The Nuclear Future That Never Arrived

Understanding how the great hopes of early nuclear power advocates eventually turned into great disappointment may shed some light on nuclear power’s future.

In 1962 a report requested by President John F. Kennedy on the state of civilian nuclear power in the United States declared that by the year 2000 half of all electricity in the country would be generated by nuclear power stations. It also predicted that all new power station construction after that date would be nuclear.

Today, however, nuclear power generates a little under 20 percent of the country’s electricity, a figure that has varied only slightly all the way back to at least 1995. No plants are currently under construction in the United States though some new plants are expected to be built in energy-hungry Asia. So, what happened on the way to the 21st century?


When President Dwight D. Eisenhower made his now famous “Atoms for Peace” speech to the U. N. General Assembly in 1953, it seemed that with the right support and controls, nuclear power could become a revolutionizing agent in the development of the world, especially that part without electricity at the time. And, there was hope that breeder reactors, that is, reactors that can manufacture more fuel than they consume, would provide energy to all of humankind for centuries to come.

With the weight of the federal government behind it, nuclear power eventually found a ready audience in the form of America’s utilities. The utilities may have surmised that if they did not participate in the building of nuclear power plants, the government would proceed on its own by forming public power entities that would compete with the utility industry. With the passage of the Price-Anderson Act which limited liability for nuclear plant operators, the stage was set for rapid expansion of the nuclear power industry in the United States.

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