America aims for nuclear-power renaissance
AFTER THE second world war, America’s new Atomic Energy Commission was on the hunt for a remote site where engineers could work out how to turn the raw power contained in a nuclear bomb into electricity. They settled on the desert shrubland of south-eastern Idaho. Towns in the area fell over themselves to compete for the headquarters of the reactor test site, seeing it as a catalyst for growth. Idaho Falls, then a city of 19,000, launched what it called “the party plan”. Locals wooed officials at lunches, cocktail parties and on city tours. The guest lists included women who were “as winsome as possible” to make the town seem attractive to the (male) engineer in charge of choosing.
The plan worked. Nearly 75 years later, Idaho Falls (population 67,000) remains home to the test site’s successor and the centre of nuclear-power research in America: the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
Now America’s nuclear-power industry is partying again. Nuclear is a carbon-free alternative to other sources of steady baseload power, such as coal and gas. Nuclear reactors are much smaller than wind or solar farms, which sprawl across landscapes and attract legal challenges from groups with other ideas on how the land should be used. The need to limit greenhouse-gas emissions has spurred liberals, historically wary of nuclear’s toxic-waste problem, to rethink their stance. In America 46% of Democrats favour using nuclear energy for electricity, the highest proportion in a decade. Republicans have long approved of it.
2023-06-25 16:44:43
Article from www.economist.com
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