Nuclear Power production in the United States.

 

Experience with nuclear power offers a prime example of an ambitious “big push” experiment which Governments have carried out in order to accelerate development, deployment and diffusion of a new energy technology. As noted earlier, more than half of all cumulative energy-related public RD&D support in IEA countries since 1974 has been for nuclear power technologies. Exuberant expectations by early promoters of nuclear power from the 1950s are reflected in the statement by Lewis Strauss in 1954 that nuclear power would become “too cheap to meter”. In the beginning of the 1970s, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had expected global installed nuclear power to reach at least 2.5 terawatts (TW) by 2000, as compared with what was in fact the actual total of 351 gigawatts (GW). The first nuclear power plant started operating in the United Kingdom in 1956. In the United States, as many as 65 plants were ordered between 1965 and 1969, and by the end of 1970, the country had 107 units on line, under construction or purchased. Rapid scaling up of unit size to beyond 1 GW brought costs down to less than those of coal power plants in the early 1970s. Thereafter, increasingly large cost and construction time overruns made nuclear power increasingly uncompetitive. Between 1978 and very recently, no new plant was ordered in the United States. Reasons included low oil prices (for much of the 1980s and 1990s) and increasing costs associated with safety regulation. The “Atoms for Peace” programme launched by the United States in 1953 was a typical Government big-push technology undertaking which shortened the formative phase during which, typically, different designs are tested. In the end, the design of the pressurized water reactor used in nuclear submarines became the sole dominant operational commercial reactor design. Yet, it was compactness and little need for refuelling that had been the main performance criteria of reactors in submarines. Safety was not a key performance criterion, which has had far-reaching consequences. When accidents in commercial nuclear power plants made it increasingly clear that safety had to be increased, it was achieved with retrofitting and increased regulation. By the year 1978, an average of 1.3 new regulations were being added every day in the United States. The result was the introduction of additional risks related to an increasingly complex technology system and cost overruns due to retrofitting. In short, the well-intended Government push for rapid commercialization of nuclear power without a link to appropriate performance criteria led to lock-in of inferior designs. Alternative designs, such as passive safety systems and high-temperature reactors, came too late.