Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [117]
Learning to run the plants well also took a long time. The capacity factors of those huge nuclear plants—how often the plants were actually generating electricity—were shockingly low. They hovered in the 58 percent range, which means that if we visited a plant on ten random days, it would not have been running for four of them. Since then the capacity has improved and is now over 90 percent, which is a testament to how good technology can become over time.
But that came too late. The energy futurology that served the industry so well began to break down. Energy demand growth did not just continue accelerating as they had anticipated. All the projections from 1960 through 1980 fell short by an average of 40 percent. We didn’t need as much energy as we had anticipated. As a result, the vision of the nation’s future that sold nuclear power never panned out.43
Higher-than-expected costs, worse-than-expected operation, the meltdown at Three Mile Island, and the Chernobyl disaster all obviously hurt the industry with the public. A less well-known event might have occurred on October 5, 1983, when Cincinnati G&E announced that its Zimmer nuclear station would need 2.8 to 3.5 billion more dollars and two to three years of further construction time. Previously, the utility had claimed the reactor was 97 percent complete. “That news was the first of many disastrous nuclear crises that followed,” wrote Leonard Hyman, an investment banker who worked with the utility industry. “Utilities tottered on the brink of bankruptcy, scrambling for funds to complete troubled projects, or to salvage what they could from huge investments in projects that had to be cancelled despite the billions that had been sunk in them.”44
Investors got the message: Nuclear power was not a good investment, so they scurried away. The First Nuclear Era, as Weinberg called it, was over. No new reactors would be built in the United States for more than twenty-five years.
LEARNABLE LESSONS
Green-tech advocates can and should learn from both the rise and the fall of the nuclear industry. It’s the last time a major new energy source came online, and its successes and mistakes were epic. Several lessons emerge from this history.
First, the short-run economics of a technology are not always what drives governments to support them or businesses to invest in them. We bank on technological learning and skill, and we often have goals beyond the immediate economics of a technology that could be attained by a different energy source. For example, the foreign policy objectives of the United States helped nuclear power gain prominence and support, despite its expense. Beyond the military R&D that went into reactors, being able to offer a world torn between capitalism and communism a way to abundance was important. Nuclear power became a major part of selling the American dream.
In green technology, advocates argue that incentives make sense because when technologies get deployed faster than the market might otherwise pull them in, the cost to produce them falls faster, too. Let the industry fatten on government dollars and the technology will get better. Renewable energy will play an important part in American foreign policy, too, as the world’s governments have broadly agreed on the need to limit carbon emissions going forward.45
Third, the quantitative and qualitative projections about what the world’s future energy system will look like were and will be the key to decision making. These projections are presented with the air of facts. If you can get your facts installed early, it’s mighty difficult to beat back those