Nuclear power is no longer a relatively new phenomenon which impacts both on culture and society. Since the early 1960s, companies have searched for an inexpensive way in which to generate power for the increasingly demanding American society. Indeed, the debate over nuclear power shows just how much the illusions of the nuclear age are "rooted in the economic and political institutions of our society. The system for threatening nuclear war - the designing, making, deploying, explaining of nuclear weapons - serves so many short-term interests that as a society we are crippled in confronting out most basic interest: physical, economic and spiritual survival" (Loeb, 1983, p. 3).
In the 1980s, however, nuclear power has become an even greater political issue that has been thrust into national, and with the recent Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, international prominence. According to many experts, what is especially changing in the demographic attitude, is the fact that many individuals are becoming even more aware of the issues surrounding nuclear power, and are demanding a say in the decisions about placement, deployment, or even the viability, of nuclear power within this modern industrial society (Berger, 1977, p. 7). In the paper, we will briefly present an overview the history and use of nuclear power, and will then concentrate on the hazards of nuclear power, as articulated from many sources. Throughout the paper, an underlying assumption will be that nuclear power has an impact upon society in a variety of ways: technological, economically, and industrially, and also culturally and psychologically.
Just after the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear technology began to grow. Almost immediately, the scientists and technicians working on the Manhattan Project that produced the world's first nuclear weapons began to envision the peaceful uses of nuclear power. At the end of the war however, ...