Reactors and Detractors

The taming of nuclear fission into a source of controlled power was a breakthrough met with both hope and deep distrust. Can it make a comeback as energy needs soar?

- JAMES B. MEIGS

THE INDIAN POINT nuclear power plant, on the banks of the Hudson River about 30 miles north of New York City, first opened in 1962 and was greatly expanded in the 1970s.

For many years it was a monument to technological optimism. On a site smaller than that of a shopping mall, the plant's two reactors could produce over 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply more than a quarter of the city's power needs-safely and reliably, without a trace of emissions.

Indian Point could have gone on producing clean, dependable power for decades. But this was not to be. Thanks to pressure from the environmental group Riverkeeper and the ambitions of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a deal was struck in 2017 requiring Indian Point to go dark four years later. The plant was a "ticking time bomb," Mr. Cuomo said, adding that its electricity would easily be replaced by planned wind and solar projects. Riverkeeper's vice chairman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., applauded the "transition from a dirty, dangerous energy system to clean, safe, wholesome, local and patriotic power." And so a pioneering power station that once exemplified the prospect of boundless energy was laid low by nuclear paranoia and green utopianism. It is a story that has been repeated around the world.

In "The Power of Nuclear," the Dutch journalist Marco Visscher sets out to explain how the early hopes for nuclear power were dashed by the environmental movement's anti-technology bias and overblown radiation fears-and how the world's most efficient energy source might be on the verge of a comeback.

This brisk and entertaining book (translated into English by the author himself) is as much a cultural history as a technological one. Mr. Visscher gallops through early research into radioactivity by Marie Curie, the sobering implications of the atomic bomb's first and only use during World War II, and the postwar dream of harnessing nuclear power for peaceful purposes.