Toward a Global History of the Nuclear Age

The environmental history of the nuclear enterprise has grown increasingly important, not the least because of the strong conviction that an ongoing, and self-proclaimed “renaissance” in nuclear energy must be a major part of world energy scenarios in the battle against global warming and the need to abandon carbon-based energy production. This article suggests a number of ways to take advantage of the recently available primary sources by using a global approach to make sense of nuclear environmental history. It calls for looking at environmental impacts across a variety of ecosystems: desert, Arctic, tropical, limnological and oceanic. It insists on considering the entire nuclear enterprise from mining to enrichment to fission. It suggests focusing on interactions between the atom, nature, and the lives of mammals, fish and birds in the nuclear world. In the end, this analysis shows that the atom is not green, and that the argument that nuclear power is a solution to global warming ignores the troubled relationship between the natural environment and peaceful and military technologies.