Meltdown.

• Author: Lenssen, Nicholas
• Position: Declining use of nuclear power

The worst industrial accident ever to befall humanity left a wound that has not healed with time. Now, the nuclear power industry appears to be wearing out its welcome on the planet - and opening the door wider to renewables.

Ten years ago, a new word - "Chernobyl" - suddenly entered the vocabularies of people all over the world. Whether they spoke Russian, Swedish, English, Japanese, or any of scores of other languages, the word came into their language and had a chilling effect. Across thousands of kilometers, the spreading news of an "accident" at a nuclear electric power plant in the Ukraine was accompanied by a spreading cloud of radioactive dust - and with that physical cloud came a psychological one. As the magnitude of the accident became apparent, the futures of millions of people darkened. Over the days and years that followed, thousands would die unexpectedly, millions would suffer from painful or debilitating ailments, and hundreds of millions would be given a sobering new perspective on the risks of powerful technologies. Many women in Ukraine and Russia would have babies with appalling defects, and many more would decide never to have babies at all.

The chill of this event - considered by some to be the most tragic accident in history - affected not only personal prospects but industrial ones: it brought the fast-growing nuclear electric industry to a virtual freeze, from which it is now apparent that the industry will probably never recover. If Chernobyl had proven to be an anomaly, the chill might eventually have lifted. But the event has been followed - and, indeed, was preceded as well - by mounting evidence that the huge investments societies have made in this industry have been a mistake.

At the time of the accident, on April 26, 1986, about 160 nuclear power reactors were under construction around the world - with the pace expected to accelerate. But ten years later, by the winter of 1996, the number of reactors being built had dropped to 34 - the fewest in 30 years. Not a single plant was being built - or planned - in the United States. The plants under construction have a total capacity of 27,000 megawatts - equal to less than 1 percent of the world's total installed power capacity. That compares with more than 520,000 megawatts of capacity from other sources under construction. Once, nuclear power was expected to rescue the planet from the heavily polluting and now climate-altering fossil fuels, but instead it is the nuclear knight that is falling by the wayside.

Moreover, even as those 34 new nuclear plants are being built (many of them in developing countries desperate for new capacity at any cost), a total of 84 reactors have already been shut down - most of them prematurely. With shutdowns now nearly matching new startups, the world's total nuclear capacity has flattened - showing an increase of less than one percent per year since 1990.

A telling sign of what this means for the future was a comment made by Ivan Selin, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when he announced that he was leaving that position last April to work in the private sector. Passing up the usual "revolving door" opportunity to accept a lucrative position in the industry he had been regulating, Selin said he was going into business building gas turbine power plants in Asia. His explanation for the shift: "I'm not predicting that the nuclear industry will pick up."

It is noteworthy that the decline of this industry began well before Chernobyl; the accident was not a one-shot catastrophe but a galvanizing of doubts that had persisted at least since the lesser - but still foreboding -

accident at Three Mile Island, in the populous eastern United States, in 1979. In fact, the nuclear industry has been beset by problems since its inception - problems now believed to be endemic to the technology.

Equally noteworthy is that as nuclear power has faltered in its intended role as an eventual replacement for coal and oil, the renewable sources - wind and solar - have boomed. And, while still very small in absolute terms, their rate of growth is 20 to 50 times that of nuclear. The challenge now is to shift the investment priorities of governments, which have heavily subsidized nuclear power to keep it going despite the mounting risks of new catastrophes.

At 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986, as Soviet nuclear operators were conducting a routine low-power experiment at the #4 reactor at the Chernobyl power station, a not-uncommon mishap - a combination of design flaws and operator error - resulted in a sudden power surge by the reactor. The surge, however, did not trigger an automatic shutdown as normally should have occurred, and the reactor blew up. A few seconds later, a second explosion destroyed part of the building and threw hot and highly radioactive pieces of the reactor core into the air. Burning graphite landed on nearby buildings, igniting fires.

Initially, Soviets authorities denied that any accident had occurred, despite high radiation readings recorded at monitoring stations 2,000 kilometers away in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. The initial cover-up was short-lived, but sewed confusion and, over the years, led to intense debates about what exactly had happened. Although uncertainty still remains regarding the details of the actual accident and its impacts, it is becoming increasingly clear that unlike most catastrophes, which with time see an end to suffering and dislocation, the costs of the Chernobyl accident continue to grow with each passing year.

TOO COSTLY FOR THE MARKET

Nuclear power was born and nurtured by governments in the three decades following World War II, only to be rejected by markets in the last two decades. The demise has been especially rapid in countries where governments have allowed other energy sources to provide real competition.

In the United States, it has been 23 years since a U.S. reactor order was placed that was not subsequently canceled (the last was in 1973), and 18 years since an order of any kind has been placed. In the 1970s and 1980s, utilities not only stopped placing new orders but began canceling existing ones. Since then, some 120 U.S. nuclear reactors have been canceled. In fact, more nuclear capacity has been canceled in the United States in the last 30 years - some 132,000 megawatts' worth - than the total capacity that exists in the country today. A 1996 poll of utility executives found that only 2 percent would even consider ordering a new nuclear power plant. With competition growing in its electric power sector, the United States is likely to see a gradual phase-out of its remaining reactors. The New York investment house of Shearson Lehman Brothers predicted in 1993 that for economic reasons, 25 of the current 110 U.S. reactors would close prematurely by the year 2003.

In the United Kingdom, a similar turnabout has occurred. The first shift came in 1989, when the government was forced to pull nuclear power from its plan to...