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“This nagging worry about the carbon dioxide issue” Nuclear denial and the nuclear renaissance campaign

Auteur	N.Almiron, N.Khozyainova, L.Freixes
	6-01-2-16-83.pdf
Datum	2020
Classificatie	6.01.2.16/83 (KE & BROEIKAS - WEL/NIET OPLOSSING + SCENARIO'S)
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Chapter 11 “This nagging worry about the carbon dioxide issue”
Nuclear denial and the nuclear renaissance campaign
Núria Almiron, Natalia Khozyainova,
and Lluís Freixes

On December 8, 1953, the president of the United States at that time, Dwight
Eisenhower, delivered a speech before the General Assembly of the United
Nations in New York that would become famous worldwide. “Atoms for
Peace”, as the discourse was named, was the first step in a massive public 
relations effort to radically transform the world’s perception of nuclear energy 
 inthe context of the Cold War and the U.S.’s urgent need to clean the image of
atomic technology – following its military use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at
the end of the Second World War. The speech enthusiastically introduced the
alleged benefits and possibilities of nuclear technology for civil uses. From that
moment on, nuclear power was to be a permanently controversial reality.
Although the Soviet Union and Britain constructed electric generation
nuclear power plants before the United States, it was the Westinghouse reactors,
based on the design of the first nuclear submarines, that determined the
future of nuclear power worldwide. Interestingly, during their first decade of
life nuclear power plants provided more than enough evidence that their costs
did not match the promise. The results of the world’s first full-scale atomic
electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses, the Shippingport
plant in the United States, left no room for doubt: The electricity generated
by the power station was ten times more expensive than that generated by
conventional means.
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) – which is ideologically
dependent on the propagandistic aims of the civilian use of atomic energy –
and also the reactor manufacturers, essentially Westinghouse and General Electric
– which are subsidized by the government – became the main promoters
of nuclear power energy. However, the electric companies that were supposed
to exploit the civilian plants could not make the numbers work.

From: Climate Change Denial and Public Relations
Strategic Communication and Interest Groups in Climate Inaction
Edited by Núria Almiron
and Jordi Xifra
First published 2020