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On December 8, 1953, the president of the United States at that time, Dwight Eisenhower, delivered a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York that would become famous worldwide.“Atoms for Peace”, as the discourse was named, was the first step in a massive public relations effort to radically transform the world’s perception of nuclear energy in the context of the Cold War and the US’s urgent need to clean the image of atomic technology–following its military use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. The speech enthusiastically introduced the alleged benefits and possibilities of nuclear technology for civil uses. From that moment on, nuclear power was to be a permanently controversial reality.

Although the Soviet Union and Britain constructed electric generation nuclear power plants before the United States, it was the Westinghouse reactors, based on the design of the first nuclear submarines, that determined the future of nuclear power worldwide. Interestingly, during their first decade of life nuclear power plants provided more than enough evidence that their costs did not match the promise. The results of the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses, the Shippingport plant in the United States, left no room for doubt: The electricity generated by the power station was ten times more expensive than that generated by conventional means.