David Nebenzahl wrote:
....
You must have missed what I wrote. You give the antinuclear movement far
too much credit for the moratorium on building nukes in this country
(U.S.). Look at the economics. Keep in mind that we (the anti-nukes)
were fighting the NRC just as hard as we were fighting the utilities:
the feds hardly changed their policies one inch as a result of all our
agitation, so you can't lay the problem at the doorstep of "excessive
regulation". The NRC has always been somewhat of a lapdog that obeys its
real masters, the electric utilities and nuclear power plant
construction firms (GE, Bechtel, Combustion Engineering, etc.).

All of which completely ignores the 900-lb. gorilla here, which is the
ongoing problem of radioactive waste disposal which is still not even
close to being solved, let alone even temporarily. This should be enough
to permanently nail that particular coffin closed and bury it.

Like we used to say: who needs fission reactors on earth, when we have a
perfectly good, inexhaustible *fusion* reactor out there in space?

Yes and no on the "anti" movement. What it did do in conjunction w/ the
ill-informed popular press and an even more sadly informed former
president was to change the political climate. The actual final straw
was, of course, the TMI incident which was totally mischaracterized in
every report outside the technical community itself.

The economics were only so bad in that time frame owing to the ability
of the obstructionists to stretch out the licensing and construction
process to such extremes as they did(1) and the excessively high
interest rates of the time so that the financing until the unit could
become a revenue-generator became intolerable. That was a combination
of effects part of which can certainly be attributed to the movement.

The waste issue is not resolved for political reasons far more than for
technical ones. The former president of whom we just spake edict'ed no
reprocessing licensing to go forward in the US and began the storage
option instead fiasco which led to the current Yucca Mountain debacle
which the Senator from NV has used as a populist campaign crutch for
almost 30 years now.

(1) The problems are far too complex to delve into in depth in this
type of a forum, but the NRC bears a fair responsibility as well in its
insatiable demands for every possible new gizmo or rule to be retrofit
to every existing plant that kept design criteria in a constant state of
flux. And, of course, as I noted upthread, there were mistakes made by
the utilities and architect-engineer firms that exacerbated the problems
by not being as careful as should have been in crossing every i and
dotting ever t. Then, of course, the protestors used every one of these
details, no matter how trivial, as a club to the fullest extent they
could manage.

--