Maize's Nuclear History Blog

Chapter 1: Masters of the universe

2009-03-26T19:28:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 16, 1954, an ebullient Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss at a dinner meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City told the National Association of Science Writers, “Transmutation of the elements – unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered – these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter – 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 at 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 for an age of peace.”[1]

Wow! The optimism of Strauss (pronounced “Straws”), appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission by President Truman in 1946 and President Eisenhower’s choice as chairman in 1952, was hardly unique. In the years following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan by U.S. atomic bombs, the phenomenal success of the Manhattan Project (which Americans had never heard of prior to the dropping of the bombs on Japan) in building the bombs, and the ensuing enthusiasm about nuclear power produced a social tidal wave of enthusiasm for anything and everything atomic.

The popular president Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower touted what he dubbed “Atoms for Peace,” and the Post Office issued a 3 cents Atoms for Peace first class stamp in 1955. Some 133 million of the stamps came off government printing presses.

If it was radioactive, if it involved nuclear energy, it was the magic wand, the rage of the age. Worldwide, the U.S. was the grand conductor of the atomic energy orchestra. The nation was enthralled by hyper-optimistic notions about what the atom could do, beyond blowing up enemy cities and spreading radioactive fallout around the globe.

Partly a result of guilt over what happened to Japan (John Hersey’s 1946 Hiroshima [2]has been in print for over 60 years), the atom captivated America. Atomic energy seemed to offered infinite power to propel aircraft, ships, locomotives, and even the family sedan. It could move mountains, and make electricity. There was no down side.

The Ford Motor Co. in 1958 rolled out – at 3/8 scale – the Ford Nucleon, a concept car designed to be powered by a small nuclear reactor. The car had a rear reactor engine compartment (no engine, of course) and an extreme cab-forward design, to put as much distance as possible between the passengers and the engine’s radiation.

The car, of course, couldn’t be built until small reactor technology and better shielding from radioactivity became available. So the car was never built. However, according to movie producer Bob Gale, the Nucleon’s reactor-in-the-rear inspired his DeLorean time-traveling sports car in the 1980s movie Back to the Future. The mock-up of the Nucleon sits in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.[3]

Given a bit of thought, it’s obvious that a nuclear powered car was a very bad idea. Imagine a 50-car pileup on a foggy, icy stretch of Interstate 5 at the California, Oregon border. The radioactivity would close the major north-south highway on the west coast for a generation.

The atom would generate electricity to light American light bulbs, and heat and cool homes. It would turn salt water into fresh and destroy nasty deposits of toxic pollutants. This was a time, few remember, when millions of American homes got their heat directly from coal, delivered down chutes from trucks to furnaces that burned the mineral and either delivered heat through grates or made hot water that went through steam registers. Cooling came from electric-powered fans. The homeowner had to deal with the slag, known as “clinkers,” and the ash that resulted. A lot of that went into vegetable garden soil, at a time when many folks had gardens to supplement their store purchases.

The atom would also revolutionize medicine, a promise that science was often able to deliver. Medical isotopes dramatically improved the treatment of some of the most terrifying of diseases, including – the curse that few spoke out loud in those days – the big C, cancer.

The vision of nuclear perfection was a direct product of the success of the Manhattan Project’s bomb-making prowess. Two characteristics that grew out of the Manhattan project dominated the US government when it came to atomic energy after World War II: overwhelming reliance on secrecy and technological hubris, with a reliance on big government to get the job done. The ethos of the Manhattan Project was “think big and keep it secret.”

The Manhattan Project was unknown to most Americans until well after the war. It was named for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan engineering district, and was the most secret project of the war. Franklin Roosevelt’s third vice president, Harry S Truman, didn’t find out about it until he was briefed after Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

Truman then made the controversial decision to drop the bomb on Japan. Many Americans believed that the bomb program ended the war with Japan and saved thousands of American lives. That’s an argument that rages to this day, with solid arguments on both sides.

Regardless of that dispute, the Manhattan Project spawned the post-war civilian nuclear energy program, and an inherent view that the bomb project validated the model of big science. Without the bombs developed in the 1940s, the civilian projects would not have been possible in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Without doubt, the bomb also altered the balance of power in the post-war period, and established the Cold War nuclear equilibrium between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that lasted for more than 50 years.

A key to the development of nuclear energy in the U.S. from the Manhattan Project until 1954 was that the enterprise was entirely a secret federal government operation, although most of the actual work was performed by private-sector contractors. Until 1954, only the federal government could own enriched uranium and other nuclear materials. Any nuclear research and development outside the government required approval from the feds. That had important implications for the shape and pace of research and development. It dramatically skewed research toward pie-in-the-sky, big government projects, away from smaller-scale, practical, business-oriented uses of nuclear energy.

The U.S. nuclear weapons program from 1942-1946 was the largest and most secret military project in history. Most of its documents, including the most mundane, didn’t see the light-of-day until a major push by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s to declassify the bulk of the paper from the weapons program. The pursuit of invisibility dominated the nuclear endeavor from its days as an entirely military mission through its transformation into a civilian enterprise, to the point of obsession.

As historians of the government’s nuclear energy program have noted, the project to develop and build an atomic bomb flew in the face of the traditions of science in general and physics in particular. Traditional science relied on open discussion, give-and-take, argument, and sharing of experimental data and research results. But that went entirely counter to the needs of the military to compartmentalize data, restrict access to research, and stifle public scientific debate. The fear was that open science would arm our enemies, initially the Germans, but increasingly, after the war, the Soviet Union.

How did the military architects of the atomic bomb project reconcile the need for secrecy with the tradition of science for open debate and unfettered replication of scientific claims? The federal government created an open, but extremely limited, environment for nuclear physicists and other bomb scientists to hash out their diverse views in a remote, and completely controlled environment, in the beautiful New Mexico wilderness.

Perched on a large mesa north of Albuquerque, N.M, the government’s free debate and scientific marketplace of ideas was called “Los Alamos.” It was a highly-secret scientific laboratory that resulted in the first atomic bombs, which devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945 and Nagasaki days later.

Free scientific discussion was the order of the day at Los Alamos, but only among the boffins who lived and worked there.[4] The military controlled access to the growing city on the mountain; only those with the proper credentials could access the government facility.

Los Alamos was also the province of the brilliant and quixotic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the laboratory, and his nemesis, the saturnine Edward Teller, who wished he ran Los Alamos. Hungarian immigrant Teller, a brilliant theoretical physicist, came to believe, and acted on the belief, that Oppenheimer, his former friend and the father of the atomic bomb, may have been a Communist dupe and a security risk. Teller was wrong, but his obsession created major changes in the U.S. nuclear program, many of them unproductive, including the creation of another national weapons laboratory, at Livermore, Calif., to rival Los Alamos.

By the end of the war, the Manhattan Project was a vast enterprise, run from a remote site near Oak Ridge, Tenn., which also housed a giant factory for separating natural uranium (U235) into its bomb-useable flavor (U238), drawing enormous amounts of electricity from the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority. The vast nuclear weapons enterprise included the Los Alamos bomb factory in New Mexico; uranium enrichment in Tennessee; a huge weapons factory in the Washington desert on the Columbia River near Hanford, Wash.; an assembly plant near Denver, Colo.; a plutonium fabrication factory in Texas; and a reactor testing station in the eastern Idaho desert. Few, other than those working there, knew much about what was then the largest science and engineering project in world history. The secrecy was a shroud that hid the program from the public (but didn’t protect the vital information on how to make a bomb from flowing to the Soviet Union).

The post-war battle between Oppenheimer and Teller, which came to a head in 1954, was a crucial element in the evolution of the Atomic Energy Commission. It contributed to the agency’s history of failure in almost everything beyond its original mission of developing a U.S. nuclear arsenal. The agency consistently pushed for funds for a multiplicity of projects that would keep it alive, an imperative of bureaucracies. These included allegedly-peaceful bomb projects, despite international treaties aimed at limiting nuclear testing; nuclear power plants for commercial merchant ships; fusion and breeder reactors for civilian uses; and multitudes of civilian power reactors of various technologies. The history of the AEC – and its successors leading the U.S. Department of Energy -- demonstrated that government bureaucracies can be created, but cannot be destroyed.

Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 to acknowledge the heretofore secret existence of the nation’s atomic weapons program and put it under civilian control. The AEC was a civilian agency charged after the war with managing the nation’s nuclear energy program, including bomb testing, building, and stockpiling of weapons. Civilian control of the major residue of the military’s nuclear weapons program, it turned out, wasn’t an easy act.[5]

For the first eight years of its life, the AEC was essentially a faux military agency. Congress, when it created the AEC in the aftermath of the war and the success of the Manhattan Project, mandated government ownership of nuclear materials, technology, and know-how. There was no civilian nuclear power industry in the U.S. in the first decade following the victory in World War II. The military drove the AEC agenda.

Congress turned the military program into nominal civilian hands. That action verified the doctrine of unintended consequences, creating an institutional and bureaucratic monster. Congress built a structure that proved perfect for intrigue, politics, pork-barrel spending, and low-level (and sometimes higher) bureaucratic warfare among competing power centers. The Atomic Energy Commission; the White House and its Bureau of the Budget; the Pentagon; industry lobbyists; and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy all participated in a bureaucratic scrum of program authorizations, funding, schedules, and allocations of resources, involving sharp elbows, eye-gouging, and anonymous back-biting and back-stabbing. It provided an unfortunate model for Congressional behavior in the future, up to today.

While the 1946 law established the AEC to manage what had been the military’s nuclear weapons program, the generals and admirals remained intimately involved. Military decisions drove the shape of the AEC weapons program, in terms of the kinds of bombs, the numbers, and even major decisions on nuclear technology. Adm. Hyman Rickover, for example, the father of the nuclear submarine, kept both his Navy military rank and a position as civilian head of a major reactor office at the AEC, from the days of the development of the Nautilus nuclear submarine in the 1950s well into the 1970s.[6]

A five-member commission, appointed by the president, governed the AEC. Offering independent advice to the commission was a nine-member General Advisory Committee, consisting of presidentially-appointed civilians, generally important scientists, to give the commissioners – who often had little or no scientific background – technical advice. The GAC often turned out to be a critic, and sometimes a scold and goad to AEC projects, particularly when contrarian physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was its chairman.

Most important, Congress created the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which became the political sun around which the other atomic institutions revolved. Who had the original idea for the joint committee is not really known, but it quickly evolved into an independent power center, a group of congressional atomic mandarins that controlled the programs of the AEC, as well as dictating to congressional appropriations committees what the AEC’s budget should be. The JCAE was, in its time, the most powerful committee in Congress, and perhaps the most powerful in congressional history. These guys had radioactive muscles, and they flexed them. Often, and often in behalf of half-baked, irrational nuclear schemes.

Unlike other joint (House and Senate together) congressional committees, the JCAE was established by law, not by the rules of the House and Senate. One of the histories of the AEC notes, “Moreover, it was the only joint committee of Congress authorized to receive proposed legislation and recommend it to the Congress.”[7] In the wacky world of Washington, that’s a killer proposition: a joint committee that can write bills trumps the work of the other substantive, but separate, committees in the House and Senate. Look out.

What’s more, the JCAE developed great staff expertise, and based its decisions on secret testimony, so that it was able to dictate to the money-writing congressional committees how much to spend on AEC programs. The power of the purse in Washington is the power of bureaucratic life and death. JCAE committee staff – who wielded extraordinary power – often moved over to the AEC as part of their career progression, where they exercised exceptional power due to their back-channel relations with the JCAE.

The joint committee had 18 members (nine from the House and nine from the Senate). No more than five of the nine could be from the same party, and the leadership rotated by chamber and party control of Congress. When the Republicans controlled Congress – not often in the post-war years – the committee leaders were Republicans. When the Democrats held the Congressional leadership, Democrats led the JCAE. But it didn’t make much who ran the committee. Members were almost always enthusiastic boosters of nuclear energy. Members of the committee tended to have safe electoral seats, so they spent years and decades on the committee.

While often critical of the AEC, all of the members of the JCAE were enthusiastic about the prospects for nuclear energy. Their disputes with the AEC were typically complaints that the commission wasn’t moving fast enough. Partisanship was not a major factor in the JCAE’s legislative life. Radioactive pork was most in mind, as the committee members concentrated on delivering AEC projects to their states and congressional districts. The AEC was usually willing to go along, if its own pet projects were protected.

The JCAE became the trump card to the other institutions involved in playing nuclear politics. When the AEC thought the White House’s Bureau of the Budget was being too stingy with funds, the committee would pressure the executive branch budgeteers, unusually getting more money for the nukes. Members of the committee watched AEC spending programs closely, making sure that contracts went to home state and districts concerns.

Industry lobbied the joint committee when it thought the AEC wasn’t serving its needs, or when it wanted to mold AEC policies in a particular direction. When an executive branch administration of either party wanted to redirect money or shut down a failing AEC program, the commission invariably enlisted the JCAE on its side, either for or against the administration initiative.

Strauss[8], Eisenhower’s appointed messenger for the promise of the atom, was well suited for the job. First named to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, Strauss was a fabulously successful investment banker who started out in life modestly selling shoes wholesale for his Richmond, Va., family business. After graduating from high school, Strauss had hoped to enroll at the University of Virginia to study physics. But a recession in 1913-1914 forced him onto the road peddling shoes. HeHHe was quite successful.

In 1917, the supremely confident Strauss traveled from Richmond to Washington, D.C., to apply for a job as private secretary to Herbert Hoover, whom President Woodrow Wilson asked to take over the task of feeding American troops in World War I. Although his prospects were slim, Strauss won the job. At the end of the war, Hoover – with Strauss in tow – organized relief for war-torn Europe.

In 1919, the now well-connected Strauss joined the investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb in New York. Over the next two decades, he made a considerable fortune and became active in Republican politics as a Hoover devotee. When the second war broke out in 1942, Strauss, a long-time Navy reserve officer, volunteered for service.

The Roosevelt administration wisely recognized Strauss’s considerable organizing and managerial talents. Strauss became a master of naval logistics and earned the rank of admiral. He never saw combat, but he refined his already-keen understanding of how government works as he guided significant Navy weapons and logistics programs.

Strauss’s successes in business and the military, and his Republican connections, led Truman in 1946, after the passage of the Atomic Energy Act, to name the Virginian to the Atomic Energy Commission. Truman prided himself on his non-partisan approach to government, and Strauss was evidence.

Strauss, the wannabe physicist, also possessed an optimistic, even romantic, view of the role of the atom in the U.S. future. In 1954, when Eisenhower started promoting his “atoms for peace” initiative, and Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act to give civilians access to nuclear technology, the president promoted Strauss to head the AEC.

Eisenhower and Strauss became close, sharing the vision of turning the incredibly-destructive power of the atom into a tool for peace. But Strauss had a prickly, difficult personality. He was abrasive and dismissive of dissent. Once he made up his mind, he refused to brook opposition. He apparently went out of his way to irritate members of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), a pivotal player in the politics of nuclear power, particularly New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson, a stalwart of the JCAE.

Strauss and Anderson clashed repeatedly over management of the Atomic Energy Commission and Strauss’s priorities for research and development. Anderson was a staunch supporter of atomic energy, but also a partisan to the bone. Anderson also thought Strauss was unresponsive to his needs and inquiries and was deliberately ignoring and sidestepping the Congressional committee. Anderson was right. Strauss frequently brushed off the committee’s complaints and bypassed its demands.

Anderson, the long-serving New Mexican Democrat, scuttled Eisenhower’s nomination of Strauss to be Commerce Secretary in 1959, a classic version of Washington payback. It was as nasty a process as Congress has produced, including recent nomination battles in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Strauss had it coming; he got it.

Overall, Strauss’s vision of the atomic future was ludicrously flawed. That’s no surprise. So it has been with most futuristic nuclear forecasts, particularly those coming from government.

The intriguing idea of small nukes that could heat homes and provide onsite electricity proved to be a pipedream. The military pursued this with its SL1 program at the Idaho testing site in the eastern desert of the Famous Potato state. The military’s notion was to develop a small reactor that could serve remote bases in places such as Alaska with their entire needs for heat, water, and electricity. On the civilian side, the concept was neighborhood nuclear plants.

The practical result was the worst personal disaster in U.S. nuclear history[9]. The test reactor in Idaho, for still-unknown reasons, lost control and killed three soldiers. One of them was impaled through the groin to the top of the reactor building by an errant control rod. The accident got little public attention at the time (largely because the government suppressed any press coverage). But it was a radioactive thorn in the side of the Atomic Energy Commission for more than a decade.

The pundits and politicians generally had more big-muscled roles in mind for nuclear power than how to heat Alaskan military outposts. They pursued the larger picture. Ships would ply the surface of the seas and underneath the waves, powered by heat released from splitting atoms. Nuclear explosives would move mountains, dig channels, carve out new harbors, and liberate vast untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Nuclear power plants would make steam, generating vast amounts of electricity, displacing coal, oil, natural gas, and water power as the engines of electric generation.

The results would be revolutionary. Nuclear power would be clean, cheap, convenient, and commonplace.

Radioactivity? Not a real problem, said the nuclear evangelists. Science could keep the radioactive emissions from nuclear energy at bay, they assured us. The friendly atom would transform American society entirely for the better.

None were more enthusiastic than the grey lady of American journalism, the New York Times. The newspaper’s editorial page, in characteristically stilted and stiffly-arrogant prose, was a consistent goad in the 1950s and 1960s in support of nuclear energy programs. The newspaper bought into the cult of the atom, and would remain a devotee throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Insular, isolated, phenomenally successful, the men (and they were almost entirely men) who unleashed nuclear energy truly thought of themselves as masters of the universe, unable to fail at anything atomic. They were well-meaning and patriotic. How wrong they were; how unwilling to acknowledge failure over the years.

Are we about to repeat some of those excesses of enthusiasm? For the past four or five years, the nuclear industry has been pushing for what it calls a “nuclear renaissance.” The peg on which they hang their hat is climate change. Clearly, no serious attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants can bypass nuclear power. Renewables, such as wind and solar, are important, but can’t begin to make the impact that new nuclear generating units would have on CO2 emission.

But nuclear hubris is again creeping up on the debate. The nuclear advocates are making claims they can’t back up, particularly about the expected performance of new, and promising, but untested, reactor designs. Hype often seems to be the order of the day.

If we don’t study the lessons of the radioactive past, there is every reason to believe we might stumble again. Some of the failed flights of fancy, such as the nuclear airplane and landscaping by bombs (although there have been some suggestions that China is interested in this), are unlikely. But we may be on the verge of recreating the messes of the past when it comes to waste management, fusion energy, space propulsion, and commercial reactor designs. The past should provide a humbling, cautionary tale, as we move into a new nuclear age. There is no reason to avoid a nuclear future, but plenty of reason to enter cautiously.

Overall, we should learn that putting the military and the bureaucrats into a secret alliance, with no oversight from outside and a congressional fan club inside, is a recipe for fantasy, failure, and folly. Guess what we had in Washington for the eight years of the George W. Bush administration? You’ve got it, the military and the bureaucracy operating in secrecy without effective public oversight.

Ironically, as one nuclear lobbyist told me not long ago, “We’ve had the most pro-nuclear administration in recent history. But for eight years, not a spade had turned on a new nuclear plant.” The Bush administration, when it came to civilian power, he said, was, as they say in Bush’s Texas, “all hat and not cattle.”

The early post-World War II days of the atomic enterprise produced some projects that seemed to have been drawn from fiction, or even hallucination. Indeed, life in the nuclear world of the U.S. government in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s often imitated art (however lowbrow).

In 1954, publishing house Grosset & Dunlap launched a second series of books aimed at boys intrigued with technology, following up on an earlier success. The target audience was the 10-14 age group. The books were the second generation of Tom Swift kids’ novels, named the Tom Swift Jr. line.

Both the first Tom Swift books, which began early in the 20^th Century and lasted until 1941, and the post-WWII generation of the 1950s through 1971, were aimed at similar post-war young readers hooked on science and technology.

The putative author of the of the post-World War II books was Victor Appleton II, a concocted moniker for a group of writers, working on a rigid formula that carried the series through a dozen books. Their inspiration was the phenomenal advancement of nuclear and military science that characterized the end of the war, as the public became intoxicated with the prospects of science and technology in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project.

When Tom Swift Jr. stepped onto the fictional stage, everything seemed possible in the world of technology.

The same was true of the original Tom Swift series, which ran from 1910 to 1941, under the paternally pseudonymous Victor Appleton, another collection of various authors writing to formula. The first Tom Swift invented the picture telephone, vertical takeoff aircraft, and a giant military tank. All of those were prescient, although not all of Tom Senior’s inventions eventually saw the light of day.

Tom Senior also gave us the delightful Tom Swifties puns, which remain a parlor game among aging pop literature raconteurs today. In the game, one is asked to come up with adverbial, adjectival, or other puns with Tom quotes, mimicking the original Tom form. For example:

* "Who would want to steal modern art?" asked Tom abstractedly.

* "Fire!" yelled Tom alarmingly.

* "It's a unit of electric current," said Tom amply.

* “Why invade Iraq,” Tom said ironically.

* "Another batch of shells for me!" Tom clamored.

* “George W. Bush?” asked a dumbfounded Tom.

The successor, Tom Swift Jr.’s escapades exemplified the technological optimism of the nuclear world after the end of World War II. Tom was the son of the original, fictional post WWI inventor, Tom Swift Sr.

An ebullient 18-year-old, Tom Jr. and his friends, relying on their own inventiveness, his dad’s advice, and the money from his father’s engineering enterprises, were able to come up with, and develop to fruition, a slew of new technologies, quickly, and without the use of government funds. In fact, they ran technological rings around the government.

These inventions inevitably saved the nation from the nefarious plots of foreign governments. Our adversaries in the books were always bogymen from eastern Europe or South America. They were dark-skinned, secretive, and motivated by hatred of the U.S. and a desire to supplant American power with their own.

All this, of course, played into the fears of the day. In the wake of the Second World War, Soviet power advanced to conquer central and eastern Europe. Communism captured China. “Who lost China,” became the refrain of right-wing Congressional Republicans, as if it were Harry Truman and the Democrats, and not the unwavering U.S. support for the corrupt government of Chang Kai Shek, the Republican favorite, which caused the western-supported government to collapse in the face of the Communist challenge.

But while the alleged traitors in our government, proclaimed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others, were said to be selling the nation down the drain, technology would save the day. No one was as good as the U.S. at turning basic science into useful weapons, goods, and services. The fact that the godless Commies had managed to develop their own nuclear weapons, which they thankfully never used, was solely a result of espionage and theft. That was the gospel of the friendly atom circa 1954.

Into the political context came the first of the second generation Tom Swift books, Tom Swift and His Flying Lab.[10] Tom was the young engineering genius (who never aged throughout the 17-year run of the series), lanky, sporting a blond crew-cut, almost always wearing a T-shirt with blue and white horizontal stripes, and blue jeans. True to formula, he had a sidekick, Bud Barclay, who was darker, shorter, and stockier than Tom. A good athlete, Bud was not nearly as intellectually gifted as Tom (who was?). He often came to Tom’s rescue when the hero was captured by the enemy. Also in tune with the formula, Tom had a comic hanger-on, Charles “Chow” Winkler, a former cowboy chuck-wagon cook who had become the Emeril Legasse of Swift Enterprises. He was prone to loud clothes and loopy outbursts such as “brand my fuselage” and “brand my space biscuits” that are as charming as the earlier Tom Swifties.

In the first book, Tom designed and built a gigantic, nuclear-powered flying laboratory that included a full-scale nuclear and chemical lab, sleeping quarters for a large crew, a gourmet galley, and the ability, using jet technology, for vertical takeoff and landing. The supersonic aircraft also was able to house and launch a small, jet-powered aircraft and a helicopter. It took Tom about three months from conception to flight to build the nuclear flying laboratory. Dubbed the “Sky Queen,” (no doubt a bounce off the popular “Sky King” radio show of the day), Tom’s nuclear craft could fly for months at a time at 1,000 miles per hour, at altitudes just short of outer space.

That’s just what the Army Air Corps had in mind in 1946, in the most ambitious and disastrous nuclear project in U.S. military history, the nuclear-powered bomber. Tom won the race. U.S. taxpayers lost.

[1] U.S. Atomic Energy Commission press release, September 16, 1954

[2] Hersey, Hiroshima, (ISBN 0-679-72103-7), originally appeared at an article in the New Yorker magazine in August 1946

[3] http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3359

[4] See Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller the Real Dr. Strangelove, Harvard University Press, 2004.

[5] See Mazuzam and Walker, Controlling the Atom, The beginnings of nuclear regulation 1946-1962, University of California Press, 1984.

[6] See Francis Duncan, Rickover, The Struggle for Excellence, Naval Institute Press, 2001. This is a splendid biography of Rickover by one of his closest associates. See also Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover Effect How One Man Made a Difference, Naval Institute Press, 1992.

[7] Mazuzan and Walker, p. 12.

[8] See Richard Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great the Life of Lewis L. Strauss, University Press of Virginia, 1984, a well-balanced biography of a great but difficult man.

[9] See Susan M. Stacy, Proving the Principle A History of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory 1949-1999, U.S. Department of Energy, 2000.

[10] Victor Appleton II, Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Grosset & Dunlap, 1954.

Introduction Part 2

2009-03-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

This book proposes to explore some of the more notable failures, follies, and fiascos of the U.S. nuclear energy age, from 1946 to today. It’s intentionally about the goofs, not the gains, which are considerable. The screw-ups are instructive, and should guide us as we move ahead in a nuclear energy revival.

With nuclear power once again a major topic of debate, this book contributes a dash of hot-sauce realism to pie-in-the-nuclear-sky prophecies from the industry and Washington of technological wizardry to come. The past wasn’t entirely a pleasant walk in the woods. My message: wait a minute and look at the experience of the radioactive past. We can learn from the past before we blunder into the future.

Following World War II and the phenomenal success of the Manhattan Project in developing nuclear (A-bombs) and thermonuclear (H-bombs) weapons, the U.S. was enthralled by hyper-optimistic notions about what the atom could do, beyond blowing up enemy cities and spreading radioactive fallout around the globe. There was, of course, an element of guilt in this enthusiasm, as President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” proposals demonstrated.

The popular press – and government circles – were filled with bizarre notions of the prospects of nuclear energy for enriching civilian life. Nuclear-powered airplanes, ships, and cars; home heating by atomic fission; locomotives driven by nukes. All seemed possible, even likely, in the years following the days that the bombs fell on Japan.

A major message of the Manhattan Project, drawn from its unique experience, was “think big.” In retrospect, that was probably bad guidance; big thinking over the next 60 years produced a lot of waste, bad technology, and spinning of technological wheels. Thinking small, and focused, might have produced better overall results, particularly when it came to technologies beyond conventional, civilian nuclear power plants. Smaller may have been better.

But that wasn’t the case. Big thinking and intellectual and political hyperbole dominated the years after the Manhattan Project. It was imagination let loose to conjure up miracles of atomic energy. The nuclear physicists were the masters of the universe, and they were not shy about proclaiming their mastery.

Few of the popular flights of nuclear fantasy, of course, came to pass. This book explores those failures, taking a hard, unvarnished look at atomic energy’s promises for the future.

Introduction -- part 1

2009-03-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

Lessons to Learn from Duds, Dead-ends, and Detours on the Road to Atomic Energy

After decades of hibernation, the worldwide nuclear power industry is waking up, flexing its long-dormant political and business muscles, and talking about a “nuclear renaissance.” No new nuclear power plant has fired up in the U.S. in over 30 years, and every plant ordered by U.S. electricity utilities since 1974 has been cancelled. Today, nuclear power accounts for 20 percent of total electricity generation in the U.S., holding steady for more than two decades.

In 2005, a Republican Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, aimed in part at revitalizing nuclear energy generation, offering heavy subsidies for new nuclear projects. These include tax credits based on electricity production, risk insurance, and loan guarantees to put the full faith and credit of the U.S. government behind a new generation of allegedly improved civilian nuclear power plants. President Bush signed the bill, the culmination of a process he began in 2001, when he empowered Vice President Dick Cheney to convene an energy policy task force.

From the day it arrived in Washington in January 2001, the Bush administration began pushing nuclear energy research and development initiatives. Bush’s policy supported new nuclear power plants to generate electricity, a rebirth of reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce additional uranium and plutonium for power plants, along with “fast” neutron breeder reactors to develop the new, but old, technology.

Call me skeptical. But the federal government has been there and done that before. And I’ve observed it over a 35-year period as a reporter, analyst, and historian of the U.S. atomic energy program. My experience, and that of others who have looked deeply into the U.S. atomic energy program over the years, is that government has consistently bitten off more radioactive work than it can chew, underestimated the problems, overestimated its abilities, and wasted mammoth amounts of taxpayer dollars.

Too Dumb to Meter

2009-03-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Over the past nearly 40 years of writing about nuclear energy and nuclear power, I've come across many humerous and instructive items on U.S. nuclear history -- cases of attempts to develop nuclear energy technology that was just hopeless on its face, or made no economic sense, or demonstrated boneheadedness in the pursuit of the power of the atom.

I'm capturing those historical experiences in a book I'm writing, titled Too Dumb to Meter. Normally, I would pursue publishing this book through the normal channels, and I've had considerable commercial interest in the book. But the economics of publishing are so fraught with risk in these days of economic meltdown -- and it's a risk business in the best of times -- that publishers aren't willing to take on book authors with no track record. While I've been in daily, weekly, and monthly energy journalism since the 1960s, I don't have book publishing track record.

So I'm looking to publish the book myself, starting with this blog, and later, I hope, with a publishing company.