What was the wet-dream of the nuclear industry advocates in the 1950s has resurfaced in this century as environmentalism. In reality this new effort is fundamentally driven by the needs of capitalists for cheap energy to keep their system's machinery going regardless of the health risks to the public. It is a recognition that the remaining fossil fuels are likely to become prohibitively expense.
Nuclear power stations were supposed to produce electricity which was ‘too cheap to meter’, as Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission pronounced in 1954, as part of a vision of a futuristic ‘age of peace’, in which people would also ‘travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and with great speeds’ (p.15). The reality however did not live up to the science fiction: building and operating nuclear reactors turned out to take much longer, cost much more, and be more risky than had originally been anticipated.Besides being dangerous, nuclear power is prohibitively expensive, but corporate advocates in their mad search of profits have managed to outsource most of the risk and expense to the 99 Percent.