Not even remotely true. First of all, nuclear power in the U.S. was already dead when Chernobyl happened, and it was thriving ten years after Chalk River. It was already dying before the Three Mile Island incident.
Here’s what really happened:
In the late 1960’s, ten years after Chalk River, nuclear production plans in the U.S. were estimated by the AEC to result in about 145 GW of electricity by 1980. Nuclear power was in full swing at this time. But that all changed in the early 1970’s, without any major accidents or incidents happening in between.
The first nail in the coffin of American nuclear power came in 1971, when the AEC reversed rules to allow the National Resources Defense Council to sue to stop construction of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant on environmental grounds. This set precedent which kicked off similar lawsuits around the country.
When Jimmy Carter was elected, he dealt several blows to the nuclear industry - first, new rules were drafted to make nuclear power plants much harder to build and much more expensive. The he signed an executive order forbidding reprocessing of spent fuel, which created the nuclear waste problem the U.S. has today. Jimmy Carter was all about conservation and cutting back on energy, and nuclear power was not acceptable to him even if he paid lip service to it. He was a fan of renewables like solar power (he even had solar collectors installed at the White House), and nuclear power was not where he wanted the country to go.
Nuclear power in the U.S. was given the coup de grace by Three Mile Island. When Three Mile Island had its accident, the environmental movement went bananas. It was greatly over-hyped, with all kinds of claims of destruction and radiation poisoning that never actually happened. Hollywood made “The China Syndrome” that year, while was pretty much a scary fable for anti-nuclear people. Within a few months, 65,000 anti-nuclear demonstrators marched on Washington, and set the tone for the generally anti-nuclear regulatory environment that ensued.
As a result of these regulations and lawsuits, a nuclear reactor in the U.S. was forecast to take 12 to 14 years for construction. Identical plants made by the same companies in other countries took 4-5 years. This was also the era of high interest rates, and nuclear power plants are capital-intensive, so the combination increased the cost of nuclear power plant construction by a factor of ten. The result was the death of the nuclear industry in the United States.
We are not all to blame for that. Myself and a lot of people I know were trying to explain the real facts to people, and to put the extent of the radiation leak in perspective. No one was killed, no one got serious radiation exposure. But it was like pissing in the wind. Within a couple of years of Three Mile Island, the ‘conventional wisdom’ was that it was a horrific accident, three-eyed fish would be swimming the rivers, people would be dropping dead from cancer in the next few years, and only by the grace of God did it not turn into an epic disaster killing tens of thousands of people.
Nuclear power never recovered from that in the U.S. Anti-nuke forces started teaming up with opportunistic lawyers, and every nuclear plant under construction was inundated with lawsuits and stop-work orders. The economics of nuclear power turned sour because of the new regulations and legal challenges, with tied up billions of dollars in capital for years or decades. And this was at a time when the cost of capital was extremely high. The risk of starting construction and having billions tied up for years became too high, and the nuclear industry stalled out.
That’s what happened. It was not ‘everyone’s fault’. It was a bunch of anti-nuclear activists, their lawyers, and a willing, scientifically ignorant media that shut it all down.
Later on, in the 1990’s, people started recognizing that nuclear power wasn’t the evil bogeyman it was presented as, but by that the price of oil collapsed, and the demand for new nuclear power completely dried up.
In the meantime, throughout all this France went merrily along building more nuclear plants, as did many countries. France now gets over 70% of its electricity from nuclear. THEY don’t have to worry about global warming treaties shutting their economy down. America does.
