The failed promise of nuclear power.

• Author: Beaver, William
• Position: Company overview

For the past two decades, the nuclear power industry has been predicting a revival of the technology, and after all these years a revival may finally be emerging. The Southern Company, a Georgia utility, has ordered two new reactors. Moreover, utilities across the country have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to construct at least twenty-six additional nuclear plants, and nuclear advocates have called for the construction of one hundred new reactors, which would nearly double the number of plants in operation (Wald 2010). The public also seems to support nuclear power. A recent Gallop Poll found 62 percent favor the technology--reportedly an all-time high. The Obama administration has altered its stance. At first, the president was somewhat ambiguous, stating only that nuclear power had a place in an overall energy strategy. However, in an attempt to gain bipartisan support for a comprehensive energy bill that would include a cap on carbon emissions, the White House announced plans to triple the amount currently allocated for loan guarantees available to utilities for construction of new reactors. Indeed, loan guarantees are seen as crucial, considering that the current price tag for a large nuclear plant is estimated to be between $6 billion and $8 billion (Farrow 2010).

The degree to which a nuclear revival is likely to occur is open to debate. Those promoting the technology point out that nuclear is the only carbon-free technology capable of replacing large coal-fired plants, whereas those who question the idea of a nuclear-power resurgence maintain that the costs of constructing large reactors are prohibitive. Perhaps the latter factor helps to explain why the U.S. Department of Energy has proposed building smaller, less expensive, "cookie cutter" plants that would serve local communities and businesses (Totty 2010).

In any event, an obvious question is posed by the availability and the need for a revival of a technology that once promised to provide abundant, low-cost energy and can help to mitigate the impact of anthropogenic global warming: Why has nuclear power languished for three decades? The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, which resulted in a partial meltdown of the reactor's core, certainly comes to mind. In addition, the government's failure to open a long-promised nuclear waste repository in Nevada for which the utilities have contributed billions of dollars certainly did nothing to restore interest in the technology. Indeed, only recently did the Obama administration deem that on-site, above-ground storage of radioactive waste would suffice for the time being. However, whatever the effects of Three Mile Island and the waste-disposal question, nuclear power's decline started before these issues came to the forefront. Consider that until recently no nuclear plant had been ordered since 1978. In reality, the technology's decline can be traced to government policies that emerged during the 1950s. These policies attempted to promote nuclear power to the point of commercial viability, while seeking to satisfy the political needs of official Washington. In this article, I outline these policies and their outcomes, seeking to provide a clearer understanding of what went wrong and why a nuclear power revival is necessary.

Beginnings

The major impetus for the development of civilian nuclear power occurred on December 8, 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower went before the United Nations to deliver his "Atoms for Peace" speech. The president called on the nations of the world to develop peaceful uses of atomic energy. The concept of the peaceful atom had its roots in the idea that something so destructive needed to be put to positive uses. During the speech, the president pledged that the United States would "help solve the fearful atomic dilemma to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but be consecrated to his life." There is nothing to suggest that the president was not sincere. Yet he also hoped to use the technology to demonstrate U.S. technical leadership and superiority over the Soviet Union as the Cold War was being waged (Pilat, Pendler, and Ebinger 1985).

Although the tone of the speech might have been interpreted to suggest a vigorous government program of reactor development, the Eisenhower administration, along with Lewis Strauss, who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), never viewed the matter in that way. They believed that government should play a more limited role and hoped that the speech would arouse interest among the nation's utilities, which would then construct nuclear plants largely on their own. However, such interest never materialized. Conventional fossil-fuel technology allowed the industry to meet the demand as prices declined owing to the construction of larger plants that took advantage of scale economies. Hence, utilities had no good economic reason to invest heavily in a largely unproven technology. This situation did not satisfy many members of Congress and certain members of the AEC, who demanded government action and often issued dire warnings even before the president's speech. For example, AEC commissioner Thomas E. Murray (the only holdover from the Truman administration) warned, "Unless we act with vigor that produced the Nautilus [the first nuclear-powered submarine], we are in danger of losing the greatest opportunity ever given to man by a gracious and loving God" (Murray 1953). The opportunity he refers to here is atomic power's promise of abundant, low-cost energy. Lewis Strauss's phrase "too cheap to meter" expressed this vision, even though Strauss was referring to the potential of nuclear fusion, not fission (Pfau 1984). Equally important, Murray and many others believed that the United States had a "moral obligation" to outdo the Soviets in developing the peaceful atom. In this vein, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa called the atomic power race the "battle for the minds of men" in which those of the Judeo-Christian tradition would take on the "the Soviet atheistic materialists" (U.S Congress 1953).

In such an environment, the Eisenhower administration decided that a government response was called for. So in February 1954 the AEC announced a five-year reactor-development program, which one observer called "a technological sweepstakes quite without precedent" (Weinberg 1954). The program had no precedent because the government would attempt to develop a technology with or without private-sector participation and would put up the bulk of the funding to do it. The experimental program sought to discover which reactor design(s) held the most promise for commercialization and hence would eventually attract the industry's interest. Five designs were to be investigated, including two light water reactors and a sodium-graphite reactor, a breeder reactor, and one other type (Dawson 1976). Only a light water plant, in which ordinary water circulates through a reactor, serving both as a heat medium and coolant, was realistically capable of a large-sale demonstration, largely owing to the development of the Nautilus submarine reactor. Thus, the first commercial plant would be a scaled-up version of that reactor.

Shippingport

The Nautilus reactor was built under the supervision of the Naval Reactors Branch (part of the AEC), headed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, in conjunction with Westinghouse, which developed and constructed the reactor. The same duo would build the country's first commercial reactor at Shippingport in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Plans to construct the plant actually started before "Atoms for Peace,"...