The most significant new energy development of the past hundred years has been electricity generation with nuclear reactors. This complex technology was stamped out of the ground in a couple of decades because of a guilty conscience of scientists and the U.S. government for having created nuclear weapons. Under the banner of ?atoms for peace? Eisenhower promised that the nuclear sword would be beaten into a nuclear plowshare.
The ?atoms for peace? campaign soon ran into trouble. A chief concern became the proliferation of nuclear arms. Where there are nuclear power plants, there exists the possibility of producing plutonium for weapons of mass destruction. This alone is sufficient reason to halt the construction of further nuclear power plants. But it was for additional problems of the nuclear industry that new plant construction in the United States virtually ceased in the late 1970s...
