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Over the next 30 years, this dynamic--whereby concerns that were essentially environmental in nature shaped national security policy--affected nuclear power, as well. To their opponents, atomic power plants were ticking time bombs dotting the American landscape, regularly extruding toxic waste and threatening much worse. Environmentalists believed, in the words of Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, that "nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust." By the late '70s, many opponents of nuclear power and many supporters of nuclear disarmament had come to see themselves merely as different manifestations of the same movement. The panic that followed the Three Mile Island incident helped fertilize the Nuclear Freeze movement, which called on the United States and the Soviet Union to immediately stop the arms race. (The mayor of nearby Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, actually proposed making Hiroshima its "sister city," despite the fact that not a single person had died at TMI.) Conversely, when fear of nuclear war peaked in the early '80s, public opinion turned against further reactor construction. The nuclear industry, already hammered by exorbitant cost overruns and slowing energy demand, entered a long slumber.
It's difficult to pinpoint when atomic-energy optimists began touting the phrase "nuclear renaissance," but the Bush administration's National Energy Policy, published in May 2001 by Dick Cheney's infamously industry-friendly task force, certainly marked a turning point. That document painted a stark picture, in which electricity demand would grow by 45 percent over the next 20 years and existing supplies would not keep pace. "America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970s," it said. The report called for increasing America's domestic energy supplies, most controversially by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but perhaps most importantly by supporting "the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States as a major component of our national energy policy."
