Whatever happened to...
...the anti-nuclear movement?
William Stodalka
In 1979, five Greenpeace protestors parachuted onto the proposed site of Ontario’s Darlington nuclear power plant. From the sky, they likely saw the 1,500 demonstrators who were also there protesting the reactor. While construction on Darlington did go ahead, the protestors’ anti-nuke message was clearly understood. Darlington became the last nuclear power plant to be opened in Canada.
But that might soon change. There’s talk of building plants in Western Canada and plans to build two more reactors at Darlington. But while the plants might soon be back, the number of protestors is nowhere near what they were during the anti-nuke movement’s heyday. When it was announced that land near Alberta’s Lac Cardinal was being considered as the home of a new reactor, only 150 protestors came out.
As Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility tells it, “In the ’80s and ’90s, nobody in nuclear was planning anything. And what happened was, the movement went to sleep, you might say. Those organizations that did exist lost a lot of resources and turned to other responsibilities.” Some of the driving forces behind the original anti-nuke movement, such as the threat of nuclear war and incidents like Chernobyl, have faded from memory too.
Another reason for our apparent acceptance of nuclear power is the idea that it’s a green technology. But while industry-funded PR campaigns have been heavily promoting this concept, it’s one that’s not completely accurate, says Edwards. He says the view of nuclear as green doesn’t factor in the greenhouse gases produced during plants’ 10-year-long build times or the problems that result from uranium exploration, mining and disposal.
While Edwards feels that the anti-nuke movement has “...gone back to square one,” he does believe that the movement can return. It’s a sentiment shared by Shawn Patrick Stensil, the nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, who believes the protests will upsurge as nuclear power becomes a bigger issue — Barack Obama has made nuclear part of his energy policy, and Darlington will start building its reactors in 2012.
Stensil says the protests will be different this time, pointing out how, unlike in the 1980s, the clean energy industry and green entrepreneurs are now actual lobbies with more political clout and more alternatives to present. Says Stensil: “It won’t just be the hippies fighting the nuclear lobbies.”
