Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [116]
Dozens of technical reports by energy analysts affirmed that the country’s energy demand was growing at prodigious rates, and they projected that growth to continue far into the future. This was not disingenuous. People who studied energy in the middle of the century had grown up in a century of nearly straight-line increases in energy consumption. The problem was, however, that they just compounded the growth of energy demand year after year after year. If we project anything in that manner, the numbers get really big, really fast. The top-down analysis was convincing even though it ended up very, very wrong.36 They ultimately whiffed by wide margins on what the future energy system would look like, but not before fears that only nuclear could maintain our society created a clear path for lawmakers.
Despite the occasional call for the free market to work, the opposite happened. For example, nuclear power plant operators are indemnified by the U.S. government for catastrophic disasters (the Price-Anderson Act), thereby lowering their insurance rates. They were given preferential access to markets for borrowing money. There was plenty of informal and regulatory help to go with the R&D and commercialization boosts.37 In effect, the government socially engineered the cost structure of the industry so nuclear could compete with coal, which got to dump all its extra costs, such as air and water pollution, into the environment.
But even then, convincing utilities that they needed to go nuclear wasn’t easy until General Electric hit on the genius idea of guaranteeing a fixed price to risk-averse utilities, effectively subsidizing the cost of the construction. And Oyster Creek was born. If they could just build a ton of plants, they could learn and scale and standardize: Costs would drop. Westinghouse matched GE’s pricing, and what came to be known as the “turnkey” plants were built. In the bandwagon market that followed until 1973, utilities ordered more than two hundred nuclear reactors. Nuclear power had arrived.38
But the turnkey plant prices did not reflect the actual costs of building a nuclear power plant. As the years wore on, that nuclear power was not as cheap as coal and other fossil fuels became increasingly clear: The prestige of the nuclear authorities began to fall; nuclear whistleblowers came forward; environmental risks were reassessed, perhaps too stringently; the protest movements of the 1960s turned their attention to nuclear power and all the centralization of power it represented. 39 It turned out that Americans were ready to extend democracy to technocratic decision making, and they did not like what they saw from the nuclear industry.
The nuclear industry operated as a closed network of thinkers and analysts, disregarding outside critiques of their methodologies and not taking the serious issues of nuclear power seriously enough. “One result of the regulators’ professional identification with the owners and operators of the plants in the battles over nuclear energy was a tendency to try to control information to disadvantage the anti-nuclear side,” a former AEC commissioner admitted in the early 1990s.40 The very agency charged with regulating the industry—the Atomic Energy Commission—was also charged with promoting it, and that’s just the most obvious conflict of interest. Nearly everyone involved in assuring the public of the economics, safety, and environmental wisdom of atomic power was also involved in promoting atomic power. Not all of them had economic interests at stake, but few were disinterested observers.
The coalition of scientists, reactor builders, and utilities neglected the social aspects of their technology. A more subtle type of blindness to the effects of actual success afflicted the nuclear crew as well: Success surprised them.41 Though