Grossman is associate professor of economics at Butler University. Contact him by e-mail at pgrossma@butler.edu
It is particularly ironic that the Bush administration wants to revive nuclear power in the United States. It was precisely due to government promotion that the nuclear industry failed so badly in the first place and is in need of resuscitation.
Given the government's track record, the odds are that any nuclear program would fail. But then it is highly unlikely that new nuclear plants will actually be built. For most Americans, nuclear power evokes the Chernobyl wasteland and the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. Few want to live near a nuke or trust the technology. And for that, both state and federal government officials deserve most of the blame.
It's unfortunate that nuclear power remains a dead end. It could be a useful part of our energy mix. Nuclear-fueled power plants produce no air pollutants or greenhouse gases. New small, modular designs, especially of the so-called "pebble-bed" reactors, seem to be relatively inexpensive compared to older nuclear technologies, and they are apparently immune to a meltdown or other types of catastrophic failure.
While there is a legitimate concern over the nature and cost of nuclear waste disposal, on balance nukes have many benefits, and it would be worthwhile to consider them.
But it probably won't happen. Nuclear power was ruined by the government's active involvement in its commercialization. In fact, the story of nuclear development shows how interference in energy markets leads to the opposite of what policy makers intend.
The U.S. government created nuclear power, both the bomb and the power reactor, for military purposes. However, officials did not want us to associate nuclear power solely with war, and from the early 1950s, they promoted the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Indeed, the Atomic Energy Commission said that nukes would eventually be our primary source of electricity. The energy would be plentiful and inexpensive, so inexpensive in fact that it would be, in a memorable phrase, "too cheap to meter."
Congress passed legislation that limited the liability of electric companies that adopted nuclear power, and state regulatory commissions put nuclear power projects on a fast track.
The results were about as bad as they could have been. The first problem was that most electric companies didn't understand the technology.
They saw it as an exotic way to boil water: Nuclear power generation is simply the use of the heat from nuclear fuel to provide steam to turn a generator. Utilities had dealt with steam generation since the birth of the electric industry, and so they thought they had nothing much to learn.
They custom-designed each plant with no uniformity of standards in the technology to simplify the learning process. Then they built nuclear plants on the same gigantic scale as standard coal-fired steam generators, figuring that if bigger was better for coal it would also be better for nukes.
These were not just peculiar, but otherwise regular, boilers. The requirements of the technology were fundamentally different, and problems worsened with plant size. They were also very expensive to build, but because there were no design standards, the cost was unpredictable. Some were built at an acceptable cost, but others were monsters that bankrupted utilities, led to bond defaults and sent local electric rates through the roof.
Meanwhile, the government kept changing environmental rules since it hadn't figured out what the problems might be before licensing the plants. This only added to the cost and confusion surrounding nuclear power construction. When some well-publicized disasters struck, nuclear power was doomed.
Rushed to market by government programs and promotion before it was ready, the technology was largely abandoned 20 years ago.
What would have happened if the government hadn't pushed nuclear power so hard? Commercialization probably would have waited until the technology was competitive in terms of cost and safety. Like now. And without the history of financial and technical disasters, the American people might well have been ready to accept it.
In any event, the Bush administration is hoping for a nuclear revival. I wish it luck, but the groundswell of popular demand for nuclear power plants is nowhere to be seen. Government involvement put a damper on any nuclear enthusiasm the first time around.
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