H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Energy@h-net.msu.edu (August 2007)
John Wills. _Conservation Fallout: Nuclear Protest at Diablo Canyon_. Reno
and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xiv + 244 pp.
Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-87417-680-8.
Reviewed for H-Energy by Daniel Pope, Department of History, University of
Oregon
Nuclear History as Environmental History
As we witness a drive to re-start the nuclear power industry in the United
States, John Wills's study of controversies around the Diablo Canyon
nuclear reactors comes at a timely moment. Wills strives for more than an
account of the skirmishes between Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and
anti-nuclear activists. He situates the disputes over nuclear power in the
1970s and 1980s in a broader environmental history of the Diablo Canyon's
Central California coastal region, the Pecho Coast. He sees a succession
of "energy landscapes" in the long history of human occupation and use of
the territory. _Conservation Fallout_ places the contest over PG&E's
nuclear plants in this expanded context.
Appropriately, _Conservation Fallout_ begins with attention to the Native
Americans who inhabited the area. By about 1000 A.D. a distinctive Chumash
Indian culture had emerged, altering the environment in largely benign
fashion. Spanish colonization intensified the process of ecological
change, introducing invasive flora and fauna, firearms, and microbes.
However, only about ten miles from the mission at San Luis Obispo, the
Diablo Canyon area remained largely a "pariah landscape"--untamed,
threatening, and inhospitable to human habitation. (p. 25). Whaling and
cattle ranching in the nineteenth century were to usher in another energy
landscape; Wills briefly tells the story of the commercialization and
commodification of the area, processes that went on with scant attention
to ecological consequences.
PG&E, foreseeing rapid demand growth and falling costs for nuclear power,
acquired land at Diablo Canyon for nuclear construction in 1963. In
chapter 2, Wills traces the controversies that shook the Sierra Club in
response. Most Club leaders favored the project. Nuclear power looked
cleaner than fossil fuel generation; granting Diablo Canyon to the utility
would preserve other more scenic areas nearby. However, opponents of the
reactor plans, led by the redoubtable David Brower, presaged a more
militant version of environmental protest that was to thrive in the 1970s.
By 1973, as plant construction neared completion and PG&E sought an
operating license, a local group, Mothers for Peace, had picked up the
banner of opposition. As American troops pulled out of Vietnam, this
antiwar group focused on the nuclear danger they perceived growing in
their midst. For Mothers for Peace, nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy
could not be separated. They demanded "No More Hiroshimas" (p. 79) and
feared radiation from the plant would harm their children. In keeping with
his broader argument that nature and landscape were perpetual topics
of contestation around Diablo Canyon, Wills finds an affinity between
Mothers for Peace and later ecofeminist ideas and imagery. This seems
valid and important, but it may understate the ways in which Mothers for
Peace adopted a maternalist rhetoric about women and peace that (as Amy
Swerdlow points out in _Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and
Radical Politics in the 1960s_ [1993]) groups like Women Strike for Peace
had deployed earlier.
With the mass civil disobedience at the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear
construction site in 1977, anti-nuclear protest emerged as one of the
era's most significant social movements. Seabrook's Clamshell Alliance
inspired the formation of California's Abalone Alliance. A coalition that
grew to involve over sixty member groups by 1981, the Abalone Alliance
staged blockades and occupations of the Diablo Canyon site between
1977 and 1982. Nearly two thousand were arrested during a two-week-long
blockade in 1981, outpacing Seabrook as the largest number arrested at an
anti-nuclear protest in America. Despite its size, its creative tactics,
and the passion of many of its participants, and despite revelations that
a branch of the San Andreas Fault extended near the nuclear projects, PG&E
eventually started full-scale generation by 1985.
By the time of Chernobyl in 1986, the American anti-nuclear movement had
fragmented and its energies had flowed in other directions. As Wills
points out, the movement had difficulty growing beyond its original class
and cultural dimensions. Opposition to the Reagan administration's
policies in Central America and movements to combat racism, sexism, and
homophobia became higher priorities for many activists. Local opponents of
the plant kept an eye out for signs of danger and strived to raise
anti-nuclear consciousness, but the main woes that PG&E faced at Diablo
Canyon were financial. With California electric energy deregulation in the
late nineties, the utility had to contemplate closing its expensive
nuclear facility.
With the waning of anti-nuclear protest, Diablo Canyon's place in the
regional ecosystem regained attention. The area north of the plants had
become a heavily used state park. PG&E's lands, meanwhile, received
relatively few human visitors. Flora and fauna thrived in the Diablo
Canyon environment. The reactors came to host a landscape of scenic beauty
and biological diversity--ironically, values prized by those who had
protested the nuclear incursion. Considering nuclear energy's stagnation
in the last thirty years, as Wills nicely puts it, "It was the atom
itself that decayed, rather than nature" (p. 167).
In his concluding chapter, John Wills reiterates the importance of seeing
Diablo Canyon as an episode in environmental history. In building the
plants, Pacific Gas & Electricity sought to transcend the environmental
limits that fossil fuels imposed and provide a green alternative to
conventional energy sources. In opposition, protesters generated their own
ideology that saw nuclear energy as entirely at odds with an idealized
conception of nature. He regrets that both sides lacked a clear
understanding of the actual environment of Diablo Canyon, an understanding
that might have diminished conflict. What compromise might have resulted
is, however, somewhat unclear. Ultimately, it is hard to disagree with his
judgment that the reactors at Diablo Canyon "did not provide an
appropriate solution to California's energy issues" (p. 184).
In vigorous prose and with a firm grounding in sources ranging from oral
histories to Sierra Club records and Nuclear Regulatory Commission
documents, John Wills has added an important dimension to our
understanding of the struggles between nuclear energy proponents and their
foes by focusing on their environmental perceptions and ideals. He
properly reminds us that the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s were often
about a landscape and our roles in it, not just about the dangers of
nuclear power. Sometimes, his perspective may give short shrift to the
contexts of business, the economy, and the Cold War. These probably had a
more direct bearing on the outcome of nuclear controversies at Diablo
Canyon and elsewhere. Yet he is undoubtedly right that the history of
nuclear energy needs to pay attention to environmental history.
He has done this for Diablo Canyon with outstanding results.
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