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Throughout the Eighties nuclear energy continued to be a subject of intense controversy, however the conflict had shifted to the local level where planned and unfinished nuclear projects offered manifold targets for attack. This period was typified by widespread changes in how the antinuclear movement was organized, and completed the shift from a concentration on nuclear weapons to that of nuclear power. So effective was this that when the Chernobyl accident occurred in 1986, the impact on public opinion was surprisingly small. Most people had made up their minds on nuclear power and entrenched attitudes are difficult to change. In part II of this series we will examine the paths that the movement took post-Chernobyl to the present dwelling on the various changes in structure and how it has impacted the movement’s agenda.

One of the greatest strengths of the antinuclear movement in North America and the bulk of the Anglosphere has been its autonomy—from business, political parties, and in most cases, the State. Thus the antinuclear power movement has been largely autonomous from partisan party politics. This autonomy from electoral politics has enabled it to escape the inevitable dilution of its demands that is characteristic of broad movements of this sort. This is quite different from what happened in Europe. In Germany the Green Party evolved directly from the antinuclear power movement, but was later able to tap enough support to elect several representatives to the Bundestag, while on the other hand France seems to have largely embraced nuclear energy, and the movement there is weak and disorganized.

Anti-nuclear forces in the Pacific region suffered two significant onslaughts in 1985. In April in Australia, an unholy alliance united to attack the young Nuclear Disarmament Party. In New Zealand, which was already in dispute with the US over nuclear ship visits, French secret service agents blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in July, killing photographer Fernando Pereira. The Rainbow Warrior had been engaged in a battle against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Deregulate The AtomHistory of the Antinuclear Movement, Part 2b var addthis_product = 'wpp-258'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":false}; The different and more diffuse class composition of the European antinuclear movement found visible expression in the tactics of the activists and the police, which were much more belligerent than in America. In Europe, antinuclear protesters carried out acts of sabotage against power-lines, railroad lines, construction sites, factories supplying nuclear plants, and installations of utility companies including bombs placed near nuclear construction sites or plants. Marches and rallies attracting upward of 50,000 were commonplace. Police responded physically against demonstrators, using tear gas, clubs, dogs, even grenades, causing hundreds of injured and even death (as in the case of Malville). Civil war-like street blockades, dozens of miles away from the demonstration-sites and at national borders were set up to block demonstrators. Compared to the small showings and relatively peaceful actions in North America, the European state of affairs was much more dynamic. The movement against the nuclear plants was one of the biggest mass movements of the 1970s and 80s in Germany. After a slowdown since, it has reappeared now like a phoenix from the ashes, The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was a pivotal event for Germany’s anti-nuclear movement, following the event, the Green Party strived for the immediate shut-down of all nuclear facilities. The SPD pushed for a nuclear phase-out within ten years. Länder governments, municipalities, parties and trade unions explored the question of whether the use of nuclear power technology was reasonable and sensible for the future.

May 1986 clashes between anti-nuclear protesters and West German police became common. More than 400 people were injured in mid-May at the site of a nuclear-waste reprocessing plant being built near Wackersdorf. Police used water cannons and dropped tear-gas grenades from helicopters to subdue protesters armed with slingshots, crowbars and Molotov cocktails. Starting from 1995, when the first transports of nuclear waste to Gorleben took place, there was a slow, but continuous new growth of resistance, with demonstrations and blockades of the railway. In 2002, the “Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity” took effect, following a drawn-out political debate and lengthy negotiations with nuclear power plant operators. The act legislated for the shut-down of all German nuclear plants by 2021

I believe that it is important that we understand the history of these groups to better understand the impact that they have had on the  public’s perceptions of nuclear matters, and how that impacts our efforts to promote the nuclear option. More to the point, they have succeeded in raising the price of nuclear power by forcing costs higher in several areas, which has scared off investors

Early objections to nuclear technology can be seen as developing in two distinct phases. The first phase centered around nuclear weapons, the second later stage against nuclear power stations. It is interesting to note, that while there were protests against testing nuclear weapons, and deploying nuclear weapons, there was little concern over nuclear power, and in fact this period also saw the construction of most of the plants operation to-day. While indeed there were local opposition to nuclear power stations in a few places, it was only after international agreement to limit the numbers, testing and deployment of nuclear weapon, and the signing of several treaties to this effect, did antinuclear focus shift in a major way.

The Ban-the-Bomb Era

Occupy Kasumigasaki” Movement Camps Continues in front of METI, PanOrient News, November 5, 2011: “Women representatives from all over Japan are camping in Kasumigaseki district in Tokyo to express their objection to the nuclear power plants in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” “Tents belonging to various civil anti-nuclear movements are pitched on the sidewalk corner facing the building of Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry. The women’s movement started on October 30, and continues through November 5.”

“The activists held banners saying ‘We Are Anti-Nuclear,’ and ‘Don’t Restart Nuclear Plants.’” “One of the banners said “Occupy Kasumigasaki,” the district in Tokyo where government buildings are concentrated.” “The anti nuclear energy movement is gaining more support among Japanese civilian groups” [...]

Vienna, Sept 14, IRNA – Non-Aligned Movement in a statement read out at the meeting of International Atomic Energy Board of Governors on Wednesday underlined countries’ indisputable right to the development, research and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

The statement read by Egyptian envoy Khaled Sham’e said that NAM believes that all countries are entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy without any discrimination. Therefore, no country should be deprived of nuclear development for peaceful purposes. The countries’ decisions in the nuclear field such as Iran’s policies on fuel cycle should be respected, it noted.

NAM recognizes International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as the only qualified authority to verify commitment of the member states to the Safeguard Agreement and believes that it should not come under pressure in the process, the statement said. NAM considers building a region free of nuclear weapon in the Middle East as a positive step in line with the materialization of global nuclear disarmament and will extend its support to this end.

The researchers at Australia's BioPower Systems evidently looked at kelp, and thought, 'what if we could use that swaying action to generate power?' The result was their envisioned bioWAVE system: 'At the base of each bioWAVE system would be a triangular foundation, keeping it anchored to the sea floor. Extending up from the middle of that foundation would be a central column, topped with multiple blades — these would actually be more like a combination of the kelp's blades and floats, as they would be cylindrical, buoyant structures that just reach to the surface. The column would join the foundation via a hinged pivot, allowing it to bend or swivel in any direction. Wave action (both at the surface and below) would catch the blades and push them back and forth, in turn causing the column to move back and forth relative to the foundation. This movement would pressurize fluid within an integrated hydraulic power conversion module, known as an O-Drive. The movement of that fluid would spin a generator, converting the kinetic energy of the waves into electricity, which would then be delivered to shore via subsea cables.'"

Looking at this aerial photographs taken by Mainichi Shinbun (one of the better ones in terms of even coverage on nuke issues in Japan; another is Tokyo Shinbun), it sure looks more than 60,000 to me. People who actually participated in the event seemed to have the same impression as mine (on this blog comment sections, and on twitter), that it was far bigger than official number by the police (30,000).Mainichi quotes the organizers' number of 60,000 people, and also quotes the number by the police (30,000):

Meanwhile, photos from Germany's Spiegel and France's Le Monde, who used the photos from AP and other agencies. Spiegel puts the number at 60,000:

and Yomiuri, who says "more than 30,000 people gathered" (exactly the police official estimate):

Organizers of the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World [in Yokohama] claimed 6,000 participants from some 30 countries [...] The conference shows all the signs of turning into a coherent, focused movement. [...] The conference’s call for “full transparency, accountability and responsibility by the Japanese Government and Tokyo Electric Power Company” is just as important. Without complete disclosure, progress toward grasping the causes of the problem and finding solutions cannot gain traction. The conference’s calls for ongoing data collection about the safety of food and materials will also be close to the hearts of all consumers. Already, consumers have been demanding basic information about foodstuffs and potentially contaminated materials. Last week’s discovery that radioactive gravel in concrete used to build a new condominium in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, is one more reminder that problems will continue for a very long time. Nuclear issues have come to home to roost. [...] it is clear that a practical consensus towards a different energy future is well underway. Now that is a weekend well spent!

Focus will turn to restoring areas damaged in the oil spill, which the coast guard says represents an important milestone

BP will officially be off the hook for any deposits of oil that wash up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico – unless they can be traced directly to the Macondo well, it has emerged.Under a plan approved by the Coast Guard on 2 November, the oil company will end active cleanup operations and focus on restoring the areas damaged by last year's oil disaster.The plan, which was obtained by the Associated Press, sets out a protocol for determining which areas of the Gulf still need to be cleaned, and when BP's responsibility for that would end.

The plan "provides the mechanisms for ceasing active cleanup operations", AP said.It went on to suggest the biggest effort would be reserved for the most popular, heavily visited beaches. More oil would be tolerated on remote beaches. BP will be responsible for cleaning up thick oil in marshes – unless officials decide it is best to let nature do its work.The agency quoted coast guard officials saying the plan represented an important milestone in restoring the Gulf. BP has set aside about $1bn for restoration.The Obama administration has been indicating for some time that the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, which began on 20 April 2010 with an explosion on board the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers, was moving into a second phase.Earlier on Tuesday, the US government rolled out a new five-year plan for selling offshore drilling leases.The proposal was a radically scaled back version of the president's earlier plans for offshore drilling – put forward just a few weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blowout – that would have opened up the Arctic and Atlantic coasts for drilling.

did you know that huge demonstrations have been taking place in Tokyo as well? We certainly didn't until a SOTT forum member posted a report on our forum. The general lack of awareness of the protests in Japan is probably due to the fact that there has been zero coverage of 'Occupy Tokyo' - which has grown out of the country's large (and growing) grassroots anti-nuclear movement - in Japan's mainstream media.

Several large demonstrations have taken place all over Japan in recent months, especially in Tokyo. The general mood is the same as elsewhere: ordinary people in Japan are fed up with their leaders' lies, particularly the lies told by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and how the government has handled the Fukushima disaster. Or rather, how it has avoided handling it. This should all be eerily familiar to Americans of course; BP's lies and the US government's enabling role from the moment the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010 has continued to this day, with the tragedy continuing to unfold in deathly silence. What is happening in Japan is almost a carbon copy; denial, smear campaigns, heavy-handed tactics and, of course, total media blackout. Up to one million people may have died as a result of Chernobyl, although we'll never really know the true death toll. Fukushima is many orders of magnitude worse...

People in Japan are very angry. Even though the Fukushima disaster is nowhere near ending (in fact, it is getting worse), Japanese media are simply not covering the fallout of the worst nuclear accident in history. Aftershocks from the Magnitude 9 earthquake which struck off the coast of Japan on March 11th are hardly mentioned in the Japanese media, but the fact is they are still ongoing and people are constantly stressed out by them. The economic aftershock is also beginning to take hold in a big way. The good news, says the SOTT forum member in Japan, is that people are now starting to wake up the fact that the Japanese government, TEPCO, and the media have been lying all this time and that more people are starting to take action to actually deal with the situation rather than wishfully think it will just blow away out into the Pacific Ocean.

In Europe and the United States, signs of the long-discussed “nuclear renaissance” are increasingly positive. But it’s in China (which now has 21 out of the 53 reactors under construction around the world) that the initial boom is occurring. Increasing mentions of nuclear power in the mass media, often with a generally positive slant, are very welcome, but the industry now needs to build new reactors in great volume. China, with its vast requirements for clean power generation, is therefore the key

An important element has been public statements from respected third-party advocates for nuclear, many of whom were previously either strongly opposed or seen as agnostic. Some of these come from the environmental movement, notably Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, but the support of James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Theory of the Earth as a self-regulating organism, has been particularly important.

The industry has recognised that securing public buy-in is critical and conditional upon in-depth dialogue. It accepts that concerns over safety, waste and non-proliferation will continue to impose a strict regulatory regime on the industry and that this is necessary, despite it costing a great deal of valuable time and money. 

Dutch energy executive Peter Terium is the most likely successor to RWE chief executive Jürgen Grossmann, according to company insiders cited in German news reports. Grossmann, whose contract expires at the end of September 2012, defended RWE's investments in nuclear power plants vigorously but unsuccessfully against government plans to phase out atomic energy by 2022. The 59-year-old's lobbying earned him the nickname "Atom-Rambo" and even prompted Germany's Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union to award him the dubious title of "Dinosaur of the Year 2010."

News that Peter Terium, 47, is likely to be the fresh face to replace Grossmann surprised many observers. But the dark-horse candidate has been with RWE since 2003. He first RWE Supply & Trading and later oversaw the takeover of Dutch energy company Essent, which he currently heads.

Other potential successors to Grossmann are RWE chief commercial officer Leonhard Birnbaum and chief operating officer Rolf Martin Schmitz. Whoever lands the top job is likely to face a turbulent time. "One large challenge will be the task of bringing RWE's image - and the image of other energy companies - back into a positive light," a labor union representative told Reuters. "We expect a new orientation towards international and national energy politics from the new RWE chief."

The group says the Aug. 23 earthquake that shut down the plant brought attention to the danger of another event in the area. They are asking Dominion to retrofit the two reactors at the plant to higher earthquake safety standards. It also is asking for the company to inspect underground pipes at the nuclear facility to make sure they aren't leaking into the ground or drinking water. "What we're afraid of is that Dominion is putting profits over the safety of the area," said Paxus Calta, a resident of Louisa County for 13 years. "This earthquake is a big wakeup call to us."

Dominion spokesman Rick Zuercher said the company did inspect some underground pipes that it thought would be most vulnerable to an earthquake as well as monitoring water wells in the area. Both of those checks don't indicate any leaks. The company also says the reactors were designed to standards for California-style earthquakes.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said preliminary data from the U.S. Geological Survey shows the quake caused peak ground movement about twice the level for which the plant northwest of Richmond was designed. The plant is located about 11 miles from the quake's epicenter and has been shut down since the earthquake. But NRC officials and Dominion said the plant did not appear to sustain serious damage. The NRC has said it plans to order all U.S. plants later this year to update their earthquake risk analyses, a complex exercise that could take two years for some plants to complete. It says the two North Anna reactors are among 27 in the eastern and central U.S. that may need upgrades.

Members of several anti-nuclear groups who are part of the Stop New Nuclear alliance say they are barring access to Hinkley Point power station in Somerset in protest against EDF Energy's plans to renew the site with two new reactors. The new reactors at Hinkley would be the first of eight new nuclear power stations to be built in the UK. Stop New Nuclear spokesman Andreas Speck said: ''This is the start of a new movement. We intend this day to be a celebration of resistance against the Government and EDF Energy's plans to spearhead the construction of eight new nuclear power plants around the UK. 'This is blockade shows that people who understand the true dangers of nuclear power are prepared to use civil disobedience to get their voice heard. ''The Government has hoodwinked the public into believing that we need nuclear power to keep the lights on. But this is totally untrue.''

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission may force the nation’s nuclear power plants to reevaluate their earthquake detection and safety systems and the manner in which they calculate their resistance to earthquakes as a result of unexpected damage to American and foreign reactor complexes caused by recent earthquakes.

The decision to send a formal Augmented Inspection Team followed the notification by Dominion Power, which owns and operates the North Anna plants that the ground motion of the Virginia earthquake, measured at 5.8 in magnitude, “may have exceeded the ground motion for which it was designed.”

All of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed in the 1950s and 1960s, were supposed to be able to handle the acceleration of the ground motion and shaking associated with the largest historically recorded earthquake within a 50 mile radius of the site. For North Anna, a ground motion of .12 of normal gravity is the “design basis” incorporated into the plant’s license. That was based on an earthquake of a magnitude 4.8, and the plant was designed to withstand the gravitational tug resulting from an earthquake of 5.1 in magnitude.

An increase in anti-nuclear sentiment after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March has stalled India's ambitious plan for nuclear expansion. The plan, pushed forward by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aims to use reactors imported from the United States, France and Russia to increase the country's nuclear-power capacity from the present 4,780 megawatts to 60,000 megawatts by 2035, and to provide one-quarter of the country's energy by 2050. But now there are doubts that the targets will ever be met if safety fears persist.

Officials say that safety precautions are sufficient to make the proposed reactors, some of which are to be sited along the coasts, immune to natural disasters. But protesters are not listening. In April, violent protests halted construction in Jaitapur in the western state of Maharashtra, where Parisian company Areva is expected to build six 1,650-megawatt European Pressurized Reactors. In August, West Bengal state refused permission for a proposed 6,000-megawatt 'nuclear park' near the town of Haripur, which was slated to host six Russian reactors. The state government said that the area is densely populated, and the hot water discharged from the plants would affect local fishing.

On 19 September, following hunger strikes by activists from the People's Movement Against Nuclear Technology, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu state asked Prime Minister Singh to halt work at Koodankulam, about 650 kilometres south of Chennai, where Russia's Atomstroyexport is building two reactors and plans to build four more.

I have been rereading a 1982 book by Bertrand Goldschmidt titled “The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy.”

The two self-assigned homework projects are as part of a reflective effort to understand more about how human society moved from a period of optimism based on a vision of “Atoms for Peace” to a period where someone reading the advertiser supported press would believe that sensible people would logically consider giving up the whole technology out of fear of radiation and its health consequences.One of the hopeful lessons I have learned so far is that the initial conditions of our current fight to defend and expand the safe use of atomic energy are far different from those that faced the people engaged in the earliest battles against a well organized opposition to nuclear technology development. We have a much better chance of success now than we did then – and there are several reasons why that is true.

One condition that is vastly different is the ability of nuclear professionals to have their voices heard. No longer are most people who understand nuclear energy isolated in small communities with few media outlets. In the 1970s, a large fraction of nuclear professionals were located near remotely sited national laboratories or power stations. Today, though many still work at national labs or in small market communities like Lynchburg, VA, we are all globally connected to a vast network on the Internet. We have Skype, YouTube and blogs. Some of us know that major decision makers and journalists read or listen to our words on a regular basis. We are no longer shy about responding to misinformation and unwarranted criticism.