.pbs.org
53:43And let us know what you thought about tonight's program
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53:59Next time on Frontline
54:01the story of a warrior breed
54:07the culture they thrive in
54:13and what happens when it clashes
54:16with the sexual politics of the 90s
54:18The Navy Blues
54:22A Frontline Investigation
54:24The Navy Blues
54:29The Navy Blues
54:30¶¶
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