The demonstration was part picnic, part protest march and part folk festival. Nearly 10,000 people, carrying accordions, flutes, guitars and a fluttering forest of posters and signs, gathered for a "festival of life" at the small Italian town of Montalto di Castro, 80 miles north of Rome, the site of two projected nuclear-power plants. The protesters were an improbable mix: elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians. They were determined to halt construction of the 2,000-megawatt nuclear complex that would be built near an ancient Etruscan cemetery. Other protests have been held at the sites of 18 additional reactors that are planned for completion in Italy in the next decade.
All this is part of a growing and quite possibly ruinous European crusade against nuclear power. The crusade is being fought by Europe's oddly mixed environmental groups, which are rapidly becoming a significant political force. Ex-Premier Olof Palme of Sweden attributed the 1976 election defeat of his Social Democratic government, in part, to public opposition to his nuclear-power program. In the first round of French municipal elections last month, ecology-minded groups gathered 10% of the vote in Paris and up to 30% in some suburbs, cutting into the totals of losing moderate candidates backed by President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
Monumental Crisis. Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, economists have warned that the failure of industrialized nations to develop alternative power sources will result in a monumental energy crisis by the mid-1980s, involving widespread industrial shutdowns and a perilously declining growth rate. In Spain, for example, the economy is already suffering from the impact of a $4.5 billion oil import bill last year.
Opponents of atomic energy are unmoved by the economic dilemma. The issue is invested with such emotion that few anti-atom groups are pressuring for research into effective alternatives to nuclear power. They emphasize that nuclear accidents at reactor sites could unleash incalculably dangerous radiation. The environmentalists fear that radioactive wastes will be improperly disposed of, thus posing a threat to mankind for thousands of years to come. There is also widespread worry that atomic weapons will be fashioned from plutonium obtained from nuclear-energy plants. Says Pierre Strohl of the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency: "Peaceful application of nuclear energy seems to be inseparable from the nightmarish images of the atomic bomb." Many people, especially the young, regard the nuclear reactor as a symbol of a "hopelessly technocratic, centralized, hierarchical society implacably destructive of natural resources and human values." As a consequence, says Strohl, the debate is degenerating into sterile confrontation between dogmatic opponents and intransigent defenders of the atom.