When nuclear power came to Cayuga Lake: Lessons from the 1970s about the politics of expertise
Sociologist Dorothy Nelkin on the rise of public interest scientists, their willingness to provoke controversy, and the challenge to decades of technocratic decision-making.
In early 1968, the New York State Electric and Gas Corporation (NYSEG) purchased 735 acres adjacent to Milliken Station, a 330 megawatt (MW) coal plant on Cayuga Lake, about 12 miles from Cornell University.
A few weeks later, the utility informed the local news media of its plan to replace the coal plant with Bell Power Station, an 830 MW nuclear-fueled electric generating facility. The utility estimated the construction cost at $135 million (equivalent to $1 billion today), with completion expected by mid-1973.
Local political leaders supported the initial announcement, and many in the community recalled thinking “finally progress is coming to the area,” wrote Cornell sociologist Dorothy Nelkin who closely studied the controversy that was about to erupt.
Following the announcement, Cornell fishery biologist Alfred Eipper formed a committee of seventeen campus scientists to write a position paper describing the lake's thermal pollution risk.
Eutrophication was already a problem due to agricultural runoff, and Eipper and his team believed thermal heating from the nuclear plant would worsen it. They warned that Cayuga Lake could become the color of “pea soup,” like the notoriously polluted Lake Erie.
Eipper joined other co-authors in founding the Citizens Committee to Save Lake Cayuga. The group opposed any action that might risk “irreversible” damage to the lake. Their strategy was to delay construction, hoping that NYSEG would eventually find the delay too costly and decide to pull out of the project. For Eipper, the issue was moral, requiring scientists to take a political stand.
Over the next year, the Citizens Committee distributed 22,000 copies of position papers, recruited 854 dues-paying members, and generated more than a hundred stories about the controversy in the local press, the great majority favorable to their position, with headlines such as “Cayuga Lake Shouldn’t Look Like ‘Diluted’ Pea Soup.”
Other Cornell scientists and engineers also evaluated the potential risks, deploying varying disciplinary assumptions and methods. One team emphasized that thermal heating was likely to be greater than from the existing coal plant but “neither an overwhelming nor negligible perturbation.” Another urged that the problem of managing radioactive waste be more closely considered.
A third team argued for evaluating the impact of heating on the entire lake rather than just the area closest to the plant. However, none of the expert groups could definitively demonstrate the possible consequences for the lake, and their reports did not gain as much public attention as the original “pea soup” report.
Eipper’s delay strategy proved successful: In 1969, NYSEG announced that it was suspending construction plans, pending the completion of a $1.5 million research study that it had commissioned, conducted by two different Cornell teams evaluating the possibility of thermal pollution risks.
Four years later, after the Cornell teams released five volumes of new analysis supporting the company’s original position that the risks were negligible, NYSEG expected to be able to move forward with its original plant design.
But by now, even though scientists and NYSEG remained focused on thermal heating, local community members were more concerned about radioactive waste, which had become a national political issue during the intervening years. Facing intensifying opposition and mounting costs, in 1973, NYSEG canceled construction.
Built in 1955, the Milliken plant remained in operation until 2019, when it was shut down after burning thousands of train cars of coal annually for 65 years.
Despite the immense amount of coal transported and burned, residents experienced decades of unreliable electric service. When the coal plant closed, the local town supervisor feared that “consistent power may still be a concern.”
A nearby coal ash landfill also remains a problem. Built in 1977 without a liner to protect against leakage, analysis suggests the landfill is likely to have steadily released arsenic, lead, mercury, and other hazardous substances into the local drinking water supply for decades.
The Cayuga Lake nuclear controversy is not only a lesson about the need for intellectual humility, cool-headed analysis, and negotiated compromise, but it also symbolizes a new era in the relationship between scientists and society.
By the early 1970s, similarly intense public controversies emerged around numerous science and technology issues. Decisions that for decades had been defined as technical—handled quietly among bureaucrats, experts, and industry — were now out in the open and hotly contested.
Protest groups stormed a genetic engineering forum at the National Academies of Sciences, waving signs that read, “We Shall Not Be Cloned.” Thousands turned out to protest the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Animal rights activists in New York City picketed the American Museum of Natural History to oppose animal experimentation.
Christian fundamentalists in California lobbied to replace the teaching of evolution with creation science. In court proceedings, pro-life activists sought to ban Federal funding for fetal tissue research. Some activists questioned mandatory automobile airbags, as others protested a ban on laetrile, a sham cancer treatment.
Scientists challenge science
In reaction to the erupting controversies, commentators warned about a new “anti-science” culture.
Science was under increasing attack from all sides, by a “a significant coalition of reactionary and left wing thinking,” wrote a political scientist. The protesters against science were Luddites rejecting technological change, according to Zbigniew Brzeziński, representing “the death rattle of the historically obsolete.” Opponents of genetic engineering were “kooks, shits, and incompetents,” declared Nobel prize winner James Watson.
For these commentators, the controversies reflected the anti-intellectualism tradition in American life that historian Richard Hofstadter had famously chronicled in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Hofstadter described the anti-intellectual as someone who derided experts as “eggheads” and universities as “rotten to the core.” In the mold of Joseph McCarthy, anti-intellectuals assumed experts were “pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive,” he wrote. In other cases, like Dwight Eisenhower, the anti-intellectual believed that “the plain sense of the common man” could substitute for the formal knowledge of the specialist.
Yet the controversies during the 1970s were neither anti-intellectual nor could they be credibly called anti-scientific. They did not pit the scientific community against an irrational public mobilized by propagandistic fear and anti-Enlightenment attitudes.
Instead, the principal instigators of the debates —the voices who called attention to the issues and supplied the evidence — were scientists themselves, even in creation science, as Nelkin famously documented.
Yet the controversies that swept across the U.S. during the 1970s were neither anti-intellectual nor could they be credibly called anti-scientific.
In the years following World War II, the consolidation of power in a highly centralized Federal government staffed by experts prioritized efficiency and speed in decision-making over public participation, consultation, and negotiation.
In contrast to Hofstadter, Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology (1960) and sociologist Robert Lynd in articles like “The Decline of Politics and Ideology” (1965) interpreted the early 1960s as reflecting a new age of centralized technocratic authority in which experts would “depoliticize” national decision-making.
Historian Brian Balogh, writing in 1991, described the post-World War II configuration as a “proministrative state.” In a symbiotic relationship that held until the late 1960s, highly credentialed, professional experts directed Federal resources. They relied on administrative agencies to implement ambitious programs ranging from international development and anti-poverty programs to constructing nuclear power plants and airports.
In turn, the Federal government, through graduate fellowships and research funding, bankrolled the production of a record number of experts who moved into government-funded positions at Federal agencies, laboratories, and universities upon graduation.
The centralized, Federal proministrative state prioritized rationalization, efficiency, speed, and predictability in decisions over public consultation and participation. Decisions were claimed to be rational and “apolitical” because they were based on “objective” data gathered through reliable procedures and evaluated by a scientific community that adhered to rigorous, impartial norms.
The centralized, Federal proministrative state prioritized rationalization, efficiency, speed, and predictability in decisions over public consultation and participation.
Scientists were to be trusted not only because their research had led to stunning technological breakthroughs but also because their viewed as “above the fray,” politically detached in their judgments and actions.
If political choices could be framed as technical ones, scientific knowledge could be used as a “rational” basis for the rapid and efficient completion of large scale, modernist projects, and as a rhetorical tool for defending “big” government spending priorities.
Yet in deploying scientific expertise to legitimize a highly centralized, Federal bureaucracy at odds with America’s decentralized, pluralist tradition, scientists and their government partners unknowingly turned scientific knowledge into a potent source of political conflict.
No end to debate
Signs of the weakening authority of technocratic decision-making appeared during the early 1960s as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring coincided with public alarm over atmospheric nuclear testing. An awareness of its many ironies suddenly tempered belief in technology as progress, wrote Nelkin.
The pesticide known as “DDT” had rid the U.S. of malaria but was now revealed to pose grave ecological harm. Nuclear weapons had been celebrated as the technology that ended World War II, but now the same bombs threatened global annihilation. A newly built nuclear power plant might bring abundant electricity to a region but pose a pollution threat to local waterways.
Fueling the 1970s resistance to science and technology was a new generation of scientist advocates supported by a rapidly growing infrastructure of organizations.
These scientist activists campaigned to control the conduct of science, not just its applications, asking if specific lines of research like genetic engineering should even be conducted. They voiced doubts about whether science could regulate itself and advocated for measures of external government control.
One group which Nelkin called “public interest scientists” were more conservative in their approaches. These experts were ideological descendants of the scientists who fought for civilian control of nuclear technology and to shape foreign policy in the post-WWII years. During the 1970s, legacy organizations like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists broadened their focus to include issues like genetic engineering.
These scientist activists campaigned to control the conduct of science, not just its applications, asking if certain research like genetic engineering should even be conducted.
But the most striking aspect of the 1970s evolution, according to Nelkin, was the rise of a cadre of professional scientist-activists and their willingness to provoke controversy. These experts were willing to speak out on almost any issue, regardless of its disciplinary emphasis, whether sociobiology, genetics research, military research at universities, nuclear energy safety, or nuclear waste disposal.
They believed that protest was a necessary and positive force in a society that, according to the New Left writer Theodore Roszak, had “surrendered responsibility for making morally demanding decisions, for generating ideals, for generating controlling public authority, for safeguarding society against its despoilers.”
By way of groups formed during the 1970s like Science for the People, Science in the Public Interest, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Scientific Workers for Social Action, and the Nader Clearinghouse for Professional Responsibility — scientist-activists sought to empower local control of decisions by providing communities with scientific resources and advice, and by participating as advocates themselves.
But as scientists stepped out into the open to join the political fray, the issues became more complex, and the types of experts who claimed authority to weigh in on an issue expanded. Not only would political goals, funding, and affiliations divide experts, but disagreement also stemmed from the diverging assumptions and methods used to assess risk.
During the 1970s, as decision-making became more decentralized and as the once mighty proministrative state lost much of its authority, power in American politics was determined by the ability to manipulate knowledge on behalf or in opposition to particular policies, wrote Nelkin.
Scientific expertise could no longer ensure political consensus but instead had become a resource exploited by all parties to justify their political, moral, and economic views.
References
Balogh, B. (1991). Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power 1945-1975. Cambridge University Press.
Nelkin, D. (1971). Nuclear power and its critics: The Cayuga Lake controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nelkin, D. (1971). Scientists in an environmental controversy. Science Studies, 1(3-4), 245-261.
Nelkin, D. (1974). The Role of Experts in a Nuclear Siting Controversy: New York case pitted academe against industry. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 30(9), 29-36.
Nelkin, D. (1975). The political impact of technical expertise. Social studies of science, 5(1), 35-54.
Nelkin, D. E. (1992). Controversy: politics of technical decisions. Sage Publications.
Nelkin, Dorothy. "Science controversies: The dynamics of public disputes in the United States." Handbook of science and technology studies 444 (1995): 456.