The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  In his address at the United Nations, delivered in December 1953, Eisenhower tried to sketch out that different path. It might or might not work, but it had to be tried. “Atoms for Peace” is what Eisenhower called it. He summarized the buildup of the nuclear arsenals. But he also called for U.S.-Soviet cooperation to modulate the nuclear arms race and to commit to the development of the peaceful atom for people around the world. That meant, primarily, the generation of electricity with nuclear power. “Peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future,” he promised.3

  The way nuclear energy was developed after World War II still shapes its role—present and potential—in the twenty-first century. That begins with designs themselves. At the heart of all of the reactor designs is a core where radioactive material generates a controlled chain reaction, releasing a great amount of energy and heat. Where the designs differ is in the coolant that flows around the core, keeping it from getting too hot while at the same time becoming hot enough itself to produce steam, which in turn drives a turbine and produces electricity. For its coolant, Canada’s CANDU reactor used heavy water, a variant of natural water that occurs rarely in nature. A British design used gas rather than water as the coolant.

  But the most common type of reactor, developed in the United States, uses light water—which is another term for normal water—for the coolant. As the water circles the core, it is heated to such a level as to produce, either directly or indirectly, the steam to drive a turbine. The light-water reactor is the basis for about 90 percent of the 440 or so nuclear reactors currently operational in the world, and virtually all those presently planned.

  Whatever the coolant, it is typical to speak of the nuclear-fuel cycle. For the light-water reactor, the cycle begins with the mining of uranium and then moves to enrichment to increase the concentration of the isotope U-235 to a level that will be able to sustain a controlled chain reaction. This more-concentrated fuel is then fabricated into fuel rods that will be inserted into the reactor. The cycle continues through the use of the fuel in the reactor all the way through to the deposition of the spent fuel in some form of storage or possible reuse.

  The origins of the light-water reactor go back to the way in which the U.S. Navy, after World War II, set out to harness the atom to power its submarine fleet. It owes its predominance to the single-minded drive of one person, an intensely focused engineer, Admiral Hyman Rickover. “Widely considered to be the greatest engineer of all time” is how President Jimmy Carter described him. Rickover, who achieved the virtually unheard-of feat of spending 63 years on active duty, was not only, as he is remembered today, the father of the nuclear navy; he is also, to a very considerable degree, the father of today’s nuclear power industry.4

  THE ADMIRAL

  “Everything in my life has been sort of a coincidence,” Rickover once said. Hyman Rickover was born Chaim Rickover in a small village in a Jewish shtetl of czarist-ruled Poland, most of whose inhabitants would eventually perish in the Holocaust. At age six Rickover immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister. His father, a tailor, who had gone ahead to New York, did not know they had arrived. His mother, tricked out of her money on the ship over and now penniless, was being held in detention with her children. Just before they were to be deported back to Poland, his father learned by chance that they were stuck in immigration and eventually stumbled on them on Ellis Island. The Rickovers settled in Chicago. The family was so poor that the boy had to take his first job, age nine, holding a lantern in a machine shop. While in high school, Rickover worked the night shift, from 3:00 to 11:00, at the Western Union telegraph agency. A picture from the 1916 Republican convention in Chicago shows him standing stiffly at attention in his Western Union uniform as he would later stand in his naval uniform. Through a lucky fluke, he won a nomination to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.5

  Anxious, fearful of failure, and certainly no athlete—and subject to extra hazing because he was Jewish—Rickover spent every moment he could at the academy studying. He was, as he later put it, “trying to get by, stay alive.” At night when the library closed, he even crammed himself into an unused shower stall to get in extra time with his books. Rickover may not have been the most popular midshipman in his class, but he graduated with distinction. However, as a result of a naval disarmament treaty, it looked as though there would be few career berths in the navy for the Annapolis graduates, including Rickover. Deeply disappointed, he secured an entry-level engineering job at Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, the linchpin of Samuel Insull’s empire. But then, a naval posting became available. Rickover subsequently served on two submarines—one, the S-48, of such faulty, sooty, dangerous and repellent engineering as to sear into Rickover’s soul a fanaticism about the absolute importance of high engineering standards. This conviction would infuse everything he did thereafter.6

  During World War II, Rickover headed the Electrical Section in the Bureau of Ships. There he honed his zealotry for excellence and an obsession with precision. “An organizer & leader of outstanding ability,” said his final fitness report, and “one of the country’s foremost engineers.” What this report did not include was his driving, domineering, irascible, abrasive, sometimes hypersensitive, extremely confident personality. This was the flip side of his single-minded focus on mission and extraordinarily demanding nature. This combination of qualities would make some forever loyal to him and others, bitter enemies—later including much of the senior Navy brass. But, he would say, “my job was not to work within the system. My job was to get things done and make this country strong.”

  “I have the charisma of a chipmunk,” Rickover, late in life, told newscaster Diane Sawyer. He added, “I never have thought I was smart. I thought the people I dealt with . . . were dumb, including you.” Sawyer quickly replied, “To be called dumb by you is to be in very good company.”7

  Rickover had a distinctive gift that made him, in the eyes of many, the best engineer in the Navy. “I believe I have a unique characteristic—I can visualize machines operating right in my mind,” he once explained. “I do not think there has been anyone in the U.S. Navy who has had as much engineering experience as I have had.”8

  THE NUCLEAR NAVY

  After World War II, despite the dislike that many had for him, Rickover’s name was added at the last minute to the roster of naval officers dispatched to the secret atomic research city at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Their mission was to learn about the mysteries of nuclear energy and what role it might have if harnessed in peaceful power generation.

  Rickover quickly recognized the strategic potential of a nuclear navy and thereafter committed himself to realizing it. In particular, he understood that nuclear submarines could offer a range and capability that far exceeded that of the diesel-fueled submarines of World War II. By so doing, nuclear power offered an extraordinary solution to an intractable problem that bedeviled contemporary submarines—the constraints of conventional batteries, which limited the amount of time that submarines could spend at full speed underwater. By contrast, it was thought, nuclear subs should be able to cruise underwater at full speed for hours, days, or even months.

  Rickover was given double duty; he was put in charge of the nuclear propulsion programs for both the navy and for the new Atomic Energy Commission. This double posting helped him to overcome the formidable engineering and bureaucratic obstacles to realizing the nuclear submarine. It was said that he would write letters to himself and then answer them, ensuring instant sign-off from both the navy and the AEC. The urgency of the program increased in 1949 with the first Soviet atomic bomb test.

  It was one thing to build an atomic bomb. It was quite another to harness a controlled chain reaction of fission to generate power. So much had to be invented and developed from scratch—the technolog y, the engineering, the know-how. It was Rickover who chose the pressurized light-water reactor as the propulsion system. He also imposed “an engineering and technical discipline unknown to industry or, exce
pt for his own organization, to government.”9

  To accomplish his goals, Rickover built a cadre of highly skilled and highly trained officers for the nuclear navy, who were constantly pushed to operate at peak standards of performance. If that meant being a taskmaster and a martinet, Rickover would be a taskmaster and a martinet. Even a minor oversight or deviation from Rickover’s very high standards would likely mean that an officer would be “denuked”—ejected from the nuclear service.

  When interviewing candidates for the nuclear navy, Rickover would, in order to throw them off and test them, seat them in chairs with shortened front legs and at the same time position them so that the sunlight streamed through specially adjusted venetian blinds straight into their eyes. That way “they had to maintain their wits,” he explained, “while they were sliding off the chair.”10

  Once, when a young submarine officer was applying to the nuclear navy, he proudly told Rickover that he had come in 59th in his class of 820 at the Naval Academy. Rickover acidly asked him if he had done his best. After a moment’s hesitation, the taken-aback officer, named James Earl Carter, admitted that he had not.

  “Why not?” Rickover asked.

  That question—Why Not the Best?—became the title of his campaign autobiography when, as Jimmy Carter, he ran for the presidency decades later.11

  In Rickover’s tireless campaign to build a nuclear submarine and bulldoze through bureaucracy, he so alienated his superiors that he was twice passed over for promotion to admiral. It took congressional intervention to finally secure him the title.

  Rickover’s methods worked. The development of the technology, the engineering , and construction for a nuclear submarine—all these were achieved in record time. The first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned in 1954. The whole enterprise had been achieved in seven years—compared with the quarter century that others had predicted. In 1958, to great acclaim, the Nautilus accomplished a formidable, indeed unthinkable, feat—it sailed 1,400 miles under the North Pole and the polar ice cap. The journey was nonstop except for those times when the ship got temporarily stuck between the massive ice cap and the shallow sea bottom. When, on the ship’s return, the Nautilus’s captain was received at the White House, the abrasive Rickover, who was ultimately responsible for the very existence of the Nautilus, was pointedly excluded from the ceremony.

  At a separate meeting, the ship’s captain presented Admiral Rickover with a piece of polar ice, carefully preserved in the ship’s freezer. It was one of the rare times that those who reported to him ever saw the frosty admiral smile. By the time Rickover finally retired in 1986, 40 percent of the navy’s major combatant ships would be nuclear propelled.12

  THE REACTOR AT OBNINSK

  The Nautilus was the first controlled application of nuclear power for vehicle propulsion. However, in the summer of 1954, Soviet radio announced another “first” for “Soviet science”: the first civilian reaction anywhere in the world had gone into operation in the science city of Obninsk, south of Moscow. The Soviet Union, declared the Soviet news agency TASS, had “leaped ahead of Britain and the United States in the development of atomic energy.”

  But the actual reactor at Obninsk was tiny, capable of supplying power only to some local collective farms and factories and a few thousand residents. It was also a forerunner of a particular type of Soviet reactor called the RBMK, which would achieve unfortunate notoriety some decades later.13

  “TOO CHEAP TO METER”

  Even before the launch of the Nautilus, the development of a civilian nuclear reactor was beginning. It too was under the firm control of Admiral Rickover. The civilian reactors were based upon the navy’s designs. The design is often attributed to the submarine reactors, but there was an intermediate step. After work had already begun on developing a reactor for aircraft carriers, the Eisenhower administration decided that the program would be too expensive and instead concluded that the quickest way to get to nuclear power would be by stripping the carrier propulsion project of its distinctive naval features and making it the basis for a civilian reactor.

  The reaction to the Atomic Energy Commission’s announcement of the civilian program was enthusiastic. Time magazine called it a “new phase” of the atomic age; the New York Times went even further, announcing the coming age of atomic power. The optimism of the times was captured in 1954 when the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, made what would turn into the famous prophecy that nuclear power would, within 15 years, deliver “electrical energy too cheap to meter.” 14

  The first U.S. nuclear plant was built at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It went into operation in 1957, just three years after the launch of the Nautilus. The British actually beat it by a year, with the first commercial production of nuclear power in the world at Calder Hall in Britain, which Queen Elizabeth dedicated in 1956. But Calder Hall was a small power plant (built with a design now considered obsolete).

  Shippingport, by contrast, ranks as “the world’s first full-scale atomic power station.” The design and construction of the power plant was directed by none other than Admiral Hyman Rickover, who retained operational oversight for the next twenty-five years. Though the reactor had been scaled up from the one designated for an atomic-powered aircraft carrier, it had also been fundamentally rethought and redesigned to produce electric power. It performed far above its rated design and operated virtually fault free. This was credit to Rickover, with his determined exactitude, and to the team he assembled. 15

  The real commercial turning point for nuclear power came in 1963, when a New Jersey utility ordered a commercial plant to be built at Oyster Creek. That reactor was also based upon the design developed under Rickover.

  THE GREAT NUCLEAR BANDWAGON

  Over the next few years, about 50 nuclear power plants were ordered, as utilities clambered all over each other to jump onto what was becoming known as the “great bandwagon market.” It was Thomas Edison versus George Westinghouse all over again, with General Electric and Westinghouse battling for market share with their respective versions of light-water reactors. Westinghouse championed the PWR, the pressurized-water reactor; and GE, the BWR, the boiling water reactor. Atomic energy, some projected, could provide almost half of total U.S. electricity by the first decade of the twenty-first century. One leading scientist declared, “Nuclear reactors now appear to be the cheapest of all sources of energy” with the promise of “the permanent and ubiquitous availability of cheap power.” 16

  But nuclear power, it turned out, was not cheap at all. Costs went up—way up. The reasons were many and interconnected. There was not enough standardization in plants and designs. Many utilities did not have the heft and experience to take on projects that were much bigger than they had anticipated and more complex and difficult to manage. The vendors were promising more than they could deliver in a time frame that they could not meet. And there was insufficient operating experience.

  At the same time, the question of “how safe is safe enough?” emerged as a burning issue. What were the risks of an accident and radiation exposure? At both the federal and state levels, licensing and permitting took much longer than expected. Growing environmental and specifically antinuclear movements prompted constant regulatory delays, reviews, and changes. Concrete walls that had already been laid in had to be rebuilt and thickened; piping had to be taken out and reworked. Plants had to be redesigned and then redesigned again and again during construction, meaning that costs went up and then went up again, far exceeding the original budgets.

  The plants also became more expensive because of the general inflationary pressures of the era, and then high interest rates. Instead of six years, plants were taking ten years to build, further driving up financing costs. Plants that were supposed to cost $200 million ended up costing $2 billion. Some cost much more. “The evolution in the costs,” said an economist from the Atomic Energy Commission, with some understatement, could be “classified as a traumatic, rather th
an a successful, experience.”17

  “THE BUDDHA IS SMILING”: PROLIFERATION

  Another concern was emerging as well—about the risks of nuclear proliferation and the diversion of nuclear materials and know-how. Members of what was becoming known as the arms-control community, focusing on proliferation, added their voices to those of the antinuclear activists.

  For a number of years, there was confidence that the nuclear weapons “club” was stable and highly exclusive, limited to just five members—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction—known as MAD—offered the stability of deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union. But then, in May of 1974, the Indian foreign minister received a cryptic phone message: “The Buddha is smiling.” He knew what that code meant; India had just exploded a “peaceful nuclear device” in the Rajasthan Desert, 100 miles from the border with Pakistan. The nuclear monopoly of the five powers had been broken, and the prospect for further proliferation was now very real.18

  It was now eminently clear that a strong link—if that link was sought—existed between “peaceful nuclear power” and a nuclear weapon. There was only one atom; and the same nuclear plant that produced electricity could also produce plutonium in its spent fuel, which could be used as a weapons fuel. That was the way the Indians had done it. Moreover, an enrichment facility that turned out nuclear fuel with the 3 percent to 5 percent concentration required for a reactor could keep enriching the uranium over and over until it reached an 80 percent or 90 percent concentration of U-235. That was weapons-grade uranium, and out of that could be made an atomic bomb.