In December 1994, the South Korean agent retained by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) to peddle its products to the Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) was convicted in a Korean court of bribing a senior KEPCO official. The agent, Park Byung Chan, was sentenced to 18 months in prison. KEPCO Chair Ahn Byong-wha was also imprisoned. The convictions marked the end of South Korea's highest profile corruption trial, but questions persist about AECL's knowledge of, or role in, the bribery scheme.

In 1991, AECL, Canada's hard-pressed nuclear parastatal, was energetically pursuing a KEPCO contract that had the potential to land the corporation its second reactor sale to Korea in two years. AECL hired Park, head of Samchang Corporation, a lobbying firm, for his familiarity with Korean business and government practices.

In October 1991, Park delivered two paper bags containing a total of $250,000 to the executive director of KEPCO, Choi Kwan-ki, in the lobby of the Seoul Rivera Hotel and asked that the money be passed on to KEPCO Chair Ahn Byong-wha to "help ensure that construction goes smoothly." News reports say Park later told Korean prosecutors that he acted on behalf of AECL.

Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, insists that AECL "had no indication that [Park] was acting contrary to his contractual obligations [to abide by] Canadian and South Korean Laws." AECL spokesperson Rhea Cohen adds that the company "had no prior knowledge of Mr. Park's illegal activities and all dealings with him were immediately suspended" when Korean prosecutors began to investigate him.

In September 1992, a year after Park's delivery, then-Canadian Minister of International Trade Michael Wilson announced that AECL had won the bid to build Wolsong 3 and 4. These two additional reactors supplemented the two AECL Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactors already constructed for KEPCO at the Wolsong site near Pusan in 1976 and 1991.

Wilson touted the sale as "an excellent illustration of Canada's ability to compete in the global high technology marketplace, which will give a substantial boost to the Canadian nuclear industry's prospects for future prosperity."
These and other foreign sales are critical to AECL's survival. AECL's 1994 annual report says that it "has been concentrating its marketing thrust abroad" and that, "encouraged by the momentum gained by the success in South Korea, its top priority is the next sale of a CANDU reactor."

It is AECL's apparent desperation to export its product abroad that tempts the company to engage in dubious business practices, critics contend. Too often, this pressure has resulted in reactor sales to unsavory regimes with poor nuclear non-proliferation standards.

A shady past

AECL was never questioned by South Korean officials over its role in the Park affair. Canadian officials have asked that AECL be given the benefit of the doubt in the Korean scandal, arguing that the company should not be presumed guilty simply because of its its association with Park. But critics such as Norm Rubin of Toronto-based Energy Probe say the corporation's controversial 43-year history does little to inspire confidence in AECL. "AECL has a very long and sorry history of shady deals," Rubin says.

AECL's 1975 sale of a CANDU reactor to South Korea, for example, involved a mysterious disbursement of $18 million to its on-site agent, Shaul Eisenburg, without any vouchers, financial records or adequate explanations of how these funds were spent. Eisenburg -- fingered in 1992 by Newsweek as the agent brokering covert sales of Israeli weapons to China and Iran -- could account for only a small portion of these funds. This omission prompted what Kenneth Dye, Canada's Auditor General between 1981 and 1991, calls the "legendary" 1976 Auditor General's fraud investigation into an "uncooperative, misleading and evasive" AECL.

AECL's reactor sale to Argentina's military dictators in 1973 was controversial for similar reasons. In 1976, Canada's Auditor General found that AECL deposited $2.5 million in an unnamed Swiss bank account for undisclosed reasons. An Argentine investigation, launched in 1985 after the fall of the junta, would later reveal that the account's owner was former Argentine Energy Minister José Ber Gelbard, the official who administered the AECL contract.

In 1977, AECL was called upon to explain the Korean and Argentine disbursements to the Public Accounts Committee of the Canadian Parliament. The committee lacked the power to compel testimony and was unable to establish the ownership of the Swiss bank account. However, the presiding Parliamentarians noted that some AECL officials were evasive and failed "to answer questions fully and ... [failed to] display a cooperative attitude." It concluded, as a consequence, that "some of the payments [made to agents] were indeed used for illegal or corrupt purposes."

After the scandalous revelations of the mid-1970s, the Canadian government compelled AECL to begin disclosing agent fees and to sign agreements with agents that oblige them to abide by the laws of Canada and the purchasing country. This measure was intended to rein in AECL's questionable foreign dealings and to bring the more than $38 million that AECL had spent on agent fees since the 1970s into line with the business norms expected of a publicly-owned company.
Canadian officials say that they are satisfied that these safeguards were met in the recent South Korea case and that AECL acted properly.

But Gordon Edwards, president of the Montreal-based Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, rejects this view. "There's little doubt that AECL would do anything it considered necessary to get a deal," says Edwards. "AECL has simply let it be known with a wink and a nod that they don't really want to know how the money is being spent. This is a direct incitation to, and encouragement of, illegal behavior."

Former Canadian Auditor General Kenneth Dye is also skeptical and says that the Crown corporation's foreign tactics are all too common. "The strategy [for many firms in the Third World] is to deal with agents where the Canadians don't have to know what goes on behind the facade of the agent," Dye said in a May 1995 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). "The agent does whatever is done in these developing countries and the Canadian is blissfully unaware."

This time around, with AECL claiming that the money given Park was earmarked for legitimate business promotion activities, it is unlikely that Office of the Auditor General is in a position to blow the whistle and establish whether AECL had foreknowledge of Park's activities. A spokesperson for the Auditor General office says that unless AECL's spending is out of line with the fees it says it paid its agents, there is little the Auditor General can do to answer questions about whether AECL knew about Park's shenanigans.

AECL Countdown

With no reactor sales in North America since 1978, its subsidies from the federal government potentially expiring in 1997, and its major Canadian utility customer -- Ontario Hydro -- groaning under reactor cost overruns, costly breakdowns and energy surpluses, AECL is likely to become even more dependent on the emerging markets in Asia and Latin America to bolster its fortunes. In recent years, the Crown corporation has done its best to move into these regions.
In 1993, in the wake of its Korean sale, AECL:
* Prepared a bid on a Turkish turn-key project with its partners, John Brown Engineers, Netherlands-based Constructors BV Europe and the Turkish construction firms GAMA and GURIS;
* Hooked up to sell reactors to Egypt with Bechtel Inc. -- which the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated in 1984, but never charged, for allegedly bribing South Korean utility officials;
* Explored sales in Indonesia, Thailand, the Netherlands, the Philippines and the United States.

In November 1994, just before Park's conviction in South Korea, AECL announced an agreement in principle that could lead to the sale of two CANDU reactors to China for $2.7 billion. These reactors account for almost half of the $6 billion in trade deals brokered during the Chinese visit of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and nine of 10 Canadian provincial premiers.

Team Canada -- as this high-powered trade team came to be known -- also visited Latin America in January 1995. CANDU reactor sales were again part of the agenda, prompting outcries from South American environmentalists. The Argentine environmental group FUNAM staged protests against Canadian "nuclear colonialism," renewing criticism of the serious accidents that occurred at Argentina's first CANDU reactor in 1982 and 1987. Greenpeace Southern Cone also denounced Team Canada's potentially "dangerous transfer of nuclear technology."

Environmentalists in Argentina and Chile also accused Canada of pressuring Chilean officials into purchasing CANDUs in return for Canadian support during Chile's bid to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement. In January 1995, Agence France-Presse reported that the Canadian government and unnamed Canadian companies would build a 700-megawatt reactor in northern Chile.

Trade uber alles

Team Canada's trade mission to China was denounced by Canadian human rights and social justice groups for overlooking human rights issues in China. But human rights have never been high on AECL's priority list, critics contend.
"AECL seems to make very few sales to desirable customers," says Energy Probe's Rubin. "Most sales are to countries, like China, where access to information is limited," preventing people from learning about the reactors or voicing opposition.

AECL's overseas clients during the 1970s and 1980s included what were then some of the world's more unsavory regimes: Argentina, South Korea, Romania and Pakistan.

AECL's first overseas delivery was to India in 1956. It is widely believed that AECL's NRX reactor provided India with the plutonium required to build the nuclear bomb that it exploded in 1974. Canada broke off nuclear ties with India soon after the explosion, leaving India with the NRX facility and two CANDUs. Canada also broke off nuclear ties with Pakistan in 1977 -- some six years after India's arch rival fired up its own AECL CANDU reactor.

Romania's reactor, purchased by the Ceausescu regime in the late 1970s, was built by what Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility calls "virtual slave labor." AECL has conceded that military conscripts were employed on the project and that working conditions were poor. The reactor has yet to be completed, though work continues. AECL's partner in this venture is the Italian state-owned engineering company Ansaldo. In an Italian corruption investigation in September 1994, Giorgio Tradati, a close confidant of former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, was arrested and charged with accepting a $610,000 bribe from Ansaldo for Italy's then-ruling Socialist Party.

The right stuff

AECL's choice of foreign clients is particularly disturbing given that CANDU reactors are ideally suited to producing bomb-grade plutonium. "CANDU reactors are heavy-water reactors that are an outgrowth of reactors designed to make bomb-grade plutonium," says Bill Robinson of Ontario-based Project Ploughshares. "Their particular advantage for bomb-grade production is that they permit on-line refueling during operation. This makes them less efficient for power, but makes low burn-up of the fuel easier." Low fuel burn-up maximizes the concentration of plutonium-239, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons.

Government officials concede that plutonium can be extracted from AECL reactors, but discount fears that CANDUs might be used to produce nuclear weapons. "All CANDU reactors are governed by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards," says Ariel Delouya, a spokesperson for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. "Attempts to divert spent fuel for a weapons program would immediately be detected" by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection systems.

The IAEA keeps close inventories on nuclear fuel inputs, outputs and storage to prevent diversion of plutonium into weapons programs. But critics contend that these safeguards are inadequate. The Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Control Institute reports that "when IAEA safeguards are actually applied to commercial-scale nuclear fuel facilities, the agency's accounting methods could miss the diversion of dozens of weapons' worth of nuclear material a year."

CANDU on-line refueling, which allows fuel to be moved about anytime rather than at select fueling periods, makes effective monitoring of spent fuel more difficult. "You have to have automated safeguards like cameras," says Rubin. "And if the cameras mysteriously go off for several hours, you don't know what happens to the fuel."

If IAEA skeptics are right, AECL's most recent overseas sales bid could prove worrisome. China, which the United States bars from its nuclear technology sales, has been accused of transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, despite its membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. China has also resisted the international ban on nuclear weapons testing.

Despite these concerns, "reactor sales to China raise no difficulty for Canada," says the Foreign Affairs Department's Delouya. "China has signed an agreement with Canada pledging to use [Canadian] nuclear energy for peaceful, non-explosive purposes only." This agreement "takes China further down the non-proliferation route than any other bilateral agreement the Chinese have entered into," adds a spokesperson for the Natural Resources ministry.

But Edwards worries that AECL is not really committed to non-proliferation safeguards. "AECL is so desperate for any kind of sale that they are willing to countenance all sorts of irregularities," he says. "In fact, in the past they have advocated openly for the relaxation of non-proliferation standards because it hinders sales."

AECL spokesperson Rhea Cohen says the company has never "pushed to sell reactors to countries that have not concluded non-proliferation agreements with Canada." The Ministry of Natural Resources spokesperson adds that AECL "has never entered into an action to lobby the government to change its non-proliferation standards." The spokesperson acknowledges, however, that "AECL has certainly asked for approval to enter into trade with countries we [Canada] have not been able to get nuclear cooperation agreements with" and, in the 1970s, asked the government to assist overseas sales by pledging to stop strengthening safeguard regulations governing overseas nuclear cooperation.

Some peace and environmental activists wonder whether Canada will go one step further and roll back its current nuclear safeguard regulations. "There are low-level discussions [between Canada and India] about renewing co-operation," notes Robinson of Project Ploughshares. "AECL has had discussions about repair work on Indian CANDUs and at the back of those discussions is the possibility of future CANDU sales to India. It's a major loosening of restrictions to be dealing with a country that has never lived up to its commitments to Canada on non-proliferation."

In April 1995, the Canadian government announced that design flaws in India's CANDU reactors might cause "a Three-Mile Island repetition or a Chernobyl" and that Canada might enter into technical assistance talks with India. The Ministry of Natural Resources spokesperson does not deny that attempts to make additional reactor sales could accompany renewed nuclear cooperation with India.

Business as usual

AECL President Reid Morgan does not hold his corporation responsible for evaluating the ethical implications of its sales to suspect clients. "It's for the Canadian government to decide whether we are able to enter a particular marketplace," Morgan told CBC radio in May 1995. "They've made the judgment that the Chinese government is one with which we may do business. And so that's what we're doing."

"AECL practices regarding dealing with foreign agents ... are sound, responsible and compare favorably with those of other companies doing business in the international market," adds Rhea Cohen.

Critics say that nothing has been done to prevent the Korean bribery problems from recurring in AECL's dealings in China. "It is a matter of common knowledge that today's China is one of the most corrupt societies in the world," says Rubin. "Coincidentally or not, the countries and markets where AECL finds its friendliest customers seem to be the countries with the most corrupt officials making the decisions about whether to buy reactors."

Corporate Welfare at AECL

ATOMIC ENERGY OF  CANADA LIMITED'S (AECL) sacrosanct status has helped it weather controversy, critics contend. Despite deep public spending cuts this year, "the Canadian Minister of Finance, Paul Martin, declared that AECL is not on the table in terms of cutting subsidies," says Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. "Yet AECL receives more than twice the subsidies of all other energy sector players combined."

"AECL's lack of public accountability, and the lack of public debate in the House of Commons on giving AECL such a free hand with money, is very unhealthy," argues Edwards. "The government of Canada owns AECL and is pro-nuclear. Without the government, there would be no Canadian nuclear industry."

Edwards attributes AECL's influence to the former AECL staffers and scientists who now hold senior positions at the Ministry of Natural Resources, the ministry charged with AECL oversight. Nor does Edwards discount the influence of such industry giants as Westinghouse and Babcock and Wilcox -- which supply equipment used in CANDU projects.
Yet some critics say the present climate of fiscal restraint in Canada will affect AECL as popular government programs in health, education and social services are cut. In April 1997, the money allocated to AECL by the government of former-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney will dry up, unless it is renewed by the present government. That may be the time, says Norm Rubin of Toronto-based Energy Probe, "when this rather aging infant industry will be asked to act like a grownup."

A Ministry of Natural Resource spokesperson says the department is reviewing "the whole area of AECL funding to see if there are changes that, while ensuring AECL remains viable, reduce the cost to the government."

Rubin and other critics doubts AECL could survive without its $128 million annual subsidy. Historically, even AECL reactor sales to overseas clients have been underwritten by soft financing and Canadian government loans to the purchaser, notes Ron Finch in his book Exporting Danger. Many of these loans were never repaid.

Estimates on total government subsidies to AECL vary enormously. Greenpeace Canada puts the figure at $10.5 billion when unrepaid Canadian government loans made in the 1970s to Argentina and Korea are factored in. Another estimate cited in the Lermer report, a 1987 study funded by the Economic Council of Canada, suggests that taxpayers have paid a whopping $13.5 billion to AECL over its lifetime.

The public outlay to AECL may increase further if Canadian Auditor General L. Denis Desautels's 1993 report is right. The Auditor General predicts that the reactor decommissioning and site remediation costs AECL routinely omits from its liability statements may eventually result in "a significantly increased demand on government resources."

David Argue, an economist specializing in energy and utilities, says that AECL's failure to include these massive costs in its liabilities statements suggests that the corporation is not financially viable. "This is a company whose liabilities far exceed its assets, which is the definition of bankrupt," Argue told CBC radio in May 1995. Argue predicts that AECL will eventually turn to the federal government for a major bailout.

AECL and Ministry of Natural Resources officials dispute their critics' figures, pointing to a 1993 report by Ernst and Young that suggests that the Canadian nuclear industry has provided a five-fold return on what it calculated to be the government's $3 billion investment over the last 30 years.

The Natural Resources Ministry also disputes the methodology of the Lermer report. "In the ministry's estimation, the costs of the nuclear program compared to the benefits to the Canadian economy -- even with decommissioning taken into account -- will be quite small," a ministry spokesperson says.

The symbiotic relationship between nuclear power and the PR industry began during World War II, when the U.S. effort to develop the atom bomb was still a top-secret war program code-named the Manhattan Project.

As "the Bomb" neared completion, the US turned to an elite group of public relations practitioners known as the "Wisemen." With government security men guarding the doors, the Wisemen met with Major General Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, at the University Club in New York City. Groves briefed them on the project and asked for advice on how to handle PR for the first bomb tests in New Mexico.

At their suggestion, the War Department invited New York Times reporter Bill Lawrence to observe the tests and to be the "pool reporter" relaying information from the bombings of Japan to other reporters the Army had assembled in Manila.

A Sacred Monopoly

The end of the war left the US with a new set of public relations concerns related to the bomb. The US held a monopoly on nuclear weapons and needed to assure people that it would use this awesome power in a responsible way. President Truman pledged to keep the bomb a "sacred trust" on behalf of all mankind. To oversee this trust, he proposed establishing a commission of Navy and Army officers to control and develop future nuclear technology.

Public opinion, however, was deeply affected by the bomb's awesome destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the horrifying prospect of nuclear war provoked sharp debate and opposition to military control of nuclear weapons.
To answer these fears, the US formed a civilian Atomic Energy Commission, headed by physicist David Lilienthal. Previously, Lilienthal had served as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his role in the development of government-owned hydroelectric works had won him as a reputation as a champion of the public interest against private monopolies. To dramatize the transfer of the bomb from military to civilian control, the AEC Public Relations Department arranged for a newspaper to photograph General Groves handing "the secret" of the bomb to Chairman Lilienthal.

Lilienthal's image as a civilian and a liberal made him an ideal spokesman for the military's campaign to accelerate research and production of nuclear weapons. In testimony to Congress, he advocated "arming this country atomically in such a way as to erect a great deterrent to aggression in the world; that we should establish unquestioned and unmistakable leadership; and in this way thus buy time for reason to prevail."

The myth of the bomb as a "secret weapon" quickly evaporated, however, as the Soviet Union developed bombs of its own. By 1952, both countries had graduated from A-bombs to H-bombs, yielding more than 15,000 times the destructive power of the explosion that obliterated Hiroshima. As US-Soviet hostilities hardened, the public was left to consider the horrifying potential that atomic power had unleashed--the prospect that the next "world war" would involve bombs capable of destroying whole cities in a war that even then people realized no one would win.

Atoms for Peace

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his now-famous "Atoms for Peace" speech to the United Nations. Using a swords-into-plowshares approach borrowed from the Bible, he pledged that "peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here--now, today," ready to "provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world. . . . The US pledges . . . to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma--to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

Eisenhower's speech marked the beginning of a public relations campaign to transform the image of nuclear technology. Previously, its sole proven use had been for the purpose of designing destructive weapons. Now the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) promised that nuclear generators would make electricity "too cheap to meter." The government's monopoly on ownership of nuclear materials was abolished, and private companies were invited to participate in the commercial development of atomic energy. The US promised to share atomic energy technology with underdeveloped nations. The atom's image as a magical source of unlimited energy was promoted using educational films, brochures and experts who promised that a lump of uranium the size of a pea could unleash enough energy to drive a car to the moon and back.

Less than a year following his "Atoms for Peace" speech, Eisenhower appeared on national television to personally lead a publicity stunt on Labor Day of 1954. Waving a "magic wand," he electronically signalled a radio-controlled bulldozer to begin breaking ground at the small Pennsylvania town of Shippingport, marking the start of construction on the country's first commercial nuclear power plant.

Once again, however, image and reality were worlds apart. Although scientists had already demonstrated the possibility of using nuclear reactors to generate electricity, the technology had little support among US utility companies, who saw nuclear generators as expensive and unnecessary. In fact, the cost per kilowatt of electricity generated by the Shippingport reactor was ten times higher than the prevailing cost of power; federal subsidies were necessary to make it commercially competitive with conventional coal-powered reactors. The true purpose of Shippingport was symbolic; it sent a message that the atom could be harnessed for peaceful uses.

In 1950, David Lilienthal had resigned as AEC chairman. He became increasingly disillusioned with the "many instances of the way in which public relations techniques--the not-so-hidden persuader--have been used to promote the appropriation of funds for the peaceful Atom." He criticized the "elaborate ritual" of providing nuclear technology to underdeveloped countries: "Even as a propaganda move it was self-defeating and naïve. A great many of these countries need and could use doctors and medicine, storage batteries, plows and fertilizers and seed--and good elementary scientific instruction. Only the desire to prove somehow that atoms were for peace could justify the absurdity of a separate program, not in the foreign aid part of the State Department but in the AEC."

"Once a bright hope shared by all mankind,
including myself, the rash proliferation of
nuclear power plants is now one of the
ugliest clouds hanging over America."
--Dr. David Lilienthal, physicist, Nobel Prize Winner, first chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission

By 1962, nuclear power was still more expensive than energy generated by conventional means, but the AEC and private companies such as Westinghouse, Union Carbide and General Electric had spent billions of dollars in research and development, and they were anxious to see a return on their investment. With great fanfare, GE announced in 1962 that it had contracted to build a nuclear plant at Oyster Creek, New Jersey, for $91 million, entirely without federal subsidy.

In reality, however, the Oyster Creek reactor was a "loss leader." General Electric built it at a bargain-basement price, accepting a loss on the deal so it could position itself to dominate the reactor market. The ploy worked. The mystique of high-tech atomic power proved hypnotic, and orders for new reactors began rolling in from utility companies convinced that they needed nuclear power to remain on the cutting edge of "America's energy future."

As the orders came in, GE discreetly jacked up its prices, until utility companies were actually paying more for the privilege of "buying into the future" than if they had stayed with conventional generators.

Damage Control

As the rhetoric of power "too cheap to meter" faded, the AEC and nuclear advocates spoke instead of someday producing atomic electricity that would be "competitive in cost" to coal, gas or hydroelectric power. This goal was never achieved in practice. But even if nuclear power could be produced at a competitive price, the technology had another major problem: safety.

At a conventional power plant, an accident or sabotage might kill a few dozen people--a couple of hundred in a worst-case scenario. By contrast, a 1957 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a "worst case" accident at a small, 150-megawatt nuclear reactor 30 miles upwind of a major city would kill 3,400 people, injure another 43,000, and cause $7 billion in property damage. An accident at a larger, 1,000-megawatt reactor could kill as many as 45,000 people, cause property damage of nearly $300 billion, and radioactively contaminate an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania.

These estimates stunned the AEC steering committee which had commissioned the study. In an internal memorandum, steering committee member S. Allan Lough wrote that "Great care should be exercised . . . to avoid establishing and/or reinforcing the popular notion that reactors are unsafe. Though this is a public information or promotional problem that the AEC now faces with less than desirable success, I feel that by calculating the consequences of hypothetical accidents, the AEC should not place itself in the position of making the location of reactors near urban areas nearly indefensible."

The steering committee decided to withhold publication of the Brookhaven study, and when word of its existence leaked out, the AEC responded by saying only that it had never been completed.

In fact, the industry had already seen a series of catastrophic incidents, most of which were successfully kept out of the press.

As the years unrolled, new accidents kept happening:
* In Kyshtym in the Soviet Union, a massive radioactive explosion at a high-level waste dump in 1957 rendered an area of over 70 square miles permanently uninhabitable.
* At the SL-1 test reactor in Idaho, an exploding fuel rod killed three reactor operators and saturated the reactor building with radiation. Three weeks after the January 3, 1961, accident, the hands and heads of the three victims were still so hot with radiation that they had to be severed from their bodies and buried separately as radioactive waste.
* On October 5, 1966, a partial meltdown at the 300-megawatt Enrico Fermi I fast-breeder reactor at Monroe, Michigan prompted utility officials to seriously consider the possibility of trying to evacuate Detroit, 40 miles to the north. News of the accident was successfully withheld from the public until the early 1970s, when John G. Fuller, one of the engineers who witnessed the meltdown, published a book titled We Almost Lost Detroit.
* In 1975, fire damaged electric cables and safety systems at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Browns Ferry complex in Alabama. The fire triggered near panic in the plant's control room and started a process that could, if allowed to continue, have led to a meltdown.

Containment Failure

Despite aggressive publicity efforts, the "peaceful atom" was never able to overcome its association with the nuclear weapons industry. The movement against nuclear power originated with the campaign against above-ground bomb testing, which educated citizens about the health and environmental dangers posed by radiation. Environmental concerns also fed the first local opposition to the building of nuclear power stations, when the Sierra Club in 1961 opposed construction of the Bodega Head plant near San Francisco on a site that was not only part of a local nature reserve, but also on an earthquake fault.

The activism of the 1960s led naturally to growing protests linking nuclear power to nuclear bombs, and by the late 1970s, "no-nuke" groups were active throughout the United States, lobbying and developing information programs which criticized the nuclear industry on environmental, scientific and economic grounds.

In response, electrical utilities stepped up their PR campaigns. A 1978 survey of business-funded educational materials in US public schools showed that "more than any industry group, the electric utilities provide extensive multi-media materials on energy issues. . . . These energy education efforts notably target the elementary grade levels through the use of films, comic books, cartoon graphics or simple phrasing. This emphasis on the lower grades seems aimed at cultivating a future constituency in support of the electric power industry in general and nuclear power in particular."

The educational cartoon books included titles such as The Atom, Electricity, and You, distributed by the Commonwealth Edison Company; For A Mature Audience Only, published by Westinghouse; and Mickey Mouse and Goofy Explore Energy, produced by Exxon.

The PR campaign attempted to portray nuclear power as not only safe, but environmentally cleaner than other power sources. In The Story of Electricity, published in 1975 by the Florida Power and Light Corporation, comic-book characters promised that "nuclear plants are clean, odorless and generate electricity economically . . . and most important, help conserve fossil fuels!"

Another comic book titled The Battle for Survival--The War Against Environmental Pollution, published by Virginia Electric & Power, claimed that "nuclear generating stations are just about the cleanest and most desirable neighbor that any community can have . . . and our power company is a leader in constructing these new plants!"

Spinning Out of Control

Despite decades of efforts to generate favorable publicity, the nuclear industry was strikingly unprepared to handle the image crisis that erupted in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, when control systems failed at the Three-Mile Island facility. According to Robert Dilenschneider, the Hill & Knowlton PR executive who was brought in to manage the crisis, "the miscommunication at Three-Mile Island was the most monumental I have ever witnessed in business, and itself caused a crisis of epic proportions."

By way of bad luck, public alarm was heightened by the ominously coincidental similarity of events at Three-Mile Island to the plot of a recently-released Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, which portrayed a utility company more concerned with corporate profits and coverups than with serious safety problems. Metropolitan Edison, the company managing Three-Mile Island for parent company General Public Utilities, seemed to be reading from the same script as the film in its initial response to the discovery that its reactor was overheating.

The first rule of effective public relations in a crisis is to announce the bad news as completely and quickly as possible. Metropolitan Edison broke this rule in the first day of the crisis by attempting to evade the facts and downplay the extent of radiation released from the ailing reactor. Worse yet, Met Ed's public-relations staff gave out contradictory and inaccurate information.

"There have been no recordings of any significant levels of radiation, and none are expected outside the plant," said Met Ed's chief spokesman, Don Curry. Shortly after this statement was released, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Resources sent a helicopter over the plant with a geiger counter and detected radiation. Company officials backpedaled and said they didn't know how much radiation had been released. Later that afternoon, they changed their position again and said the release was minor.

Company vice-president Jack Herbein became the perfect target for skeptical journalists, talking in technical jargon and losing his temper with reporters. When someone asked what might happen if the hydrogen bubble inside the reactor came in contact with a spark, he answered that the result could be "spontaneous energetic disassembly" of the reactor. When a reporter asked him to explain the difference between "spontaneous energetic disassembly" and an explosion, he angrily refused to answer further questions.

Alarmed by the utility company's refusal or inability to explain what was happening inside the plant, Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh suggested that pregnant women and children leave an area within a five-mile radius of the plant. Panic followed. Forty-nine percent of the population living within fifteen miles of the plant--144,000 people--packed up and fled. "The photographs in the press were appalling," Dilenschneider recalled. "They resembled refugee lines in World War II. People were living off bottled water and canned food. There was an exodus. They packed their cars and their campers with everything they could, and jammed the highways: babies bundled in blankets, kids with scarves wrapped across their faces to limit their exposure to the 'radiation,' and pregnant women in sheer panic about the future they might be facing."

Following the accident, opinion polls registered a sharp drop in public support for nuclear power, and the nuclear industry responded with a multi-million-dollar media blitz. Teams of utility executives spread across the country to hold press conferences and appear on TV talk shows. Pro-nuclear advertisements were placed in magazines aimed at women readers. Videotapes of experts discussing technical aspects of nuclear power were distributed free to TV stations, and information packets were sent to the print media. An industry-funded Nuclear Energy Education Day was organized on October 18, 1979, with over 1,000 sponsored events, including a brunch for congressional wives in Washington and a joggers' mass relay race in California. When Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden went on an anti-nuclear speaking tour, the industry sent out two nuclear engineers as a "truth squad" to follow them and refute their arguments.

In reality, however, the nuclear power industry was in decline even before Three-Mile Island. Between 1970 and 1980, the price for building a new reactor had quintupled. The nuclear industry complained that legal challenges and delays from anti-nuclear citizens were responsible for many of the cost increases. Rising costs led utility companies to cancel their plans to build new reactors. The last order for a nuclear power plant was placed in 1978. In 1984 at least half a dozen nuclear power plants under construction were cancelled as the industry realized that it was cheaper to let them sit unused and incomplete than to try to finish and operate them. The 1985 meltdown of the Russian nuclear plant at Chernobyl, which spewed radioactive contamination over Europe and around the globe, seemed to mark the final nail in the coffin of an already dying technology, born of hype and deception.