Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  Virtually the entire nation was electrified, compared to the early twentieth century, a fact not lost on private corporations. Companies like General Electric and Westinghouse were cranking out more and more units for home and industrial use each year. Utility companies were producing more energy as demand grew. Rising stock prices showed confidence that the trend would continue into the future.

  A long-term energy policy was needed to meet demand. The predominant energy sources of the time were oil and coal, which had been able to meet growing needs for years. Resources were plentiful, but the US had begun to import foreign oil after World War II, to augment domestic production. Neither Eisenhower nor anyone else could have foreseen the extent of problems that would be caused by a growing dependency on foreign oil in the future, but there certainly was a realization that self-sufficiency was preferable. Importing energy added costs to the product. American companies and government officials had to reach political agreements with counterparts in foreign nations supplying energy. This was a challenge, especially during the Cold War in which the US was in competition with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of many nations.

  Then there was the problem of air pollution. The environmental movement had not yet blossomed by the mid-1950s. But the issue was entering the public consciousness. An absence of blue skies and clean water was becoming more and more a part of the American landscape. One source of these darkening skies was coal burning plants. Coal was a developed technology, cheap to mine, and highly plentiful domestically, but its processes, from mining to electricity production, were dirty ones. Any long-term plan for energy could not rely simply on more and more coal burning plants.

  By the end of 1953, at the time of Eisenhower’s speech, the country’s leaders recognized that the American Empire would need energy to fuel its growth. Conveniently, the creation of electricity from nuclear power had been given a head start; the American experience operating nuclear weapons reactors for a decade was similar in many ways to that needed to produce electricity. The process of splitting uranium atoms generated enormously high levels of heat, which could be used to heat water, leading to production of electrical power. The process would be controlled, as opposed to the uncontrolled, chain-reaction process employed in nuclear weapons explosions.

  As part of the Idaho National Laboratory in the eastern part of the state, the federally-operated Experimental Breeder Reactor I was constructed in 1951 to address various research goals for developing nuclear power. By December of that year, the reactor produced enough electrical power to light the building containing it. While Eisenhower did not identify what he meant by the “power-starved areas of the world,” US officials envisioned that the first nuclear power reactors would be built in America. Any soothing of fears of the destructive atom had to begin at home. In addition, the energy needs of a rapidly-growing nation were being met by coal, oil, and gas, each an old and polluting source. Atomic power seemed to be the wave of the future.

  To date, producing energy to meet the nation’s demands had always been a matter that the private sector handled through market forces – identifying demand, and meeting that demand with supply. Coal and oil were purely a private function, as were other, less-used forms of power. And good entrepreneurs are always inclined to pursue new options if they can be developed into a profitable effort. Private energy companies were certainly interested in developing atomic power, even though the government had a monopoly over the technology. The interest was so strong that the monopoly quickly changed when, after lobbying by energy companies, Congress passed the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The legislation actually was an amendment to the first such Act passed in the aftermath of World War II. It authorized government, for the first time, to allow private companies in America and abroad access to technical information about nuclear energy production. Private companies could operate nuclear reactors, but would have to first receive a license from federal officials.

  The changes in the Act meant not just a greater push for reactors in the US, but abroad. The federal government began to export nuclear technology and materials to friendly nations, with the understanding that these were to be used for peaceful purposes, and not any buildup of atomic weapons. This effort served the dual purposes of being good for business, and for countering Communist propaganda that Americans were only interested in the atom for building a large weapons arsenal for the purpose of destroying the Soviet Union and its allies.

  Federal management of nuclear power was primarily the responsibility of the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was legally a civilian-run agency, although it had close ties with the military. Eisenhower had appointed Lewis Strauss as AEC chairman in 1953. Strauss was a wealthy investment banker who had a lifelong interest in physics, funding giants in the field such as Leo Szilard and Ernest Lawrence. He was one of the original commissioners at the AEC, serving for four years under Truman, during which time he urged the US to develop a program of hydrogen bombs, which were roughly a thousand times more powerful than atomic bombs. He was greatly distrustful of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that developed the original atomic bombs used on Japan, because Oppenheimer opposed developing a hydrogen bomb.

  In a September 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York City, Strauss summarized the government party line, i.e., that nuclear power was almost too good to be true. In particular, his words “too cheap to meter” to describe the atom’s ability to produce electricity would be repeatedly cited for years afterward.

  Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and with great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace.

  Eisenhower himself praised nuclear power when he could. On Labor Day 1954, he made a national television appearance in which he waved a “magic wand” that signaled the start of construction of the first US nuclear power reactor. The site was Shippingport, a small town in western Pennsylvania about thirty miles from Pittsburgh. The Westinghouse Corporation, based in Pittsburgh, had elected to enter the nuclear power game – aided by very generous subsidies from a federal government eager to see the America’s first nuclear reactor take off. The image of a career military man illustrating the non-military uses of the most deadly combat weapon in human history was an opportunity of which Eisenhower and his advisors availed themselves.

  The government also found some strong allies to help spread its message. One of the more prominent backers was Walt Disney, a major force in television, movies, and amusement parks. Disney, who had a long-time interest in public affairs, used his powerful media apparatus to convey the pro-atom message to the American public. After meeting with government officials in late 1955, Disney and his advisor Heinz Haber launched a project to produce a sixty-minute animated cartoon entitled “Our Friend the Atom.” Haber was an astrophysicist who had served in the Nazi air force during World War II. Working with the US Navy and General Dynamics (which built nuclear powered submarines), Haber produced the cartoon that featured a fisherman who opens a bottle. A genie emerges, and tells the fisherman he will kill anyone who released him. After tricking the genie back into the bottle, the fisherman convinces the genie to grant his wishes if he frees him again. The parallels of the genie representing atomic power and the fisherman representing Americans was clear to the public, millions of whom viewed the cartoon after its release in January 1957.

  In addition to its publicity campaign, Washington increased funding incentives for new domestic nuclear reactors and encouraged other, friendly nations to develop the technology. Despite these extensive government efforts, nuclear power made little progress in the mid-1950s, for several reaso
ns. Slogans like “too cheap to meter” hid concerns about the costs of building and maintaining reactors. The cost of weapons reactor construction was high, but completely borne by taxpayers. Private companies, which would have to foot the bill for power plants, were concerned, as were Wall Street financiers who would generate loans for reactors. Second, there was the matter of reliability. Private companies, while interested in nuclear power, were not convinced that this new technology would be able to quickly produce electricity with a minimum of start-up costs and disruptions to their operations. Reactors were far more complex to operate than coal or oil plants, which had a proven track record.

  But the most serious of all problems standing in the way of nuclear power development was safety. In the promotion of nuclear power, several major issues went unaddressed, each based on the fact that reactors produced a mixture of radioactive chemicals, the same waste products as did atomic bombs. These “fission products” numbered more than 100, each of them radioactive and harmful to health. They did not exist in nature, but only were created when uranium atoms were split after bombardment with neutrons. They included isotopes such as cesium-137, iodine-131, and strontium-90. Like all radioactive products, they decay over time, but at different rates. Some disappear from the environment in days, even hours or minutes, but some exist for hundreds and thousands of years. Like the genie in the Disney cartoon, these products had to be secured, as exposure to humans and animals was known to kill and injure cells and cause diseases such as cancer.

  The safety questions raised over the 100-plus fission products were threefold. First, could reactor operators figure out a foolproof means of safely storing these products for thousands of years? Second, how much radioactivity would be released into the environment (and into humans) as part of routine operations? Finally, and perhaps most urgently, could operators guarantee that there would be no major malfunction of reactors, resulting in a meltdown of the red-hot core or waste pools, and a large-scale release of fission products to the air and water? Assurances given by government officials were not sufficient, certainly not to energy companies who were rebuffed by all insurers when they sought to purchase policies against damages after a catastrophic meltdown.

  The energy companies involved in nuclear power were stuck; no insurance, no reactors. There was no way any utility would risk operating a reactor, with billions in potential losses after a meltdown, without adequate insurance. They took their case public, hoping to get the government to break the impasse. Westinghouse Vice President Charles Weaver stated that, “Obviously we cannot risk the financial stability of our company for a relatively small project no matter how important it is to the country’s reactor development effort, if it could result in a major liability in relation to our assets.”

  Seeing that the inability of energy companies to secure insurance against a catastrophic meltdown was preventing reactor power development, the government again rose to the rescue. In 1957, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act; the legislation limited the liability borne by energy companies from a meltdown to $60 million. It also guaranteed that up to $500 million in federal funds would be committed to additional liabilities from a meltdown. The Act was to last for a decade, when private companies could then buy liability insurance without government guarantees.

  The reality was that a catastrophic malfunction at a nuclear reactor could cost more than $60 million, or even $500 million. A 1957 study by Brookhaven National Laboratories known as WASH-740 estimated that property damages to land, buildings, food, and water would cost up to $7 billion – not including the costs to society from the many thousands of deaths and illnesses. But since the need to jumpstart the reactor program was paramount, Congress and the Eisenhower administration ignored the report, and passed the Act with the arbitrarily low number of $60 million that they knew insurance companies would cover.

  With the problem of liability taken care of by government intervention, the door was open for nuclear reactors to proceed in the US. The Shippingport reactor, after operating for several months on a test basis, began selling nuclear-produced electricity commercially in May 1958. Once again, Eisenhower presided over the occasion by waving a “neutron wand” at the White House to signify the beginning electrical production, and “ease mankind’s burdens and provide additional comforts for human living.” The age of nuclear power reactors in the US had begun.

  This spirited boost in the mid-1950s gave many a highly positive view of nuclear power. But in just over half a century since then, the view has changed drastically. Nuclear power may well be the most argued-about, hotly-discussed form of energy.

  The advent of atomic power indeed represents a unique chapter in American history. It is a relatively new discovery, one whose development has been closely shaped by military, economic, and political factors. It is also a public issue that paradoxically has been characterized by a culture of secrecy and deception. It has challenged various rights that are deeply rooted in the American saga. The right of people to have access to clean air, water, and food is one. The right of people to be informed of the actions of its leaders, and conversely the obligation of leaders to be accountable to the popular will, is another. The right of people to self-determine, including issues like how their energy is generated, is yet another.

  A total of 127 nuclear power reactors have operated in the US. Of these, twenty-three have closed permanently; since 1998, the remaining 104 have been in operation, and no new ones are being built at present. The 104 reactors are located in thirty-one states, at sixty-five sites (some sites, or plants, have more than one reactor). These machines generate just over 19% of the country’s electricity, far behind coal, which produces about half. The 104 reactors actually produce about 8% of the nation’s energy; nuclear power cannot produce non-electrical forms of energy.

  The figure of 20% of the nation’s electricity is a sort of wall, as nuclear reactors have stalled at about that figure for about two decades, never producing more than 20.6% of the country’s electricity in a single year. In all but one of the most recent eight years (2003–2010), the proportion has been between 19% and 20%. With no new reactors to begin operating for at least a decade more (if ever), with current reactors operating at nearly 90% capacity (which is not likely to be exceeded), and with population and electrical needs growing steadily, the coming years will likely see a drop below 19% (see table):

  Source: Department of Energy. H. Data for 2010 is an estimate, based on an extrapolation of 11 actual months. Electricity generated in thousands of megawatts electrical.

  A number of nations have followed the American lead, and operate nuclear power reactors, with 439 such units now in operation worldwide. A number of developed nations, especially in Europe, rely on nuclear power for part of their electricity. The most notable of these is France, which gets about 80% of its electricity from nuclear power. However, a number of European nations have no nuclear power reactors, including Albania, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, and Turkey. In the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and South America, very few nuclear power reactors exist, long after Eisenhower called for their development in “power-starved areas of the world.”

  In the 1960s and early 1970s, hundreds of new nuclear reactor units were ordered by utility companies. But construction turned out to be much slower and costlier than expected. For many reactors, an excessively long time transpired between the time they were ordered and electrical power was produced. For example, the two North Anna reactors in northern Virginia were announced in October 1967. However, they didn’t begin producing electricity for commercial use until June 1978 and December 1980, a total of eleven and thirteen years later, respectively. A single reactor at the Clinton plant in central Illinois was announced in January 1973, but didn’t begin generating electricity until November 1987, nearly fifteen years later. The last reactor to begin operating in the US was Watts Bar, in eastern Tennessee; an announcement that two new reacto
rs would be built took place in January 1970. However, reactor #1 at the plant did not begin operations until May 1996, a staggering twenty-six years after the announcement. Plans to build reactor #2 were scrapped in the 1980s, while still in the early stages of construction. Total construction costs for the first seventy-five US reactors amounted to more than three times that originally projected, according to one study by the US Energy Information Administration, although some believe this figure to be understated.

  When reactors were finally started, they ran into another problem that had an impact on both economics and safety. Mechanical problems frequently required reactors to close until these problems were diagnosed and resolved by maintenance staff. The “capacity factor” or the percent of time that reactors were in operation was just under 50% in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, the figure had risen slightly, to 57%, according to the EIA. In some cases, the problems were so complex and presented such a threat that reactors closed for long periods, generating no electricity (or revenue) during that time, and incurring substantial costs for repair and rebuilding. Some were persistently problematic. The Peach Bottom reactor #2 in southeast Pennsylvania closed from April 1984 to July 1985 – only to close again from March 1987 to May 1989. Thus, over a five-year period, the reactor only operated for a maximum of eighteen months, and, reported the Union of Concerned Scientists, probably fewer. There were fifteen operating reactors that had to be shut down for at least two years and eight months (consecutively) before starting up again; they are listed below (see table):