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The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Power
David Freeman
The atomic age started with the dropping of a bomb.
Perhaps only those alive at the time would appreciate the guilt this caused America. No one wanted to talk about whether America should or should not have dropped the bomb. But President Harry S. Truman believed we could make a blessing out of this terrible event, and Americans were deluged with the most vivid descriptions of how this awesome, godlike power would be turned to the benefit of humankind.
It’s useful to examine some of the words that were said. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, where much of the research for the Manhattan Project was done, said that atomic power would make “heat so plentiful that it will even be used to melt snow as it falls. A very few individuals working a few hours a day at very easy tasks in the central atomic power plant will provide all the heat, light, and power required by the community and these utilities will be so cheap that their cost can hardly be reckoned.” There was talk of only having to fill gas tanks once a year with a pill-sized pellet of atomic energy rather than twice a week with gas. The day would be gone when nations would fight for oil; the era of atomic energy would usher in an age of plenty.
And people believed it. It was a euphoric time.
Meanwhile, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman David Lilienthal reported to Truman, at about the time the Russians tested their bomb, that America had no stockpile of bombs. According to Lilienthal’s journals, there was never any discussion of civilian nuclear power. It was an arms race. All the talk about a nuclear idyll was just talk, and in its stead came the hydrogen bomb. After all, the scientists in their secure university positions did not have to dirty their hands with pipes and pumps and the machinery of developing nuclear reactors for civilian use.
It took Hyman G. Rickover, a four-star admiral of the U.S. Navy working with a private company, to develop the Nautilus submarine—the first civilian application of nuclear power. The costs were so astronomical that it ultimately had little civilian application, but it did give people a basis for thinking that perhaps all these dreams about nuclear power had some validity to them. The period of nuclear euphoria lasted into the 1950s. The research did not produce anything. The AEC knew that they were nowhere near building a civilian reactor but they continued to make grandiose promises in order to secure funding from Congress to continue their weapons program.
The beginning of the civilian nuclear power program came in 1957, when Congress passed the Price Anderson Act. Early research on reactors proved unsuccessful, but the big breakthrough came in 1963 when General Electric made a bid to build a nuclear power plant at Oyster Creek in New Jersey. They offered a price cheaper than coal, and the AEC hailed this as the first step in the commercialization of nuclear power. It was, however, a loss-leader bid. GE had no idea what a nuclear power plant would cost. All that it knew was that it was time to start selling them. It had a turnkey deal at a price that made it competitive but that was far below the actual cost. This ushered in the era of the cost overrun. These plants were built and sold at a price that looked like it was competitive with coal, even though there has never been a nuclear power plant built that was cost-competitive in this country or anywhere else. All of a sudden, what looked like a dormant option—the cause of much lip service—was the rage.
I remember when GE came to my law firm in the 1960s and asked us to help them create a public power agency in New Jersey because they wanted to build half a dozen nuclear reactors there. Fortunately, GE’s lawyers said they would be violating antitrust laws and put a stop to the plan, but that was the prevailing mind-set at the time. A year later, Peabody Coal Company came to us and said they were so afraid of nuclear power taking over the future that they did not think that coal resources in the West would be developed. They wanted to create public power agencies with low-interest money to lower the price of coal so that they might have a chance at competing.
It got worse. By the time I took over the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1976, TVA had stopped maintenance of its coal plants for years. They were going nuclear. With an armada of twelve nuclear reactors, they were writing off their coal plants. We put a billion dollars into installing scrubbers and pollution-control equipment on those plants.
AEC chairman Glenn T. Seaborg said he was certain that nuclear power was the future. He traveled to sixty nations to sell the idea of the peaceful atom as outlined in Eisenhower’s famous “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations on December 8, 1953. Most people believed him. The first time I went to Israel, I asked why the country was considering building an atomic power plant there. David Ben-Gurion said that if you did not have atomic energy, you were not a modern nation. That was the mind-set the United States had created and sold all over the world.
The AEC had the dual role of promoting and regulating nuclear power, but promotion was their priority. It suppressed documents from staff that raised safety questions. Safety was not discussed in public during the euphoria of the 1960s, when everyone and their uncle were ordering nuclear power plants. There is no such thing as peaceful atoms. The road to the atomic bomb is the nuclear power plant, which has also led to confrontations with nations such as Iran and North Korea, who are just implementing the program that America sold to the world. It is the height of hypocrisy and arrogance that America expects the world to support its attempts to stop countries from building bombs when it is promoting nuclear power.
There has been one constant throughout: nuclear power has never been economical, and it never will be. Even with the latest improvements, the cost overrun is about one or two billion dollars. Thirty years ago, when we went on a nuclear binge, nuclear power was the alternative source of power. There were no alternative technologies that were sustainable and clean. Affordable wind power and solar power were still to come. The situation now is entirely different.
There is no antinuclear movement today. There are, of course, a few souls who gather every once in a while to say the same old things to each other, but the antinuclear movement has lost all connection with the American people. Three Mile Island set the nuclear industry back for twenty or thirty years, but there are still 150 reactors in the United States that can cause major destruction if there is an earthquake or human accident. Every ten years, there has been an accident of some kind, and there is no reason to think that the cycle has ended.
Too much of what comes from the antinuclear movement has been negative. Instead, to persuade the entire nation, the movement must unite with other environmentalists to agree that nuclear power is as much an existential threat to humankind as climate change. It also needs to make a positive case. It needs collectively to inform people that there are alternative sources of energy and it is not simply a matter of choosing between carbon and plutonium.
Every scientist can be a spokesperson. The world has to count on people with knowledge not just to write doctoral papers but to speak out and to speak to the layperson—to talk about aspects of nuclear power that the average American can relate to. The average American does not think a power plant that has operated for twenty-five years without accident will suddenly become a killer. What does impress people is telling them in plain English that there is thirty years’ worth of spent fuel, or radioactive trash, piled up in their backyards that no one knows where to store safely. The trash sits in a swimming pool, which if it loses water will cause a fire that is the equivalent of a bomb in power and scale. The strongest argument for shutting down nuclear reactors is that it is immoral to produce more radioactive trash if no one knows what to do with it other than to hand the problem down to future generations—to sweep the dirt under the carpet. Moreover, no one has ever talked about the cost of monitoring this trash in the future.