Safety Problems

Questions about the safety and economy of nuclear power created perhaps the most emotional battle fought over energy. As the battle heated during the late 1970s, nuclear advocates argued that no realistic alternative existed to increased reliance on nuclear power.

They recognized that some problems remain but maintained that solutions would be found. Nuclear opponents, on the other hand, emphasized a number of unanswered questions about the environment:

What are the effects of low-level radiation over long periods?
What is the likelihood of a major accident at a nuclear power plant?
What would be the consequences of such an accident?
How can nuclear power’s waste products, which will remain dangerous for centuries, be permanently isolated from the environment?

These safety questions helped cause changes in specifications for and delays in the construction of nuclear power plants, further driving up costs.
They also helped create a second controversy:

Is electricity from nuclear power plants less costly, equally costly, or more costly than electricity from coal-fired plants?

Despite rapidly escalating oil and gas prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these political and economic problems caused an effective moratorium in the United States on new orders for nuclear power plants.

This moratorium took effect even before the 1979 near meltdown

(melting of the nuclear fuel rods)

At the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the 1986 partial meltdown at the Chernobyl’ plant north of Kyiv in Ukraine .

The latter accident caused some fatalities and cases of radiation sickness, and it released a cloud of radioactivity that traveled widely across the northern hemisphere.