Anti-nuclear movement
The anti-nuclear movement is a social movement that opposes various nuclear technologies. Some direct action groups, environmental movements, and professional organisations have identified themselves with the movement at the local, national, or international level. Major anti-nuclear groups include Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Peace Action, Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. The initial objective of the movement was nuclear disarmament, though since the late 1960s opposition has included the use of nuclear power. Many anti-nuclear groups oppose both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The formation of green parties in the 1970s and 1980s was often a direct result of anti-nuclear politics.
Scientists and diplomats have debated nuclear weapons policy since before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The public became concerned about nuclear weapons testing from about 1954, following extensive nuclear testing including the Castle Bravo disaster. In 1963, many countries ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty which prohibited atmospheric nuclear testing.
Some local opposition to nuclear power emerged in the early 1960s, and in the late 1960s some members of the scientific community began to express their concerns. In the early 1970s, there were large protests about the proposed Wyhl Nuclear Power Plant, in southern Germany. The project was cancelled in 1975 and anti-nuclear success at Wyhl inspired opposition to nuclear power in other parts of Europe and North America. Nuclear power became an issue of major public protest in the 1970s and while opposition to nuclear power continues, increasing public support for nuclear power has re-emerged over the last decade in light of growing awareness of global warming and renewed interest in all types of clean energy.
A protest against nuclear power occurred in July 1977 in Bilbao, Spain, with up to 200,000 people in attendance. Following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, an anti-nuclear protest was held in New York City, involving 200,000 people. In 1981, Germany's largest anti-nuclear power demonstration took place to protest against the Brokdorf Nuclear Power Plant west of Hamburg; some 100,000 people came face to face with 10,000 police officers. The largest protest was held on 12 June 1982, when one million people demonstrated in New York City against nuclear weapons. A 1983 nuclear weapons protest in West Berlin had about 600,000 participants. In May 1986, following the Chernobyl disaster, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people marched in Rome to protest against the Italian nuclear program. In Australia unions, peace activists and environmentalists opposed uranium mining from the 1970s onwards and rallies bringing together hundreds of thousands of people to oppose nuclear weapons peaked in the mid- 1980s. In the US, public opposition preceded the shutdown of the Shoreham, Yankee Rowe, Millstone 1, Rancho Seco, Maine Yankee, and many other nuclear power plants.
For many years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear power was off the policy agenda in most countries, and the anti-nuclear power movement seemed to have won its case, so some anti-nuclear groups disbanded. In the 2000s, however, following public relations activities by the nuclear industry, advances in nuclear reactor designs, and concerns about climate change, nuclear power issues came back into energy policy discussions in some countries. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident subsequently undermined the nuclear power industry's proposed renaissance and revived nuclear opposition worldwide, putting governments on the defensive. As of 2016, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Norway have no nuclear power stations and remain opposed to nuclear power. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power. Sweden formerly had a nuclear phase-out policy, aiming to end nuclear power generation in Sweden by 2010. On 5 February 2009, the Government of Sweden announced an agreement allowing for the replacement of existing reactors, effectively ending the phase-out policy.
Globally, the number of operable reactors remains nearly the same over the last 30 years, and nuclear electricity production is steadily growing after the Fukushima disaster.
History and issues
Roots of the movement
The application of nuclear technology, as a source of energy and as an instrument of war, has been controversial. These issues are discussed in nuclear weapons debate, nuclear power debate, and uranium mining debate.Scientists and diplomats have debated nuclear weapons policy since before the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The public became concerned about nuclear weapons testing from about 1954, following extensive nuclear testing in the Pacific, with some calling it nuclear imperialism and colonialism. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, about 50,000 women brought together by Women Strike for Peace marched in 60 cities in the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. In 1963, many countries ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty which prohibited atmospheric nuclear testing.
Some local opposition to nuclear power emerged in the early 1960s, and in the late 1960s some members of the scientific community began to express their concerns. In the early 1970s, there were large protests about the proposed Wyhl Nuclear Power Plant in southern Germany. The project was cancelled in 1975 and anti-nuclear success at Wyhl inspired opposition to nuclear power in other parts of Europe and North America. Nuclear power became an issue of major public protest in the 1970s.
Fossil fuels industry
The fossil fuel industry starting from the 1950s was engaging in campaigns against the nuclear industry which it perceived as a threat to their commercial interests. Organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association and Marcellus Shale Coalition were engaged in anti-nuclear lobbying in the late 2010s and from 2019, large fossil fuel suppliers started advertising campaigns portraying fossil gas as a "perfect partner for renewables". Groups like the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council are receiving grants from other fossil fuel companies. As of 2011, a strategy paper released by Greenpeace titled "Battle of Grids" proposed gradual replacement of nuclear power by fossil gas plants which would provide "flexible backup for wind and solar power". However, Greenpeace has since distanced itself from advocating for fossil gas, instead proposing grid energy storage as a solution to issues caused by intermittent renewable energy. In Germany the Energiewende, which was advertised as a shift to renewable energy but included a gradual phaseout of nuclear power from 2000 to end 2022, caused among other things a rise in fossil gas power production from 49.2 TWh in 2000 to 94.7 TWh in 2020. In the same interval total electricity generation barely changed while it did rise and fall in the meantime, reaching a peak of 652.9 TWh in 2017. As much of that fossil gas was and is imported from Russia, controversial pipeline projects like Nord Stream 1 were built to satisfy increasing German gas demand. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine it came to light that significant amounts of Russian lobbying was involved in both the continued anti-nuclear movement in Germany and the anti-fracking movement.Anti-nuclear perspectives
Concerns about nuclear weapons
From an anti-nuclear point of view, there is a threat to modern civilization from global nuclear war by accidental or deliberate nuclear strike. Some climate scientists estimate that a war between two countries that resulted in 100 Hiroshima-size atomic explosions would cause significant loss of life, in the tens of millions from climatic effects alone as well as disabled future generations. Soot thrown up into the atmosphere could blanket the earth, causing food chain disruption in what is termed a nuclear winter.Many anti-nuclear weapons groups cite the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, in which it found that 'the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict'.
Ridding the world of nuclear weapons has been a cause for pacifists for decades. But more recently mainstream politicians and retired military leaders have advocated nuclear disarmament. In January 2007 an article in The Wall Street Journal, authored by Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn. These men were veterans of the Cold War who believed in using nuclear weapons for deterrence. But they now reversed their previous position and asserted that instead of making the world safer, nuclear weapons had become a source of extreme concern.
Since the 1970s, some countries have built their own second-strike capability of massive deterrence in the event of a military attack with weapons of mass destruction.
Two examples of this second-strike capability are the Samson Option strategy of Israel, and the Dead Hand system of Russia.
During the era of nuclear weapons testing many local communities were affected, and some are still affected by uranium mining, and radioactive waste disposal.
It should however be noted, that countries can possess nuclear weapons without possessing nuclear power plants or indeed the reverse, as is the case with most users of nuclear power past and present.
Concerns about nuclear power
There are large variations in peoples' beliefs regarding the issues surrounding nuclear power, including the technology itself, its deployment, climate change, and energy security. There is a wide spectrum of views and concerns over nuclear power and it remains a controversial area of public policy. When compared to other energy sources, nuclear power has one of the lowest death rates per unit of energy produced – 0.07 per TWh, as compared to over 32 per TWh in case of brown coal. This figure is driven by a 2005 WHO projection of up to 4000 stochastic cancer deaths that could result from the Chernobyl disaster. The UNSCEAR reports in its 2008 summary on Chernobyl that no increases in cancer incidence have been observed to date that can be attributed to radiation from the accident.Many studies have shown that the public "perceives nuclear power as a very risky technology" and, around the world, nuclear energy declined in popularity in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, but it has recently rebounded in response to the climate crisis. Anti-nuclear critics see nuclear power as a dangerous, expensive way to boil water to generate electricity. Opponents of nuclear power have raised a number of related concerns:
- Nuclear accidents: a safety concern that the core of a nuclear power plant could overheat and melt down, releasing radioactivity.
- Nuclear Fuel Mining: mining waste of nuclear fuels like uranium and thorium, results in its radioactive decay. That causes radium pollution and radon pollution in environment and ultimately affects public health.
- Radioactive waste disposal: a concern that nuclear power results in large amounts of radioactive waste, some of which remains dangerous for very long periods.
- Nuclear proliferation: a concern that some types of nuclear reactor designs use and/or produce fissile material which could be used in nuclear weapons.
- High cost: a concern that nuclear power plants are very expensive to build, and that clean up from nuclear accidents are highly expensive and can take decades.
- Attacks on nuclear plants: a concern that nuclear facilities could be targeted by terrorists or criminals.
- Curtailed civil liberties: a concern that the risk of nuclear accidents, proliferation and terrorism may be used to justify restraints on citizen rights.
In his book Global Fission: The Battle Over Nuclear Power, Jim Falk explores connections between technological concerns and political concerns. Falk suggests that concerns of citizen groups or individuals who oppose nuclear power have often focused initially on the "range of physical hazards which accompany the technology" and leads to a "concern over the political relations of the nuclear industry". Baruch Fischhoff, a social scientist, said that many people really do not trust the nuclear industry. Wade Allison, a physicist, said "radiation is safe & all nations should embrace nuclear technology"
M.V. Ramana says that "distrust of the social institutions that manage nuclear energy is widespread", and a 2001 survey by the European Commission found that "only 10.1 percent of Europeans trusted the nuclear industry". This public distrust is periodically reinforced by nuclear safety violations, or through ineffectiveness or corruption of the nuclear regulatory authorities. Once lost, says Ramana, trust is extremely difficult to regain.
Faced with public antipathy, the nuclear industry has "tried a variety of strategies to persuade the public to accept nuclear power", including the publication of numerous "fact sheets" that discuss issues of public concern. M.V. Ramana says that none of these strategies have been very successful. Nuclear proponents have tried to regain public support by offering newer, purportedly safer, reactor designs. These designs include those that incorporate passive safety and small modular reactors. While these reactor designs "are intended to inspire trust, they may have an unintended effect: creating distrust of older reactors that lack the touted safety features".
Since 2000 the nuclear power was promoted as potential solution to the greenhouse effect and climate change as nuclear power emits no or negligible amounts of carbon dioxide during operations. Anti-nuclear groups highlighted the fact that other stages of the nuclear fuel chain – mining, milling, transport, fuel fabrication, enrichment, reactor construction, decommissioning and waste management – use fossil fuels and hence emit carbon dioxide. As this is the case with any energy sources, including renewable energy, IPCC analyzed total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions, which account for all emissions during manufacturing, installation, operations and decommissioning. With 12 gCO2eq/kWh nuclear power still remains one of the lowest emitting energy sources available.
In 2011, a French court fined Électricité de France €1.5m and jailed two senior employees for spying on Greenpeace, including hacking into Greenpeace's computer systems. Greenpeace was awarded €500,000 in damages.
There are some energy-related studies which conclude that energy efficiency programs and renewable power technologies are a better energy option than nuclear power plants.