Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [113]
These solar scientists recognized that although huge nuclear power plant designers and rooftop solar installers might have vastly different ideals and business models, they did have a common enemy: coal. Plenty of nuclear advocates pondered the same question that Weinberg asked, and many saw their power as “clean” in comparison with coal long before carbon dioxide was a primary concern. Coal, after all, has been shown to be far more destructive to the environment than nuclear power, even before climate change became a primary environmental issue.15
What’s important here, though, is not the relationship between solar and nuclear power, which is a story that has been told many times over. The success of nuclear power is at least as interesting as its comparative problems or links with military operations. After all, this technology that was not economically competitive with coal became a major contributor to the American energy system in only twenty years. But nuclear power didn’t succeed only because of its usefulness to the military’s bomb-making complex, nor did it succeed because, as Johnson’s speech suggests, nuclear power got cheap quickly. The strategies its promoters employed and the structural factors underlying its emergence provide a fascinating model for green-tech advocates.
What we’ll focus on here is how nuclear power transformed from a sluggish technology looking for a market into a huge industry from 1965 to 1975. Just like solar and wind advocates now, nukes, as they called themselves, battled coal interests. However, the difference for nuclear power pushers is that they won, thereby garnering tremendous governmental and industrial support.
Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1965, Joseph Moody, president of the National Coal Policy Conference, told the assembled Congressmen that his testimony was “one of the most ineffective things I do.” They laughed in his face.16
This, despite the fact that economic historian Steven Mark Cohn concluded in his study of the rise of nuclear power that there was no monetary basis for the size and scope of the American government’s support. “The bottom line is that there was no compelling economic case for large public or private investments in commercial nuclear power plants in the 1950s and 1960s,” Cohn wrote.17 In 1959, for example, a private Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) briefing for President Dwight Eisenhower concluded, “For our own economy, with but few exceptions, we do not need atomic energy in the foreseeable future.”18
IF YOU BUY IT, IT’S CHEAP
The New York Times ran a story about Johnson’s speech on page one under the headline, “Johnson Reports a ‘Breakthrough’ in Atomic Power.” They followed up with a series of stories, as did the other major newspapers.19 Word of a breakthrough in the cost of nuclear power was big news because everyone had been waiting for economically feasible nuclear power for a decade. After the heavy promotion of the early nuclear power days—exemplified by Walt Disney’s classic nuclear cartoon, Our Friend the Atom—nuclear power had stalled out with just a few demonstration plants in operation. The coal lobby, however, smelled blood. In March of 1964 the coal industry assailed