Introduction -- part 1

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.