The Demise of Nuclear Energy: Lessons for Democratic Control of Technology (Yale Fastback Series)

Morone, Joseph G.

ISBN 10: 0300044496 / ISBN 13: 9780300044492

Published by Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1989

About this Item

2009. Illustrated. paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780300044492

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Demise of Nuclear Energy: Lessons for Democratic Control of Technology (Yale Fastback Series)
• Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven & London
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300044496
• ISBN 13: 9780300044492
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Three Mile Island, Seabrook, Diablo Canyon: their controversies have come to symbolize the unhappy fate of American nuclear power. Three decades of effort and an investment of several hundred billion dollars have culminated in wide-spread public fear, huge financial losses, an unworkable regulatory system, and a virtual ban on new reactors. How did one of the world's most flexible political and economic systems produce such a technological white elephant? What does this enormous failure reveal about the compatibility of democracy and technology? And what lessons can be learned for future energy policy making?
To answer these questions, Joseph Morone and Edward Woodhouse offer a nonpartisan diagnosis of the decision-making processes that led to the industry's current state. What we think of as nuclear power, they argue, is just one of many technical and organizational forms this energy source could have taken. It was shaped by political and economic choices of the 1950s and 1960s, not by any internal dynamic of the technology. If a few of those choices had been made differently--particularly regarding the scale-up and diffusion of reactors--the nuclear enterprise might have evolved far more acceptably. The ills of the first nuclear era stemmed not from any fundamental incompatibility between technology and democracy, but from a failure of democracy to live up to its own standards of good decision making.
Although many nations have turned away from civilian nuclear power, problems with fossil fuels--particularly climate changes from the greenhouse effect--may lead to reappraisal of the nuclear option. A radically altered form of nuclear power, together with alternative energy sources and intensified conservation, could provide a more acceptable and less environmentally destructive energy future--if we learn from the failures of the first nuclear era.

From the Back Cover

Nuclear power once stood for a bright and exciting future, a tangible symbol of hope and optimism in the postwar era. That began as the dream of a handful of scientists working in wartime laboratories grew into one of the most ambitious technological efforts of the second half of the twentieth century. In scale, expense, technical challenge, and organizational complexity, it was comparable to the Apollo space program. But the outcome could not have been more different.