By the time of the oil crisis in 1973, seventeen countries had 167 power reactors with a capacity of nearly 61 000 MWe.47 The nuclear industry thought the four­fold increase in oil would make nuclear more economic than coal. For a time this was indeed the case. However, the worsening inflationary environment led inexorably to a steady raising of interest rates making capital-intensive projects like nuclear stations very costly. Moreover, the deep global recession that began to bite as the 1970s drew to a close led to a steep fall in electricity demand. This negatively impacted on some countries’ nuclear ambitions, with some countries like France willing and able to bear the increased costs more than others. Although there were substantial orders placed in the US for new nuclear sta­tions during 1973 and 1974, many were never completed.48 Indeed, no new stations were ordered in America after 1978, with many plants cancelled when 90% complete.49 This was a rapid reversal in fortunes from the golden age, announced only in 1973, when the US AEC predicted that by the year 2000 there would be 1000 operational nuclear reactors in the US alone.

Similarly in the UK the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), partly in response to the oil crisis, drew up plans during 1973 to build 32 PWRs (only one — Sizewell B — was ever built) and during 1974 The Department of Energy ordered six Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactors, a programme which was mothballed in 1978 as recession deepened with £145 million having already been sunk into the project.50

During the late 1970s protests against the construction of nuclear plants steadily began attracting increasing numbers of people particularly in continental Europe — from the 60 000 who demonstrated against the construction of a fast breeder reactor in Malville, France, in July 1977 where one protester was killed, to the large scale protests across West Germany in which for the first time the police began deploying water cannons and tear gas to disperse protesters. These gathering protests were labelled by one writer at the time as the ‘‘anti nuke explosion’’.51

In the late 1970s, several countries also decided to abandon the more ambitious parts of their nuclear programmes, particularly fast breeder and reprocessing technology. This development was led by the United States when President Carter issued a decree in 1977 halting reprocessing, formally moti­vated by nuclear proliferation concerns but also responding to the enormous technical difficulties and financial costs that had arisen with regard to devel­oping fast breeder reactors and reprocessing plants.52

From the late 1970s to 2002 the nuclear power industry suffered relative decline, particularly in Europe and North America. The number of reactors coming online from the mid 1980s little more than matched retirements, though capacity increased by nearly one third and output increased 60% due to capacity plus improved load factors in existing reactors. The share of nuclear in the world electricity market from the mid 1980s was fairly constant at 16-17%. During the period 1986-2005 there were only 71 new nuclear plants constructed, with only a small number of these being in the ‘‘old’’ nuclear power countries; in the preceding 20 year period there had been 436 new nuclear plants. As a result, but also due to an increase in secondary supplies, the uranium price dropped.

Moreover, in the USA, in what had been one of the largest markets for nuclear power stations, nuclear reactors became increasingly uncompetitive in comparison to coal-fired power stations as well as to the emerging combined cycle gas turbine plants.53 Gradually ‘‘the optimism of the early 1970s turned to pessimism about the future of nuclear power’’.54 Although at first the US Clean Air Act increased the attractiveness of nuclear power in comparison to coal through the 1970s, this was more often than not offset by the effects of capital cost escalation and increasing time delays that plagued the construction of new nuclear plants. From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s 100 nuclear plants were cancelled in the US alone.55

There were two accidents, however, which sounded the death knell for the nuclear industry, reinforcing the negative public and utility perception toward nuclear power that had emerged during the 1970s. Firstly, the partial core meltdown in 1979 at the reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, which, although did not lead to any loss of life, caused over 100 000 people to flee their homes and cost a great deal of public money ($2.5 billion). This hastened moratoria on building new nuclear stations in a number of European countries (Italy, Belgium and Sweden) as well as contributing to killing off the industry in the USA.

Secondly, the fire and core melt down at one of the RBMLK reactors at Chernobyl during 1986 which sent radioactivity into the atmosphere contaminating dozens of countries, causing 50 immediate casualties and

thousands of cancer victims in the years afterwards, and displacing 100000s of people across the former Soviet Union from the Ukraine and Belarus. The accident led to an intensification of anti nuclear sentiment across Europe, in Germany in particular,56 as well as contributing to Finland (a relatively pro nuclear country) to shelve plans for a new nuclear reactor. Opinion polls throughout Europe captured the impact Chernobyl had on public attitudes toward nuclear power. Even in Finland, a country with relatively higher levels of public support for nuclear power, the amount of people who wanted to phase out nuclear power after Chernobyl increased from 21.3% in 1983 (ref. 58) to 34.5% in 1986 (ref. 59). In the UK a de facto moratorium on new nuclear builds was declared in 1989, pending a five year review.59,60 Chernobyl marked the end to the ailing nuclear industry’s hopes of recovery after the decline of the late 1970s. Nuclear power became increasingly framed in terms of its risks rather than its feel this is a good description benefits. The ‘‘new’’ framing around the risks of nuclear energy did not erase, but came to compete against and co-evolve with the original framing around the ‘‘promise of civil nuclear energy’’.61

The economic case against nuclear power became increasingly central to the debate during the 1980s. Security of supply faded to the background in a number of countries, as the influence of OPEC declined, oil prices fell, and the North Sea oil and gas fields provided cheap domestic energy. Moreover, the privatization of electricity networks also exposed the fragi­lity of nuclear economics. The hidden costs of nuclear were starkly exposed when nuclear power stations were exempt from the privatization of the UK electricity industry in 1989, given the refusal ofthe private sector to take on the risk of ageing nuclear stations with potentially massive liabilities.™11 In the UK, as a result of the 1995 white paper The Prospects for Nuclear Power in the United Kingdom, seven AGR stations and the one PWR were floated on the stock market as British Energy for the sum of just £2.1 billion in 1996 (Sizewell B alone had cost £2.8 billion). The private sector had got eight stations for the price of one,65 reflecting the desire of government to get rid of the nuclear plants as quickly as possible. xxvin It became clear that private utilities found it more economical to build gas-fired plants than either nuclear or coal-fired plants. It also became transparent that, bereft of a subsidy, the utilities in liberalised energy markets did not view nuclear stations as the most cost effective investment.[24] [25] [26]