Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
has been like a fresh spring rain promising renewal through state subsidies and
carbon trading credits. Following accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,
nuclear power became for many a paradigmatic symbol of technological hubris
('cutting butter with a chainsaw') posing a range of hazards - in uranium mining,
plant operations, radioactive waste disposal, plant decommissioning and nuclear
proliferation - that remain largely unsolved (e.g., Pasqualetti and Pijawka, 1996).
Although a new plant has not been started in the USA since the 1980s, the industry
remains strong in France, and elsewhere, nuclear politics and perceptions are shifting.
Sweden, for example, recently put two plants into 'early retirement' before halting
its program of nuclear phase-out (Lofstedt, 2001). In Iran, President Ahmadinejad's
claim to an 'inalienable right' to develop nuclear power - building upon a program
begun with US support prior to the 1979 revolution - has been viewed by many as
a pretense for pursuing nuclear weapons development. The regimes of control needed
to manage the contradictions of nuclear power make it an inherently anti-democratic
technology (Lovins, 1977; Winner, 1986), and the enormous associated costs and
risks have private capital refusing to invest absent massive state subsidies in every-
thing from R&D, facility development and radioactive waste disposal to limiting
liability in the event of catastrophe. These subsidies are antithetical to neoliberal
principals of market competition underpinning power sector restructuring and
threaten to divert investment capital away from more sustainable alternatives. Nev-
ertheless, they are gaining serious traction, even among longtime nuclear critics.
Whereas nuclear power reinforces the conventional 'hub and spoke' geography
of electrical power grids, renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, small
hydro, geothermal and biomass can often be exploited with small, mass-producible
technologies distributed throughout the grid. Although accounting for little more
than 2 percent of the global commercial energy mix, the resource base for renew-
ables is immense. The wind power potential in just three states (North Dakota,
Texas, and Kansas) could meet current US electrical power demand (Pasqualetti,
2004), and solar potential is similarly great. While technical challenges are not
insignifi cant - wind sites are often far from transmission lines capable of handling
large, variable generation sources - each type of renewable resource also presents
different political potentialities and liabilities.
Wind power, for example, is the fastest growing source of electricity in the USA
because the technology has advanced rapidly to become economically competitive
with conventional power resources and has been encouraged through state policy
(Pasqualetti, 2004). However, as wind turbines become larger and more visible, they
become increasingly controversial. Large wind farm proposals, for example, often
generate confl ictual discourses pitting the benefi ts of clean energy and rural eco-
nomic development against those of landscape preservation, tourism, and other
land-use options. Pasqualetti (2000) explores how competing social and cultural
interests intersect with technological and ecological constraints to produce 'land-
scapes of power' in the American West and elsewhere. With his collaborators
Pasqualetti (2002) offers guidance for reducing confl ict that can impede windpower
development even in supportive areas like Germany and California. By contrast,
Mercer (2003, p. 91) fears geographers and others are giving inadequate weight to
'the place of landscape values within the ecologically sustainable development
paradigm.'
Unlike windpower, solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rarely controversial as
economies of scale in siting are comparatively few, so that PV arrays need not be
