The two blows that killed the industry

Once-promising sector never lived up to its promise

No industry in history has held more promise, been more welcomed, received more favours and failed more spectacularly than the commercial nuclear power industry.

When U. S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a civilian nuclear program in the early 1950s, it was to universal acclaim. Not only would nuclear reactors be safe and provide electricity that was too cheap to meter, it would help redeem a technology that had unleashed horrors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Governments wholeheartedly backed nuclear power, as did the corporate world and the general public.

When anti-nuclear protesters in the 1950s and 1960s marched in favour of nuclear disarmament, they often coupled their desire to “Ban the Bomb” by advocacy for commercial nuclear power, in the hope of turning swords into ploughshares.

When the modern environmental movement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmental groups, too, supported commercial nuclear power, Energy Probe among them. They saw nuclear power as a hopeful alternative to coal, the dominant polluting fuel.

There was no shortage of goodwill for commercial reactors; the failure of this technology to succeed was internal to itself.

Eisenhower was first to face facts on nuclear power’s limitations when, to usher in this new industry, he created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

To Eisenhower’s surprise and that of the AEC, a study that it commissioned determined that a credible industrial accident at a modest-sized reactor near a modest-sized city could kill 3,400 people, injure 43,000 and cause $7-billion in property damage.

Although the risk of such an accident was low, the potential damage rendered nuclear plants uninsurable. Governments needed to step in to exempt electric utilities and manufacturers such as General Electric from liability — otherwise, these companies told governments, they could not risk being wiped out in the event of a serious accident.

But even after governments provided exemptions from liability, nuclear reactors were proving to be uncompetitive.

Financial Post