The thirty-year accelerated expansion of U.S. capitalism that began in 1941 created a substantial enough aristocratic layer in the U.S. working class to fasten a class-collaborationist officialdom on the labor movement; extinguish the embers of the broad proletarian social movement that had begun to take shape through the struggles that built the industrial unions and fought racism and reaction; eliminate the need for the rulers to move outside imperialist democracy in order to maintain stable political control; and foster the gutting of union power that continues to this day. With a time lag, a process with increasingly similar elements took place throughout the imperialist countries over the postwar years.

Despite this grave weakening of the labor movement, the toll that the international profit system has exacted from working people worldwide through and following the 1974–75 and 1981–82 recessions falls far short of the blows that the capitalists must deal to living standards and conditions of work as preconditions for launching and sustaining a new wave of capital accumulation. Nor have the rulers been able to impose the draconian reorganization of class relations and degree of additional social devastation on the peoples in the colonial and semicolonial countries that would be necessary to collect the Third World debt....¹

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the "peaceful use of the atom" was presented throughout the capitalist world as a virtually unlimited economic boon. Nuclear power was going to drastically lower energy costs across the board and result in a general increase in the average industrial rate of profit. The massive investments necessary to construct and outfit the reactor plants--given their long-term profit potentials--would further stimulate economic expansion.

Instead, over the past two decades nuclear power has ended in a debacle. The politics of nuclear power became the opposite of what had been expected by the capitalist rulers. As a result, it has proven to be an economic disaster for them. Nuclear power has met growing public opposition, as accidents such as those at Three Mile Island in the United States and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union have put a spotlight on its unalterable catastrophic dangers. On top of the ever-present threat of a meltdown, nuclear reactors day in and day out produce mounting radioactive wastes (22,000 tons in the United States as of 1987) that remain life-threatening for tens of thousands of years and cannot be safely stored or disposed of.²

Popular opposition to nuclear power has become a permanent political factor throughout the imperialist countries. It has cut deep into industry profits by forcing the shutdown or cancellation of many plants and steeply increasing capital costs to cover additional safety equipment and procedures. The capitalists have increasingly concluded that nuclear power is a losing proposition. No new plants have been ordered in the United States since 1978, and more than 100--some near completion--have been canceled. Only three are currently scheduled to be completed and opened after 1989, and all of these are in jeopardy from challenges to their operating safety.³

There is massive overcapacity in the U.S. nuclear reactor manufacturing industry, which now produces almost entirely for plants being foisted onto semicolonial countries. Especially following the Chernobyl disaster, capital investment in nuclear power has slowed across most of Western Europe, and the debate over phasing out existing reactors is under way in many countries. Even in France, where nuclear power accounts for 65 percent of electrical generation, the industry faces a $32 billion debt.

Because of the change in consciousness about its irremediable dangers, nuclear power cannot be made profitable. While the wealthy owners of utilities monopolies are now organizing to recoup some of their colossal outlays through tax breaks, higher rates, and accounting write-offs, there is no way for them to transform a massive loss into a profitable new source of expanded productive capacity. They are now waging a battle within finance capital as a whole to share out the losses, not divide the profits, of four decades of investment in nuclear power. In the 1950s and 1960s, the capitalists anticipated that nuclear energy would bring a drastic lowering of the circulating costs of constant capital (that is, the costs of raw materials, in this case, energy). Instead, by the closing decade of the twentieth century the nuclear industry and related public utilities were saddled with an enormous increase in the fixed costs of constant capital (that is, the costs of nuclear plant and equipment). Much of this capital has been simply written off, with many reactors mothballed in recent years. At the same time, the "promise" of nuclear power has left a long-term legacy to humanity of tens of thousands of tons of deadly radioactive wastes, as well as hundreds of useless concrete-and-steel monuments to the truth of Marx's insight into capitalism's tendency to transform the forces of production into forces of destruction.  
 

2. For a concise account of nuclear power's special hazard to health, safety, and human life, see Fred Halstead, What Working People Should Know about the Dangers of Nuclear Power (New York: Pathfinder, 1981).

3. Five years later, as of the end of 1993, there were still no new nuclear power reactors on order in the United States and only one more had been completed and licensed for operation over that period. This trend is not limited to the United States, as indicated by an article headlined "Concern over lull in plant construction" in a special supplement on the world nuclear industry in the November 21, 1994, Financial Times of London. It reported that no nuclear power plants are under construction anywhere in Western Europe except France, "and even it is close to the end of its programme." The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that nuclear power's market share in energy production worldwide will drop from 17.5 percent in 1993 to between 13 and 15 percent by the year 2000.

So long as the capitalists hold power, however, they will not conclude once and for all that nuclear power is a losing proposition. The political fight will have ebbs and flows with the course of the class struggle and capital's energy and profit needs.
 
 
Related article:
No to nuclear power  
 
 
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