Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [114]
General Electric and Westinghouse, who had helped build America’s military and civilian nuclear program, were getting antsy that their knowledge would go to waste. “Our people understood this was a game of massive stakes, and that if we didn’t force the utility to put those stations on line, we’d end up with nothing,” as John Gitterick, a GE vice president, later told Fortune.21
Out of this corporate desire to capture rents on a technology that only a few companies could provide came the “economic breakthrough.” As soon as the words left Johnson’s mouth, scientists at national laboratories around the country knew what he was talking about, even though he was a few months late with the announcement.
When a Chicago Tribune reporter called Stephen Lawrowski, associate director of Argonne National Laboratory, the scientist told him that the president must have been talking about the guaranteed price that General Electric had offered Jersey Central Light and Power for the Oyster Creek plant. That announcement had “caused a flurry” in scientific circles because the price GE was charging for the plant—$68 million for the 515-megawatt plant—made the plant economically competitive with fossil fuels.22 Yet the scientists knew from the available evidence that nuclear power was far from economically competitive in mid-1964.23
However, instead of setting the Tribune reporter straight, Lawrowski simply punted, saying “The New Jersey plant is a significant milestone in nuclear power progress because it has affected thinking not only in America but also in Europe.”24
The price was a door-buster, a loss-leader, an advertisement for a nuclear age that had not actually yet arrived. The so-called “turnkey” plants, as they later became known, probably cost Westinghouse and General Electric over $1 billion, though they did not say that at the time.25
Coal officials told the Wall Street Journal that GE had “priced the Oyster Creek plant at less than cost.” A GE executive denied that, claiming the company would “make a slight profit unless we run into some unforeseen difficulties.”26 British and Russian engineers also called the estimates into question—and French officials unsuccessfully tried to get details out of GE. But American news accounts, though they reported those foreign doubts, always made sure to note the bias that national competition could introduce into other countries’ expert opinion.27
None questioned the U.S. expert corps’ own Cold War sympathies. Yet in retrospect, no less a nuclear proponent than Alvin Weinberg saw that the scientists and engineers had taken leave of their senses. Against a backdrop in which Lyndon Johnson’s most effective campaign ad against Barry Goldwater featured a child picking flower petals until there’s a harsh cut to a mushroom cloud, the nuclear community was caught between visions of apocalypse and utopia. As Weinberg recalled in his sharp memoir:
I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the G.E. economic breakthrough had on us. We had created this new source of energy, this horrible weapon: we had hoped that it would become a boon, not a burden. But economical power—something that would vindicate our hopes—this had seemed unlikely.... Because we all wanted to believe that our bomb-tainted technology really provided humankind with practical, cheap, and inexhaustible energy we were more than willing to take the G.E. price list at face value.28
Newspaper reporters, with the help of sources within the nuclear industries, came up with stories to explain how prices could have fallen so far, so fast. But like a trend piece about raising chickens in Manhattan, they were little more than anecdotes strung together by plausibility and the public’s desire to believe.29 Although they reported doubts about the breakthrough, they were often run deep inside the paper whereas the optimistic pieces led the sections of the paper. Even the most skeptical piece, a September