The Commercialization of Nuclear Energy from Nixon to Reagan 1969 - 1989

American Presidential Actions and Policies: The Commercialization of Nuclear Energy from Nixon to Reagan, 1969-1989

Introduction

Presidential actions and policies were mostly pronuclear during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations (1969-1989). I. C. Bupp reports that “If the 1960’s had been a decade of oil, the 1980’s would be a decade of nuclear power.” All four presidents intermittently advocated policies to lessen America’s dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf, but because of market competition with fossil fuels and strong opposition from antinuclear forces, the commercialization of nuclear energy ground to a standstill in the 1980s.¹

Oil crises were precipitated in the United States by the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974 and the Iranian revolution in 1978-1979. President Richard M. Nixon stated, “Nuclear energy, which lessens our dependence on foreign fuel, is an essential part of our program of achieving energy self-sufficiency.” President Jimmy Carter delivered his “Crisis of Confidence” speech on 15 July 1979 and declared “the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade.”²

S. David Freeman, White House insider to Nixon and Carter and author of the Ford Foundation study on energy choices, opines that atomic power holds “enormous promise for a high-energy civilization that can see the limits of its supplies of fossil fuels.” In the 1980s, nuclear-power development stalled because of environmental concerns, lengthy reactor licensing delays, and higher plant construction costs for nuclear vis-à-vis fossil fuels.³ Was nuclear energy the answer to America’s energy crises of the 1970s? Did these presidents take appropriate actions to support civilian nuclear energy? The following authors provide some answers to these questions.⁴

De Marchi and Cochrane

Craufurd D. Goodwin, the editor, and his associates released their book for publication in 1981. Each chapter is written by an economist with a long-standing interest in the history of economic policy. The authors present the institutional and market dynamics surrounding the nuclear industry. These essays repeatedly emphasize how external shocks directed bureaucratic efforts. When the external shock of the Arab oil embargo occurred, President Nixon in 1974 focused his attention on this problem and directed his efforts toward a short-term resolution of the embargo.

De Marchi’s and Cochrane’s discussion of decisions made by the commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) highlight the problems with the energy policy plans advanced by the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. The authors suggest that these annual plans were drafted primarily to appease American citizens.⁵

Nixon delivered an energy speech which De Marchi characterizes as the first broad energy message. Nixon stressed the work of Freeman calling for conservation and a general emphasis on clean energy. Accordingly, Nixon pushed in June 1971 for a civilian nuclear program to promote the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. The Clinch River Breeder Reactor (CRBR) “was being built on Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lines and TVA had an option to take over.” With breeder reactors, the fuel is reused so that plants do not pile up vast quantities of radioactive waste.

Ford announced a proposal in June 1975 “to allow the Energy Research and Development Agency to assist private firms to build and operate enrichment facilities.” When Carter began campaigning with an anti-nuclear trajectory, Ford slowed down his discussions about breeder reactors and uranium enrichment, and particularly about proceeding toward a reliance on plutonium.⁶

After the first energy crisis, Washington’s establishment became interested in building more nuclear-power plants. Cochrane states that the “major issue surrounding the generation of electricity in the 1970s concerned the issue of nuclear power.” Carter closely monitored the findings of the Kemeny Commission which he had formed to investigate the incident at Three Mile Island (TMI). For example, Carter refused to replace the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with an agency headed by one individual as the Commission had recommended.

Somewhat surprising to White House watchers, Carter declared that the country could not do without civilian nuclear energy. Carter believed the United States could “avoid the dangers and potential terrors of reliance on conventional nuclear sources” by tapping the country’s vast coal deposits; and this stance was also surprising in light of the president’s environmentalism.

The costs of the breeder reactor were staggering and not at all what had been budgeted. Therefore, Cochrane argues that the major effect of the Carter administration’s energy plan was to derail the continued investment in the breeder reactor. On a collateral issue, Carter did not want to “defer indefinitely the reprocessing and recycling of spent fuels produced in U.S. civilian nuclear power plants.”⁷

Stoler

Reporter Peter Stoler’s Decline and Fall discusses certain critical turning point events in the nuclear civilian legacy. Stoler opens his first chapter with a fictionalized obituary notice for the U.S. nuclear power industry. The author traces the presidential decisions of Nixon, Carter, and Reagan from a reporter’s perspective. For example, he reports on Nixon’s “Project Independence,” a project aimed at having nuclear energy provide one-half of America’s electricity by the year 2000. His treatment of Carter centers on the dramatic visit by President and Mrs. Carter to the control room at TMI on April 1, 1979, only the fourth day after the partial meltdown of the reactor. Stoler summarizes the Kemeny Commission’s recommendation to ban the construction of new plants until reforms identified in the commission’s report were enacted. With respect to the presidency of Reagan, Stoler zeros in on how the president condemned the morass of regulations hanging over the industry, emphasizing the directions given by Reagan to Energy Secretary James Edwards to speed up the licensing for new plants because licensing was taking twelve to fifteen years.

The Reagan administration’s pronuclear posture and Nixon’s rhetoric about “energy blackmail” could not override the TMI disaster, argues Stoler, and industry officials should have recognized the decline and fall sooner than they did. Stoler believes that eventually American consumers will demand more sources of electricity, and more nuclear energy will become necessary.⁸

Tomain

Joseph Tomain’s Nuclear Power Transformation sets out three models of transition for the nuclear industry. Tomain maintains that the traditional model(1946-1979) was typified by huge construction costs; he called the second model transitional (1979-present) because construction stalled and projects were canceled; and he thinks the industry is moving toward the third model which he labels the post-industrial, where transition will be from nonrenewable to renewable resources with some scaled down nuclear-plant construction. Tomain believes that the radical changes in nuclear politics and markets that he explains in his transitional analysis “produced a series of mismatches in nuclear policy-making.”

As an attorney, Tomain explores the relationship between law and policy. With recognition of the politics surrounding controversial issues like nuclear energy, Tomain concludes, “the inescapable consequences of the interaction of law and policy are that political values are implicated in the regulatory order.” Additionally, the author claims that American presidents have great power in the setting of the policy agenda on a critical subject. Tomain believes Nixon was the first American president to devote considerable attention to nuclear affairs. Tomain points out a political reality of Ford’s administration: this president’s ability to foster his pronuclear policies, for example, a ten-year program to build two hundred additional nuclear plants, was stymied by the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Carter repeatedly tried to kill off the CRBR demonstration project, but for the most part, signals from his administration were ambiguous.

By the time Reagan entered office in 1981, environmental issues had swelled from an initial focus on thermal pollution to concerns about land, air, and water; and “more groups were now involved in the fight against nuclear power.” Reagan was decidedly pronuclear, and his actions were “like a nuclear industry wish list.” Reagan promised to reduce regulations and devolve governmental functions to state and local governments. Nevertheless, Reagan promoted economic growth so federal regulation of nuclear energy continued unabated even when this presidential posture collided with his determination to roll back the scope of federal regulatory activity and allow free market forces to function. Therefore, Reagan “pursued his policy goals through executive orders, appointments, and budgetary policy rather than legislation.”⁹

Societal views weighed heavily on the decision-making processes about nuclear policy for the presidents as nuclear power grew rapidly in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Harry Henderson insists that two events threatened the growth of nuclear power by the mid-1970s: first, “the growing popular concern about the environment,” and second, “the partial meltdown at TMI.”¹⁰

Jasper and Joppke

James Jasper’s Nuclear Politics and Christian Joppke’s Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy are books written by sociologists in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Jasper provides a study of the public policy of the four presidents, and also discusses the different policy perspectives of France and Sweden as compared to those of the United States. Jasper’s theme contends that with “controversial issues like nuclear energy, the presidents were anxious to claim they had little choice of policy.” Jasper goes beyond formal political and economic structures to show how other factors such as social psychology and culture shape policy on a technological issue like nuclear energy. For example, Jasper characterizes the environmentalist as an environmental moralist concerned with the potential of nuclear power to harm the environment. For Jasper the culture of environmentalism represents part of the moralistic approach that provides a cultural dimension to presidential policy goals.

At times presidents have trouble dealing with Congress. “Like the Nixon administration before it and the Carter administration after it, the Ford administration was strapped with an uncooperative Congress that did little to provide a comprehensive energy strategy,” notes historian Martin V. Melosi. One reliable tactic for presidents to counterbalance an intransigent Congress involves going public with their policies. Nixon spoke to Americans about his Project Independence within weeks of the Arab oil embargo. Ford, by way of comparison, recognized that “nuclear energy represented partisan cleavage over government intervention,” so Ford refused to intervene with assistance to the industry even though most Republicans favored such help. Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech and later his energy plan of 1977-1978 “said little about nuclear energy.” Carter did not want to intervene to support nuclear energy. At this critical time, Carter left nuclear energy basically to its own devices. The industry stagnated when support from Washington dissipated. Utility companies were unwilling to construct new plants without presidential leadership for their projects. Reagan attempted to revive the nuclear industry. His rhetoric and NRC appointments were strongly pronuclear, but these actions could not save nuclear energy. Reagan was the most pronuclear of all, but by 1981 the regulatory regimes had tightened their controls over nuclear power to such a great extent that the economic viability of uranium (yellowcake) was lacking. Fossil fuels also became cheaper by the early 1980s.¹¹

Joppke offers a comparative study, this time between the United States and Germany. Joppke studies the environmental activism in both countries during the 1970s and 1980s. His work claims that environmentalism frustrated the pronuclear stances of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. The author describes how nuclear opposition played a major role and affected presidential policies because the environmental lobby created an atmosphere which the presidents could not ignore. Joppke contends that environmental concerns were shared across party lines, and this sharing of ideology reinstated consensus in American politics after the divisions created by civil rights and Vietnam.

During the Republican administrations, Joppke points out that Nixon did characterize the breeder reactor as our best chance for clean energy in the 1970s, but the president also declared in his State of the Union address in 1970 that Americans needed to “make peace with nature” and this was “the next great question of the 1970s.” Under Ford the bulk of nonmilitary research and development funds went to nuclear power, because Ford wanted nuclear energy to provide 50% of the nation’s energy demand by the year 2000.

The author describes how Carter made confusing decisions when viewed from the vantage point of an environmentalist. Joppke delineates some of these actions as the following: (a) in his campaign Carter said he would rely on nuclear energy “only as a last resort”; (b) nuclear power was to be kept to a minimum, to be improved by stronger safety standards and more transparent regulatory processes; (c) the president opposed the fast-breeder reactor and called on all nations of the world to adopt a voluntary moratorium on the purchase or sale of enrichment or reprocessing plants; (d) his energy plan also called for speedy expansion of nuclear and coal plants so long as alternative sources could not come online in a timely manner; and (e)in 1978, under the new Department of Energy (DOE), the president directed 55% of the research and development funds into nuclear programs. In his second energy plan Carter made a formal commitment to nuclear energy. After the incident at TMI, Carter stubbornly refused, according to Joppke, to consider a nuclear moratorium. Most antinuclear groups supported Carter during his campaign and early presidency, Joppke concludes, but the environmentalists became divided over their evaluation of the Carter administration’s policies with regard to nuclear energy.

Joppke outlines the extremely pronuclear actions of Reagan. However, by the early 1980s, the author shared the prevailing view that nuclear power was completely stalled in the United States. Joppke believes Reagan’s zeal for confronting the Russians sealed the fate of nuclear power by shifting the nation’s direction on atomic power from energy production to weapons.¹²

Cohn

Steven Mark Cohn’s Too Cheap to Meter traces the hypothesis that nuclear energy was going to be America’s cheap energy source only to evolve into its most expensive. Cohn explains how global warming may lead to a rebirth of nuclear power generation. As a political economist, Cohn was interested in the influence of social context on technical decisions about nuclear power. His book was written for two audiences: those interested in the history of nuclear power, and those interested in social theory. Cohn displays a healthy skepticism about nuclear power so his book will appeal to the anti-nuclear groups. In his densely written book, Cohn provides a good analysis of path dependency within the nuclear power issues. Cohn’s notes are categorized comprehensively as reference citations, concrete issues related to nuclear power, or social theory issues. Readers can immediately ascertain those notes that are of most interest to them.

Cohn mentions certain policies of Ford, Carter, and Reagan. The policies the author focuses on are usually economic in tenor. In Cohn’s discussion of Ford, for example, the author discusses Ford’s veto of the Price-Anderson extension. Reprocessing plant bailout schemes, continued funding for CRBR, and government subsidies to private enrichment projects involved high-dollar commitments from the Ford Administration. When Carter arrived in the White House, the nuclear industry, encouraged by both Nixon and Ford, was path dependent on the continued funding of expensive nuclear endeavors by the federal government. The federal government continued to control commercialization of nuclear energy. However, with the environmental legislation under Nixon, especially the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) in 1970, industry stalwarts were aware of a changing atmosphere for nuclear power. And the massive economic commitments were still prevalent as were the lengthy processes for licensing and constructing a nuclear power plant near populated areas. Cohn argues, “While these firms had a strong interest in a successful nuclear industry, they were unwilling to bleed their companies indefinitely in defense of an ill nuclear industry.”¹³

How and to what degree do socio-political ideologies influence technology? Cohn believes Reagan was naive with his “leave it to the market” mantra. These market-oriented economic policies, Cohn insists, would not provide the kind of research and development (R&D) and subsidy aid necessary to get nuclear power back on the path as an official technology for the future energy needs of the United States. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires utility companies to provide comprehensive environmental impact statements. Nuclear energy was no longer viewed as a benign alternative to fossil funds. Earth Day in 1970 symbolically spoke to this transitional change in public opinion. “Between 1972 and 1983, 102 nuclear plants were canceled with only 88 in operation,” according to Melosi. By 1983, American drivers had largely forgotten the long queues at gasoline stations, and the price of a gallon of gasoline had declined.¹⁴

Walker

A review of nuclear power would be incomplete without the works of J. Samuel Walker. Walker works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as its historian. In his latest book, Three Mile Island, Walker states that Nixon, Ford, and Carter all expressed the need to reorganize the federal energy agencies. There was considerable political capital involved because energy was the political hot button of the era. “The surge in reactor orders and the growth in the size of individual reactors also spurred new concerns about the environmental impact of nuclear power and intensified public uneasiness about the safety of the technology,” reports Walker. In the words of Walker, “Largely in response to the growth of the nuclear industry, protests against nuclear power gathered new strength and gained unprecedented national attention in 1969 and 1970.” The author asserts that Nixon was the first president to request legislation to disassociate the AEC’s regulatory functions. “Carter’s military experience with nuclear reactors did not steer him to a clear position on nuclear power as president,” claims Walker. Nevertheless, one of the book’s most interesting parts details Carter’s trip to TMI. Carter’s ambivalence toward nuclear power did not inhibit him from going quickly to the plant, because the president’s concerns for the local citizens outweighed any political repercussions from such a visit. The president recognized the risks of injury and death entailed in an evacuation of the 600,000 people who lived within 20 miles of TMI.¹⁵

Walker has been a keen observer of the nuclear industry for a long time. His books are neutral in tone and context. Walker supplies information so industry participants may employ “knowledge management” in their decisions. Walker declares that the NRC wants to be a tough but fair regulator. The NRC came into being in order to separate promotion from regulation. Although de facto pronuclear, Walker believes, the NRC does take into consideration the views of the antinuclear groups. “One reason the industry did not live up to its promise of the successful commercialization of nuclear energy is that the promise was outlandish,” insists Walker.¹⁶

Patterns, Trends and Conclusion

Global climate change and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change have spurred new thinking about nuclear energy by both environmentalists and the nuclear industry. The interdisciplinary MIT study concludes, “But we believe that the nuclear option should be retained, precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power.”¹⁷

From these diverse works, certain patterns and trends emerge. The most salient ones are as follows:

• Each president advocated nuclear power, and Reagan was the most forceful and Carter, ambiguous. Carter did say civilian nuclear power was needed.

• All of them realized that the civilian nuclear industry was path dependent on federal funding.

• Environmental movement frustrated nuclear policy goals of all four presidents.

• Nixon, Ford, and Carter faced uncooperative Congresses. Reagan used executive orders. Ford and Carter recognized the partisan cleavage so they did not want to intervene.

• Nixon, Ford, and Carter made nuclear power a part of their comprehensive national energy plans. And all three presidents wanted to reorganize the federal energy bureaucracy.

• Nixon, Ford, and Carter were able to sustain nuclear programs in the 1970s despite environmentalism, but Reagan could not after TMI and Russian invasion in 1979.

• During campaign of 1976, Carter was antinuclear and Ford toned down the issue.

• Nixon and Ford favored breeder reactor program, Carter derailed it, and Reagan tried to resuscitate it. All four presidents committed research and development funds to nuclear power.

• Nixon made first broad energy message called “Project Independence,” stressed “energy blackmail,” conservation and clean energy, and for nuclear to provide one-half of energy needs. Ford said he wanted 200 new plants in ten years to provide one-half of energy requirements, and Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech said little about nuclear energy.

• Reagan condemned morass of regulations and hurt the civilian program with his zeal for confronting the Russians.

During the energy crises of the 1970s, Nixon, Ford, and Carter were still able to foster the commercialization of nuclear energy despite the fact that their national energy plans, containing nuclear parts, were delayed and amended by the United States Congress. With the passage of the environmental laws in the 1970s, environmentalists secured standing under NEPA and other laws to sue in federal courts. The environmental movement of the 1970s had called attention to risks from radiation exposure, breeder reactors and disposal of nuclear waste. After Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, new fears about the proliferation of nuclear weapons resurfaced. Public opinion favored new plant construction until the early 1980s when oil prices declined, supplies increased, and paranoia had spread from the TMI incident. Melosi observes, “Protests against nuclear power plants were replaced by the ‘nuclear freeze.’”¹⁸

Although the presidents recognized the need for energy nondependence to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), market forces and the environmental movement worked against the further development of nuclear power. During Reagan’s presidency of the 1980s, when free market forces did not advance civilian nuclear power, the federal government stayed involved in order to promote economic growth. The administration’s pronuclear goals were thwarted by unsympathetic court decisions and environmentalism. The winds of political change blew back toward reliance on fossil fuels to meet America’s rapidly expanding energy needs.

Another energy crisis could be triggered by a sudden drop in overall energy supplies, especially if accompanied by dramatic increases in the price of gasoline and other fuels. I suggest that social, economic, political, and environmental groups and their lobbies will need to compromise if nuclear proponents expect to see Congress advance nuclear power as at least a partial solution to the problem of U.S. dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf. In the words of physicist Paul B. Weisz, “Energy availability determines, drives, limits, and shapes the working capability of all processes of society.”¹⁹

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