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Originally published in 1984. This annotated bibliography will serve as a starting point for information on the issue of nuclear power. Arranged for easy use into three sections – Pro-Nuclear, Anti-Nuclear, and Neutral – the book cites over a hundred of the most important books on the subject, offering for each full bibliographic data and a lengthy annotation that is balanced and informative. This work, which features author, title and subject indexes, is simultaneously a collection-building tool, a guide for non-specialist library patrons and an invaluable aid for research.
As of June 1977, the United States had some 232 nuclear power plants either planned or in operation, with a generating capacity estimated at about 321 million kilowatts. To date, the industrial world has spent over $200 billion in order to produce useful energy from nuclear fission. By all odds, civilian nuclear power is one of the largest technological ventures in history. To many, this massive effort is completely justified: No other single technology offers as much promise for satisfying world energy needs in the years ahead—particularly as fossil fuels dwindle and climb drastically in price. Yet to others, there is no single technology which raises such serious questions of risk to public health and safety.
Some controversies, as the useful cliche has it, generate more heat than light. Nowhere is this more true than in the polarizing debates that are sparked by public hearings on the licensing, location, and construction of nuclear power plants and on the safety criteria that they should be required to meet. The "pro" and "anti" confrontations are tests of strength—divided among corporate, governmental, and local citizens' bodies—that do not guarantee an outcome that is fair or based on factual merit. Moreover, this book argues that where scientific and technological issues are involved, an adversary procedure, however properly moderated, is fundamentally incompatible with the impartial search for truth through scientific methods. And yet the desirability of participatory democracy—of people exercising their right to determine the shape and future of their society by some effective process—is clear and postulated as inalienable. However, in the nuclear power controversy, the adversarial process is inappropriate not only in principle but also in practice, as far as ordinary citizens are concerned. As the authors point out, "government and industry have tended to become allied against small groups of concerned, even worried, citizens. Clearly, the weight of influence, talent, money, power, policy, and decisionmaking lies with government and industry. As a result, citizen groups are usually restricted to raising questions about matters concerning which they possess little knowledge or expertise." In order to examine the process as it works now and to propose improvements for the future, the authors undertook an intensive one-year study, covering three cases: the construction permit hearings on the nuclear plants proposed for Midland, Michigan; the operating license proceedings for the plant at Vernon, Vermont; and the rule-making hearings on criteria for emergency core cooling systems. Altogether, hearings were attended for some 48 days, and more than 100 people on all sides of the issues were interviewed. After a thorough analysis of the findings, the book offers in its concluding chapter a number of specific recommendations to ensure that the public interest will be better served. And these are offered from a position of strict impartiality: "We have found that despite lip service paid to citizen participation in governmental decisionmaking agency arrogance, expert elitism, stacked-deck proceedings, and the consigning of citizens to helplessness before the steamroller of big government is more the rule than the exception. On the other hand we have found strong evidence among citizens groups of 'know-nothingism,' blind anti-technology and anti-government sentiments, pessimism, and doom forecasting.... We have attempted scrupulously to view the panoply of issues and the cast of characters analytically and fairly."
Path-breaking research into the Atomic Energy Commission's internal memorandum files supports this text's explanation of how and why America came to depend so heavily on its experts after World War II and why their authority and political clout declined in the 1970s.
background needed to make informed choices about nuclear technologies, introducing concepts that can be used for evaluating the claims of both proponents and opponents
The regime under which humankind has governed its uses of the ocean is in the process of change—shifting away from the traditional freedom of the seas toward a “mixed†system in which most of the valuable near-shore resources come under coastal jurisdiction. The transition to a new regime has been difficult for many states, most notably Japan, whose rights to use the entire ocean were well protected by the traditional regime. Japan’s response to the need to develop a modern ocean policy— to adapt to the emerging ocean management regime—is the subject of this multiauthor volume. U.S. and Japanese scholars look at what Japan is doing, how, and with what results. They first assess general trends in ocean management, then examine the role of Japan in the international political economy of the oceans, and finally look at Japan’s ocean policy in various sectors: shipbuilding, fisheries, mineral resources, offshore petroleum, and nuclear power generation. Given Japan’s importance in ocean affairs, the authors point out that the lessons that can be learned from its experience are of prime international importance.