Many citizens, nourished on Cold War-era information, continue to believe that nuclear energy and its by-products are dangerous to their health. That means that the nuclear industry - in order to continue making money - must overcome such resistance so that the public will welcome nuclear energy and its by-products into its communities on an expanding scale.

Citizens' concerns about nuclear energy and waste are not unfounded. While there's a much longer, more scientific way to describe the danger, the short version of it this: Nuclear material decays, like many things. As it decays, it throws off alpha particles, which are tiny, invisible bits of radioactivity. Once inside a human or animal, these particles enter and damage cells, causing the abnormal cell changes that become cancer. Nuclear material remains active for anywhere from 100 to 250,000 years, potentially affecting multiple generations of species.

"Power plants can easily be converted to produce weapons-grade plutonium," says Mike Moore, editor of the bimonthly Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. "Even though the Cold War is over, things are more dangerous than at the height of the Cold War. In order to have nuclear power provide most of the world's electricity, you're going to need so many plants so widely dispersed, that it becomes dangerous again."

Moore estimates that the world would need about 50,000 power plants in order to make nuclear power its sole source of energy. Putting power plants in so many places means giving more countries the ability to create nuclear weapons.

"If we had thousands of nuclear power plants around the world, it would be hard to oversee that," says Moore.

And many nuclear reactors operating power plants, says Moore, are not safe because they are based on reactors used during wartime.

"The [nuclear reactors] we built in the 1950s and 1960s are built up from submarine reactors and are not designed for major power-production use," says Moore.

"There are newer designs that would have been better, but those are not being followed. They didn't want to slow down and build better reactors."

"The industry has convinced people that they will freeze in the dark if they don't use nuclear energy," says Faye Brown, campaign director with Honor the Earth.

Keeping the public in the dark is another industry strategy. "At the regulatory level, there's a tendency toward deregulation," says David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service. "Government agencies are given a pass or even allowed to regulate themselves, so that it becomes more difficult or less meaningful for the public to participate."

The other part of the industry's push consists of telling the public that nuclear power and all its wastes and by-products pose little or no danger, or that they would be safe if handled correctly.

This is the stance of publications like the Bulletin. Despite Moore's acknowledgement of the dangers of peacetime use, the Bulletin still advocates for it.

"I don't want to say that nuclear energy is not dangerous," he says, "but its danger is often over-dramatized."

The Nuclear Energy Institute puts out this seemingly contradictory message as well. With a membership that includes 41 U.S. utilities that own and operate nuclear power plants, it advertises a mission "to promote peacetime use of nuclear energy." Even so, the NEI points out that in comparison with a nuclear bomb, "in a nuclear power plant accident, you have a smaller explosion, with steam blowing open its container, but the extent of death from radiation is likely to be the same."

Especially since, adds Kraft, nuclear power plants do not always operate safely. "There's a trend to do questionable practices on maintenance and save money," he says. "They're starting to do repairs and refueling while reactors are operating. Efficiency goes up but safety goes down."

The industry has even co-opted part of the environmental message. Paul Loeb is an activist and author of Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World's Largest Atomic Complex.

"Thirty years ago, even [some activists] were saying that we should be environmentally responsible and use nuclear energy," he says. "People like that had bought into the consensus."

Brown says of the industry, "They'll say, ‘We don't emit greenhouse gasses,' but they don't tell us that they produce tons of radiation."

And the nuclear industry is also hard at work to defeat proposals for alternative, non-polluting forms of energy production, like solar and wind power. "The money in solar and wind energy would not be concentrated in so few hands," says Michael Keegan, an organizer with the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes. "It would be an economy more based in equity. It's labor-intensive power, so you have to hire a lot of people. But you can't hoard the wind and sell it to people, so the power industry doesn't want it.

"Nuclear culture reaches into the democracy and the economy," added Keegan, citing high costs to consumers, and high contributions the industry makes to lawmakers. "It's a feudal economic order. People work a job to come home and pay utility bills. We're producing energy in the most pathological, expensive way possible, with the worst possible outcome."

The result is that the public often will not ask questions.

Moore, a former newspaper reporter, believes that the public simply is not interested in understanding nuclear energy. "We are getting into areas that are so specialized and arcane that ordinary readers aren't going to be interested in those details," he says.

But the Nuclear Energy Information Service's Kraft says the industry uses that assertion to avoid putting out information. "Once people understand that you don't have to be a nuclear physicist to get it, they want more information," he says. "There are a lot of things the public doesn't get, but they still have to make decisions about these things. "Nuclear issues are the same way," he says. "We want to take the technical gobbledygook out of it, to take it out of the realm of mystery that the industry keeps it in."

Loeb connects the strong influence of nuclear culture to the existence of nuclear weapons. "The willingness to live with potential annihilation has made us more willing to live with things like environmental problems," says Loeb. "It makes us fatalistic about other things as well."

What seems to work, when fighting against nuclear power plants and their wastes, is to fight against nuclear culture using cultural phenomenon which would support opposition to it.

In this culture, physical or psychological proximity to people's personal lives make an issue more meaningful. Quite simply, with the issue of nuclear energy, the picture becomes clearer when people are closer to it.

Yucca Mountain is a place of worship for the Western Shoshone and Paiute tribes of native peoples. But the Department of Energy is also evaluating the area for permanent nuclear waste storage. This process has involved environmental impact and feasibility studies, and the DOE is currently conducting public hearings on the issue.

It is not by chance that every industry proposal for nuclear waste sites being considered targets an area occupied by people of color or the poor, argues 'Honor the Earth's' Brown. "There's something we call nuclear colonialism," she explains. "The reason that the industry targeted Native people is that they have the least economic and political power. [Nuclear power plant officials] are looking for a political solution -some way that they'll get the least resistance."

While Yucca Mountain is holy ground to native peoples, this is not just a fight over the sanctity of the mountain. There are serious safety and health considerations as well. There have been 621 earthquakes in the vicinity, with Richter-scale measurements of 2.5 or higher, in the past 20 years. There are 33 faults and seven small volcanoes in the area as well. One study found that an earthquake could push groundwater into the proposed storage area, forcing plutonium into the atmosphere.

At the same time, the utility companies are lobbying Congress to change the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. If they are successful, the law will allow them to temporarily store the waste in front of the mountain until the DOE approves storage inside it.

What may get the attention of non-Indians and people of privilege, however, is that the nuclear waste the utility companies want to store here must be shipped in -by train and by truck -from all over the country. As a result, these dangerous materials will pass by and through hundreds of cities.

"We are all Indians when it comes to Yucca Mountain," says Honor the Earth's Brown. "That's because it's not just about dumping this dangerous garbage where the Western Shoshone and Paiute people live," but also about exposing dozens of other communities to possible contamination as it is transported to Nevada.

"In the time of [President Richard] Nixon, a thousand reactors were going to be built in the next 10 years," he says. "It sort of rolled along on schedule, then it stopped. People started asking questions. They said, ‘Don't you need safety systems?'and ‘What are you going to do with the waste?' By holding [nuclear companies] accountable, what was once expected to happen by now hasn't happened."

Kraft adds that in addition to public opposition, the nuclear industry may be collapsing under its own weight.

"As huge and massive as the industry is, the fragility is incredible," says Kraft. "If you enforced all the regulations on the books, the nuclear industry would shut down. Some of the plants are so old and inefficient, they're just closing down. The cost of getting things back up to even questionable standards would cost too much."

Activists say that the prevalence of nuclear culture, and the renewed push by the industry to indoctrinate the public with it, is the industry's desperate attempt to save itself.

"The nuclear industry hasn't given up, but it is certainly on the defensive," says Loeb. "Anywhere you go with a proposal for a reactor or waste storage site, you're going to get opposition. Thirty years ago, the arguments of the nuclear industry were taken for granted. It will be an uphill battle for the industry to get that back."

ANTI-NUCLEAR COALITION BUILDING Loeb also believes that anti-nuclear activists have to remember that "victory doesn't always happen in mass ways, but one person at a time."

In August, environmental activists gathered in Soni Springs, Michigan for an "action camp" sponsored by the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes. The group spent a week learning to fight more effectively against nuclear wastes in the environment. "We did a week-long, intensive training on nuclear issues," says Kraft. "Like how to deal with the media and what to say, how to organize a group, how to form coalitions and why."

Kraft believes that building coalitions is one of the most important skills for environmentalists in the future. "There are very few elements and institutions left in society where people feel that good vibe, that meaningfulness," he says. "Churches do that. For better or worse, they do it. And we should do it. Building this movement is a subset of building community."

Loeb says that doing this allows activists to recognize and harness the cultural forces which would contradict nuclear culture. "We'll keep winning by teaching an ethic of responsibility and accountability, because the nuclear industry does not fit into that," he says. "The basic story that must continue to be put forth it that it is irresponsible to put out technology that has so many costs deferred to the future."