times was captured in 1954 when the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, made what would turn into the famous prophecy that nuclear power would, within 15 years, deliver “electrical energy too cheap to meter.” 14
The first U.S. nuclear plant was built at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It went into operation in 1957, just three years after the launch of the Nautilus. The British actually beat it by a year, with the first commercial production of nuclear power in the world at Calder Hall in Britain, which Queen Elizabeth dedicated in 1956. But Calder Hall was a small power plant (built with a design now considered obsolete).
Shippingport, by contrast, ranks as “the world’s first full-scale atomic power station.” The design and construction of the power plant was directed by none other than Admiral Hyman Rickover, who retained operational oversight for the next twenty-five years. Though the reactor had been scaled up from the one designated for an atomic-powered aircraft carrier, it had also been fundamentally rethought and redesigned to produce electric power. It performed far above its rated design and operated virtually fault free. This was credit to Rickover, with his determined exactitude, and to the team he assembled. 15
The real commercial turning point for nuclear power came in 1963, when a New Jersey utility ordered a commercial plant to be built at Oyster Creek. That reactor was also based upon the design developed under Rickover.
THE GREAT NUCLEAR BANDWAGON
Over the next few years, about 50 nuclear power plants were ordered, as utilities clambered all over each other to jump onto what was becoming known as the “great bandwagon market.” It was Thomas Edison versus George Westinghouse all over again, with General Electric and Westinghouse battling for market share with their respective versions of light-water reactors. Westinghouse championed the PWR, the pressurized-water reactor; and GE, the BWR, the boiling water reactor. Atomic energy, some projected, could provide almost half of total U.S. electricity by the first decade of the twenty-first century. One leading scientist declared, “Nuclear reactors now appear to be the cheapest of all sources of energy” with the promise of “the permanent and ubiquitous availability of cheap power.” 16
But nuclear power, it turned out, was not cheap at all. Costs went up—way up. The reasons were many and interconnected. There was not enough standardization in plants and designs. Many utilities did not have the heft and experience to take on projects that were much bigger than they had anticipated and more complex and difficult to manage. The vendors were promising more than they could deliver in a time frame that they could not meet. And there was insufficient operating experience.
At the same time, the question of “how safe is safe enough?” emerged as a burning issue. What were the risks of an accident and radiation exposure? At both the federal and state levels, licensing and permitting took much longer than expected. Growing environmental and specifically antinuclear movements prompted constant regulatory delays, reviews, and changes. Concrete walls that had already been laid in had to be rebuilt and thickened; piping had to be taken out and reworked. Plants had to be redesigned and then redesigned again and again during construction, meaning that costs went up and then went up again, far exceeding the original budgets.
The plants also became more expensive because of the general inflationary pressures of the era, and then high interest rates. Instead of six years, plants were taking ten years to build, further driving up financing costs. Plants that were supposed to cost $200 million ended up costing $2 billion. Some cost much more. “The evolution in the costs,” said an economist from the Atomic Energy Commission, with some understatement, could be “classified as a traumatic, rather than a successful, experience.”17
“THE BUDDHA IS SMILING”: PROLIFERATION
Another concern was emerging as well—about the risks of nuclear proliferation and the diversion of nuclear materials and know-how. Members of what was becoming known as the arms-control community, focusing on proliferation, added their voices to those of the antinuclear activists.
For a number of years, there was confidence that the nuclear weapons “club” was stable and highly exclusive, limited to just five members—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction—known as MAD—offered the stability of deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union. But then, in May of 1974, the Indian foreign minister received a cryptic phone message: “The Buddha is smiling.” He knew what that code meant; India had just exploded a “peaceful