Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [115]
The country’s political leaders were more than willing to believe and promote these technical promises. It was a wonderfully convenient solution to an America battling Communist agitation across the world. After all, could the Russians offer cheap nuclear power that turned the atom into electricity and oceans into fresh water?
The foreign policy positives of civilian nuclear power had been deeply embedded in American rhetoric since the dawn of the Cold War. When Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech in 1954 to the UN General Assembly, he spent the majority of his talk on the subject of destruction before he turned to the title of the talk and the potential of creation. Eisenhower stated,
The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here—now—today. Who can doubt, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, that this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage.32
This was pure faith in technological promise, but hey, it was the half-century of the automobile, airplane, telephone, nuclear bomb, and widespread electricity. Plus, the Soviets were hot and heavy to develop nuclear reactors themselves. Eisenhower thought history was on his side and that the future demanded his particular idea of progress.
ESTABLISHING FUTURE FACTS
That’s because nuclear proponents convinced politicians that their set of future facts about energy in America were correct. They said energy usage would soar and they had nice graphs to back it up. Their vision was expansive, expensive, and rather brilliant. Technical reports came out purporting to show energy “needs” for Americans in the future that were spectacularly high. From the early 1950s until the energy crises of the 1970s, politicians accepted as gospel truth nuclear proponents’I overblown visions of America’s energy needs emanating from the nation’s national laboratories and the AEC. Legislators continually delivered high-levels of steady funding to nuclear research.
Of course, the political relationship ran both ways. The AEC knew what the government needed and the government knew what the AEC needed. In both cases, the answer was: Don’t stop believing!
In 1960 the AEC, which had as its mandate to promote the commercialization of nuclear power, projected that Americans would use 170 quadrillion BTUs in 2000.33 In reality, that year Americans used about 99 million quads of energy. And we still do. Imagine adding 70 percent more power plants, cars, and buildings to our current energy infrastructure. It’s nearly unthinkable. After reviewing energy demand growth forecasts made by the AEC later in the decade, Glenn Seaborg, the commission’s head, made the consequences of such inexorable growth clear. “Nuclear power has arrived on the scene, historically speaking, in the nick of time,” he argued, because of the “projected demand for power based on population growth and increasing per capita consumption of electricity.”34
Nuclear power was the only solution to “the energy problem” as it was conceived. “I do not think, therefore, that anyone can seriously believe we could rely on coal as our major source of power as we enter the twenty-first century or that we should not develop with all due urgency the best systems for producing nuclear power,” Seaborg