Core Arguments

A generation after Three Mile Island's near-disaster in 1979, nuclear power remains politically radioactive. Though energy consumption has increased dramatically -- Americans upped their per capita household electrical use by a third between 1980 and 2001 -- no new nuclear plants have been built since 1996. We've let the Mighty Atom sit in the penalty box rather than settle whether we're Pro-Nuke or No-Nuke once and for all.

In her provocative yet flawed and often frustrating book, "Power to Save the World," Gwyneth Cravens does us all the service of taking a fresh look at nuclear power and asking whether the threat of global warming has changed the calculus of nuclear risk. Is it worth risking a rare reactor meltdown to keep the glaciers from melting? Are we ready to commit to more nuclear power? Cravens, a novelist and former New Yorker fiction editor, concludes that the survival of the human race depends on it.

What makes this thesis noteworthy is that Cravens was once so anti-nuke that she joined the opposition to the opening of New York's Shoreham nuclear plant. Now she has written a chronicle of her conversion, told as a tour of American nuclear facilities guided by a family friend named D. Richard "Rip" Anderson. A chemist and oceanographer who modeled the risks of nuclear waste storage for Sandia Labs, Anderson is so confident in the safety of nuclear power that he once held an egg-size lump of plutonium in his hand and swam wearing scuba gear in the coolant tank of a nuclear reactor.

Craven's best argument for nuclear energy is that coal is much worse. Nukes in the United States haven't killed anyone outright, Cravens says, while air pollution from coal is known to cause 24,000 deaths a year.

Nuclear power produces about two pounds of radioactive waste to generate all the electricity that the average American will use in a lifetime. That may sound like a lot, but coal-fired power generation produces nearly 69 tons of solid waste while providing the same amount of power, not to mention untold tons of greenhouse gases.

And radiation? Coal loses again: A coal plant emits between 100 and 400 times more radiation than a nuclear plant. (Coal itself is radioactive, as are -- mildly -- bananas, lima beans, cigarettes and the granite walls of Grand Central Station. Furthermore, it's safer to work in a nuclear power plant than in a bank. Who knew?)

But when it comes to making a nuanced, balanced case for nuclear power, this book fails, in part because Cravens seems overly eager to refute her earlier opposition. With the zeal of a novice, she underplays the historic effects of uranium mining, fails to ask questions about the security of supplies of nuclear materials, glosses over the costs of building more plants, denigrates alternative energy and efficiency, and quotes a non-expert saying that negative predictions come from "troublemakers or con men."

These undisciplined arguments have a giddy granularity that fails to acknowledge big issues and credible nuclear naysayers. Analyzing the risks of terrorism to power plants, Cravens discovers that in mock attacks, commandos managed to reach their targets in nuclear plants 15 percent of the time. She accepts without question the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's assurance that this is no cause for concern.

Most plants use "palm geometry" to admit their employees, she explains, and a terrorist who tried to cut off a worker's hand to gain admission would be detected immediately because the scanner "can tell the difference between a severed hand, whose measurements have necessarily changed owing to blood loss, and one still attached." The book is full of such odd nuggets, but they don't add up to a thorough argument.

The strongest parts of the book -- and the real reason to read it -- are Cravens's descriptions of the off-limits sanctums of nuclear power. A half mile below the surface of the earth near Carlsbad, N.M., at the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), she explores a salt deposit used to store waste from nuclear weapons. WIPP sounds like a hallucination.

Airborne salt dust makes halos around the light fixtures, while the salt floors muffle all sound. "Vanishing perspectives and the large scale of the chambers toyed with the senses. Here there were no straight lines: the plasticity of the salt caused walls to bulge, floors to hump, ceilings to bow." Patterns on the walls and ceilings "fooled the eye into seeing sculpted columns, vaults, niches, bas-reliefs -- as in an ancient temple."

Running through the book is a meditation on just how nukes became so vilified. Cravens characterizes this as illogical, unscientific and driven by environmentalists with "agendas," yet offers scattered evidence for why public opinion shifted. But the reason is pretty clear: incompetence, as egregious as anything Homer Simpson could come up with.

In 1975, workers used a candle to test for gas leaks at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama, started a fire that burned the whole electrical system and raised temperatures in the reactor core. The plant stayed closed for 22 years thereafter. In 1979, a few beads of resin blocked a valve in the reactor at Three Mile Island, leading to a chain of equipment malfunctions, bad human decisions and finally a meltdown of the reactor core. As recently as 2006, utilities in New York and Illinois tried to hide tritium leaks. And last year, video footage of guards sleeping at Pennsylvania's Peach Bottom Power Plant caused yet another scandal.

Public mistrust of the nuclear industry may be at odds with the national labs' risk assessments, but it reflects a certain wisdom about the weaknesses of humans and equipment. The appearance of this book -- and Cravens's ability to get into these facilities -- may be the beginning of the industry's attempt to regain that trust through argument, transparency and evidence of contrition, but I suspect it will be a long process.

Book reviewed in this article

Gwyneth Cravens, Power To Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, 439 pp., Knopf.