Abstract
AbstractThe first known grassroots protest against nuclear power was organized by industrial unions: the United Auto Workers, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and the United Papermakers and Paperworkers. InPower Reactor, a landmark case begun in 1956 and pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (where it was lost in 1961), these unions tried to prevent construction of the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant, a fast breeder reactor, outside Detroit. However, their action has been interpreted as not truly environmental at all, but rather as merely a smokescreen for their opposition to commercially developed atomic power; at that time they were identified with support for public power, which was under assault by the Republican party. Attending to union discourses of nature reveals the case to have marked a pioneering turn from a conservation to environmental discourse of nature.
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