SAN ONOFRE, Calif. -- Surfers have been riding the thundering breakers of this beach since the days of the steam automobile, long before anyone cracked an atom to make electricity.

Joe Higgs adopted this beach as his second home even before bulldozers scraped away 1.5 million cubic yards of sandstone bluff for the first of three nuclear reactors. He and the San Onofre nuclear plant are now uneasy neighbors, peering at each other through barbed-wire fencing."I've learned to live with that. I love surfing, and I love the ocean so much," Higgs said, looking up at the plant's three domes designed to seal in radioactivity.

But then he added softly: "I wish it wasn't here, to be truthful."

The way the nuclear industry is declining, his wish may yet come true.

Since the Three Mile Island accident in Middletown, Pa., 20 years ago March 28, American attitudes toward nuclear power have been characterized by paralyzing ambivalence and mood swings. No new plants have been ordered since 1978, the year before the accident. Virtually no one in the industry can imagine building one in the foreseeable future.

Yet it is not runaway chain reactions, but exploding costs that have jeopardized this $43 billion a year business. The nation has quietly let 21 atomic reactors -- 17 percent of its total -- shut down.

They are victims of the intertwined costs of safety changes and complex operations; construction debt; and mounting expense to replace parts, clean up abandoned sites and store radioactive waste. Cranking up pressure, some states are making nuclear power stand on its own as they drop guaranteed electric rates to inject competition into energy production.

The nuclear industry still supplies about a fifth of the country's electricity -- second only to coal. But the Energy Department predicts the nuclear power could wither away almost entirely over the next 20 years.

By just about any standard of policy, atomic power is looking like a lesson in energy wasted.

"We over-promised and under-delivered. We created fears that are not appropriate, and the industry handled it all in a very defensive, closed way," said consultant Roger Gale, president of the Washington International Energy Group. "We took a good technology, and we blew it."

Decades of environmental and economic bruises have rubbed the veneer off atomic technology as the wonder boy of energy.

Public support for more advances in nuclear energy has slipped from 70 percent before Three Mile Island to 43 percent in 1997, according to Roper Starch Worldwide, the polling company.

"Nobody is going to order a new nuclear plant: too much political pressure and environmental pressure, and your capital is at risk for so long," says Chris Neil, an industry consultant with Resource Data International.

Even strong critics say the industry has greatly bolstered safety since the partial meltdown of a reactor core at Three Mile Island.

The nation's worst nuclear accident released only a small amount of radioactivity into the environment, but the dangers exposed by the incident shook government regulators into ordering expanded training of nuclear operators. Plants were redesigned to give operators better information on the state of reactors. Training control rooms were built identical to the real ones. Emergency command centers sprang up and connected to hot lines at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

While basically on target, the government's reaction may have sometimes been overzealous, according to William Travers, the new director of the watchdog agency, who oversaw the Three Mile Island cleanup through much of the 1980s.

Today, he said, the agency is "looking to reduce the unnecessary burden."

Confronted with industry pleas about costs, federal regulators are stripping back some rules. Using downgraded risk predictions, the agency is allowing more limited testing of some plant materials and setting up a fast track for re-licensing of old plants.

Some critics are again fretting over safety. A January report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, says "safety margins may be compromised" as markets turn competitive.

With conservation and more efficient products, energy demand now grows at only about 2 percent a year. It is now harder for utilities to pay off nuclear construction debts enormously swollen by 1980s interest rates, environmental delays and costs of ordered safety changes.

Aging nuclear plants increasingly need big-ticket replacement of generators, turbines and even reactor cores made brittle by decades of neutron bombardment.

Meanwhile, in states like Pennsylvania, regulators are expected to bar utilities from recovering some of their nuclear construction debt through consumer rates during the changeover to competitive markets.

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Some in the industry are embracing two plant sales in the works as a sign of hope. An international partnership has even arranged to buy the Three Mile Island reactor that did not melt down and later came back on line.

But it is going for just $23 million. It was built for $400 million.

"It appears to me the way to sell a nuclear plant is to pay someone to take it off your hands," says Kennedy Maize, editor of the Electricity Daily trade newspaper.

The industry is banking heavily on an expanding market in Asia. Much of the future growth, though, is predicted in developing nations without the centralized grids of power lines to accommodate big nuclear plants.

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