Do you know where your nukes are?

Here's a varied set of cards that draw attention to where nuclear facilities are - or will be -- located.  Some seem to favor the benefits of nuclear energy, others are intended to jolt you into awareness of that nuke in your backyard.  The first is a 1960's US card pointing out planned nuclear plants:  note the quote on the back: "Atomic power has youth, glamor and substance." Wow!

Others want to remind you that there are nukes in your neighborhood. What's that doing for you? Are you worried? Should you be?

This one was put out by the Anti-Nuclear Campaign headquartered in Sheffield, England,  and suggests "You don't have to be an expert to know what's wrong with nuclear power."

Even in heavily nuclear France, some cards seem to want you to question the prevailing nuclear norm:

And this one from 1984  invites you to explore the nuclear Rhone Valley:

As the reverse says, the Rhone Valley has the largest nuclear concentration in the world!

Finally we have this late 1980s card from Sweden which I originally thought was a protest card, but based on a crude translation, seems to be saying, "What are you worried about"?

As best I can tell, the reverse of the card quotes a Swedish government report that says electrical demand is growing and suggests that the Chernobyl accident doesn't give rise to a rejection of nuclear power.

It leaves us with the question: will Sweden really be safer without nuclear power? I guess we're supposed to look at all those other nuke spots on the map of Europe and not feel so bad about living in Sweden!

Cheese or Nukes?

The French are building a new plant at Flamanville on the Normandy coast at a site with two currently operating reactors. The Areva-designed EPR is also being built at the Olkiluito site in Finland and potentially in the US, though the planned new  unit at  Calvert Cliffs has stumbled due to a provision in the US Atomic Energy Act prohibiting foreign ownership or control of a power plant licensee. Here's an EDF promotional post card of the Flamanville 3 plant under construction:

Although France produces nearly 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, President Hollande has proposed reducing that proportion to 50% by 2025. Hollande calls for closing the older Fessenheim units, while continuing the construction of Flamanville 3.  There are some signs of protest, like this playful card that my daughter spotted in a souvenir shop at Mont Saint Michel during our visit  in 2011:

You can see the play on words - so what will it be? La tome de Savoie or l'atome de Normandie?
Cheese or nukes?

Atomic Towns

Here are classic "linen" post cards of the 1950's extolling three towns' atomic connections. The first is Oak Ridge, Tennessee, "Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb," as the back of the card reminds us. Oak Ridge was the "secret city" as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb and remains one of the national labs.

Paducah was the site of a new uranium enrichment plant built for the Atomic Energy Commission that began operation in 1952. The plant was originally operated for the AEC by Union Carbide and eventually was operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation, though the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), eventual successor to the AEC, owns it. The Paducah plant's life has been extended another year.

The Portsmouth Uranium Enrichment Plant is actually in Piketon, Ohio, near Portsmouth. It operated originally from 1952 until the mid-1960s to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and then turned to processing for commercial fuel for nuclear power plants. It ceased operation in 2001.

Artistic Protest

These are two cards supporting anti-nuclear causes using the work of Austrian artist-architect-environmentalist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I first came across Hundertwasser when I was a student in Vienna in 1974, the year of a major retrospective of his work at the Albertina Museum. His philosophy can probably be summed up in this quote: "Paradise is there, but we destroy it."

The first card shows a poster donated by Hundertwasser to Ralph Nader's Critical Mass Energy Project in Washington in 1980.

The poster itself is based on a silkscreen created by Hundertwasser about a decade earlier: Irinaland over the Balkans with Bulgarian actress Irina Maleeva as the subject. Hundertwasser visited Washington in 1980 and in his honor Mayor Marion Barry, Jr., proclaimed  "Hundertwasser Day" which was marked by planting of the first 12 of 100 trees in Judiciary Square.

The poster was also used in other anti-nuclear campaigns, with sales proceeds going to the citizen action groups. The version below was for the benefit of the Initiative östereichische Atomkraftwerkgegner (Initiative of Austrian Opponents of Atomic Power Plants):

The post card's legend translates as "Atomic Final Solution - No, No, No, No."

Hundertwasser died in 2000 at age 72 while on the Queen Elizabeth 2.

Atomic Jobs - Binders of Men!

Well, maybe the Romney allusion is a stretch, but I did find amusing this 1950's era post card for DeVry Technical Institute in Chicago picturing its training labs to prepare its students for careers using, among other things, "nuclear instrumentation." 

The legend on the back says it all: DeVry is "one of the best-known, best-equipped training organizations of its kind in the nation for preparing and helping men get started in Television-Radio- Electronics." I guess they never heard of Women in Nuclear.

One of the students apparently sent the card to his sweetie.

The other card is a small trading card (about 1 x 2 1/2 inches) issued in the 1960s by a British soft drink company in a series on "Adventurous Lives" -- of men, that is. This one features an "atomic worker":

I'm sure he was ready for a lubbly Jubbly  after a hard day at the glovebox!

Ontario's Bruce Power Units return to service

Two units at the Bruce Power Station in Ontario, Canada, have recently returned to service after a 17 year hiatus. At the time of lay-up in the mid 1990s Ontario Hydro, then the operating company, was facing the consequences of a poor performance and reliability. A number of U.S. advisors and managers, many of whom had helped U.S. plants break out of a similar malaise, were brought in for the recovery. 

In 1997 when I was an Associate General Counsel at the US NRC, I was contacted by Ontario Hydro and subsequently was offered a position as a legal advisor. It was a hard decision whether to take the offer and move to Toronto, and I jokingly said to my wife that I would make the decision based on the outcome of a Toronto Blue Jays - Baltimore Orioles baseball game that I was watching at about the point I had to make a decision. The Orioles won 3-2 in the 9th inning.  I stayed in Maryland for another 15 years with the US NRC.

Indian Point: Optimism and Anxiety

It's like deja vu all over again, as Yogi said.  A New York governor named Cuomo opposes the licensing of a reactor in his own state. Some 25 years ago it was Mario and Shoreham. Now it's Andrew and Indian Point.  NRC hearings on the application for renewal of Units 2 and 3 recently began.

I've picked diverse pieces of memorabilia: one that reflects the optimism of the early years of atomic power; the others reflect the anxiety bred by calls to shut down the plant due to its proximity to New York City and supposed attractiveness as a target for terrorists.

The Con Edison brochure from c. 1960 illustrates the benefits of electricity generated from the proposed Indian Point Unit 1 to New York City. There's a certain irony in the proximity of the plant to the city in the cover illustration, given later opposition to the plant based on that fact.  Unit 1 itself was shut down by the mid-1970s because it did not have an Emergency Core Cooling System required of all plants as a result of an AEC rulemaking.  In response to a Union of Concerned Scientists petition, the NRC held a special proceeding in the early 1980s on the risk of operation of Units 2 and 3 in light of the population density near the site.

The terrorist attacks in September 2001 in New York and Washington recharged arguments against the plant as illustrated in these advocacy post cards calling the plant a nuclear weapon. Each is intended to be sent to some public official -- or in one case his wife.  The back of one card is addressed to Mrs. Diaz, the wife of then NRC Chairman Nils Diaz, who served as Commissioner from 1996 to 2003 and then as Chairman until mid 2006.