Antinuclear movement of the 1970s

Political movement protesting nuclear weapons and nuclear power

A nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, along with a series of nuclear accidents during the 1970’s, saw citizens’ groups place considerable pressure on governments to halt the construction of many nuclear plants.

Almost from the moment that the first nuclear weapon exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, in August, 1945, citizens in the United States and Canada began to protest the development and use of nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear materials to generate energy. During the 1970’s, these protests grew into mass movements and their opposition became more ferocious, with a mixture of marches, sit-ins, and lawsuits challenging the development of nuclear weapons and the building of nuclear power plants.

Protesting Nuclear Weapons

By the early 1970’s, the United States and the Soviet Union had built thousands of nuclear warheads and were pointing them at each other. At the time, some worried about the possibility of those weapons being launched, with the resulting deaths of millions and the destruction of civilization. As the arms race quickened and the two countries built more weapons, protesters in the United States became more active in marching and trying to influence the public that nuclear weapons programs should be frozen or eliminated.

The late 1970’s saw large, active protests against nuclear weapons. Some protests focused on installations where nuclear weapons were built, including Savannah River in South Carolina and Rocky Flats in Colorado. Throughout most of 1978 and 1979, the Rocky Flats facility was bombarded with protesters attempting to block its entrance and prevent the development of nuclear material for weapons. In April, 1979, Groton, Connecticut, saw its share of protests as the Navy prepared to launch its newest submarine, the Ohio. The Ohio was the first of the Trident submarine class and was capable of launching nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Around the launch date, hundreds of protesters invaded the shipping yards and were jailed as they conducted a sit-in to prevent the Ohio from heading to sea.

Targeting Nuclear Power

The oil crisis of the early 1970’s forced industrialized countries to seek energy alternatives, one of which was nuclear power. Beginning in the 1950’s, public utilities built plants that used nuclear fission to generate electricity. However, the radioactive material created by the process was dangerous and difficult to store. The handling of such material became a political issue as many Americans refused to allow storage within their own regions.

Initially, nuclear power plants proved less controversial than did nuclear weapons because of the need for electric power and the fact that the plants were not producing weapons. However, most people protesting nuclear weapons also opposed the building of new plants and the use of existing plants. The fight against nuclear power was linked to the environmental movement, which had been challenging the dumping of toxic materials in the air and water. The main concern of the environmental movement was the practice in nuclear power plants of cooling radioactive materials with water, which was then released back into rivers or lakes.

Local Movements

The antinuclear movement started as a series of small, local protests against plans by utility companies to build new nuclear power plants. One of the first challenges during the 1970’s occurred in 1971, when a court placed restrictions on the building of a plant at Chesapeake Bay. The limitations delayed its construction and increased the cost of the plant. The court decision opened the avenue to other legal challenges and more dramatic attacks on plants as they were being built.

The Seabrook nuclear facility in New Hampshire also gained the attention of protesters. Construction of the plant began in the mid-1970’s, and it was intended to provide most of the power for the state. In response to the construction, local residents organized protests and an organization, the Clamshell Alliance, which aggressively protested at the site. In April, 1977, nearly fifteen hundred protesters were arrested and charged with trespassing when they entered the site and attempted to prevent construction. Several other protests followed, leading to more arrests. The Clamshell Alliance was successful in delaying construction and raising the cost of the facility, even though it was eventually built.

On the West Coast, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, located near San Luis Obispo, California, was attracting the attention of regional antinuclear groups. To fight Diablo Canyon, they formed the Abalone Alliance, a grouping of antinuclear forces. In August, 1977, Diablo Canyon was blockaded, and a small number of protesters were arrested. The next year, a protest led to several hundred people being arrested. An even larger protest in June, 1979, attracted tens of thousands, including California governor Jerry Brown, who announced his opposition to the plant. Later that year, Brown had to wade through protesters who conducted a sit-in at his Sacramento office.

National Protests

Local protests soon developed into a national movement. Several newly formed groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Union of Concerned Scientists, were directly involved in challenging permits for nuclear plants and in issuing reports warning of the dangers of such plants. The NRDC used perceived design flaws in the nuclear plants to file lawsuits attempting to prevent construction permits from being granted. The groups also held conferences where scientists spoke about the dangers of nuclear power and dire predictions were made about what would happen if a plant malfunctioned. The groups even engaged a prominent activist, Ralph Nader, to be one of the public faces used to convince citizens that nuclear power was dangerous.

While the groups challenged the plants in court and in the media, public opinion polls at the time showed that a sizable majority of Americans supported the continued use of nuclear power and the building of more plants as one of the solutions to the energy crisis. These polls did not deter antinuclear activists from challenging plants, however, and at times they were successful in delaying plants from being built or in preventing construction altogether. The success convinced some in the movement that statewide bans could be passed.

The best financed of the antinuclear petitions was in California, where opponents of nuclear power were able to get Proposition 15 on the ballot in 1976. The proposition would have halted the building of new nuclear plants in the state and begun phasing out the plants operating at the time. Although Proposition 15 generated the most media attention, other states had similar initiatives on the ballot. Its defeat by a two-to-one margin showed how the antinuclear movement had failed to generate much public support for its position.

The antinuclear movement did not gain significant ground among the public until the spring of 1979, when the crisis at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania occurred. A malfunction at the plant led to a near meltdown and the release of some radioactive material into the air. Three Mile Island became the news story of the year, and extensive media coverage emphasized the dangers of nuclear plants. The sentiments of the antinuclear movement became part of the mainstream, as public fear of a nuclear disaster prevented the building of any further plants.

Protests in Canada

Lacking a nuclear arsenal or the desire to build nuclear weapons, the Canadian government was able to escape the type of antinuclear protests that occurred in the United States. Instead, Canadian protests against nuclear weapons targeted sales of Canadian-mined uranium to countries building nuclear weapons. The rarity of uranium and its mining in unstable parts of the world made Canadian uranium particularly valuable and dependable.

The Canadian protest movement was both national and local. Most of the national protests focused on the sale of uranium to countries such as Romania, South Africa, and Argentina. During the 1970’s, these countries were dictatorships unfriendly to the West and Canada. However, the Canadian government and the nuclear industry were aggressive in trying to sell uranium and the nuclear reactors using the uranium to generate electricity. Government officials, including members of the ruling party, criticized the sale of nuclear technology to Romania because it belonged to the communist Warsaw Pact. Shipments of material to Argentina were halted when dockworkers refused to load the equipment on the ships in order to protest human rights violations in Argentina and the selling of nuclear material to an authoritarian government.

With large uranium deposits located in provinces such as Saskatchewan, it was inevitable that plans in the early 1970’s to expand the uranium mines would draw local protests. Most of the uranium deposits in Saskatchewan were found in the northern reaches of the province, the poorest region and one inhabited by First Nations communities. The provincial government proposed expanding the mines and increasing production as part of an overall economic growth plan. Private groups protested immediately, including the Interchurch Committee composed of religious groups and Indian rights groups protesting the abuse of native land. Most of the opposition feared contamination of groundwater and the air caused by the mine runoff when the uranium was brought to the surface.

A fierce protest arose when the town of Warman was proposed as a site for a uranium refining factory. The dust produced by the refining of raw uranium into a metal that could be used in nuclear plants was believed to be dangerous. The provincial government and a committee created to consider the factory were swamped with protesters, and eventually the government agreed not to build it. Instead, the Province of Ontario built a factory in Blind River.

Another controversy was sparked by a 1978 decision to build a nuclear waste repository in the southern region of Manitoba. The repository would be blasted from a cave and used by plants in Canada and the United States to store the nuclear waste that they generated. Once the plan was made public, local antinuclear groups began lobbying against the repository, claiming that the material would seep out of the planned cavern and into the groundwater or the air. People in the region also disliked the idea of large amounts of nuclear material being shipped through their communities, as an accident might result in exposure to radiation.

Impact

During the 1970’s, the rising tide of opposition to the use of nuclear power halted the building of new plants and heightened public fears of the dangers of nuclear power.

Bibliography

Bedford, Henry. Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power. Lowell: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Focuses on the controversy surrounding the building of the Seabrook nuclear plant. Told from the perspective of the protesters, it blames the problems with the plant on the government and the utility company building it.

Carroll, Peter. It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970’s. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Focuses on the political events of the decade, including the rising protests against the nuclear power industry.

Levanthal, Paul, Sharon Tanzer, and Steven Dolley. Nuclear Power and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2002. Looks at the connection between nuclear energy and the eventual building of nuclear weapons, tracing the development of nuclear power through the 1970’s.

Robbins, Walter. Getting the Shaft: The Radioactive Waste Controversy in Manitoba. Ottawa: Queenston House, 1984. Describes in detail the efforts by local people to protest efforts to build a nuclear waste depository in their community.

Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies. New York: Free Press, 2001. A wide-ranging book looking at political issues and social movements, including environmentalism and the antinuclear movement.

Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Discusses the Three Mile Island crisis in the context of the antinuclear power movement, the energy crisis, the public misunderstandings about nuclear power, and political pressure against the building of nuclear plants.