The Birth of America’s Nuclear Power Industry

So first of all, I mean, you know, the latter point, we should probably build standardized, you know, Generation 3 or Generation 3 plus reactors anyway.

But I think the more interesting question is what you started with, which was, were these early plants? So plants like, you know, I've heard, for example, Brett Kugelmas talk about Point Beach 1 and 2 as this idea of why we should just be building plants These two-loop pressurized water reactors, which were built for very, very cheap, or plants like Oyster Creek or Dresden or Monticello, they were all historically thought of as extremely cheap nuclear power plants.

And they were extremely cheap nuclear power plants to the utility, but they weren't actually cheap to build necessarily, or at least they weren't as cheap as the price implies.

Right.

And that's because, you know, part of the issue that was occurring is as, you know, the Atomic Energy Commission had really in the 1950s built out the Power Reactor Demonstration Program, the PRDP, which is really designed to jumpstart the U.S. nuclear industry.

And it actually didn't really work.

Right.

One of the more interesting things.

parts of the PRDP is that although we built, you know, three waves of power plants in that PRDP program, right, totaling some, you know, more than a dozen different reactors of not just light water reactors at all, right? We had Fermi-1 as a sodium-fast reactor.

We had Peach Bottom as a helium-cooled high-temperature gas reactor.

We even had a pressurized heavy water reactor, an American can-do, like the Carolina-Virginia's tube reactors.

We had Pequot, which was an organic-moderated reactor out in Ohio.

We had Hallam, which is a sodium-cooled graphite-moderated reactor, all built, all commissioned with a lot of AEC development.

We didn't really see... actually a huge amount of the US utility industry starting to build nuclear power even after the PRDP was over in 1963.

Is

that because oil is cheap, coal is cheap, or the technology just hasn't been panning out?

Well, I mean, I think it's a combination of the fact that fossil fuels are relatively cheap.

But I think the real challenge was that the utility industry was not particularly convinced that they could build a nuclear power plant at parity with a coal power plant.

primarily coal at that time.

And, you know, that's the sort of irony of people like Devaney who are saying that, in fact, you know, we were building plants at parity with coal and the opposite is actually true, right? The nuclear power industry, which was very embryonic, very nascent at this time, really was not yet able to demonstrate that it could be competitive with coal power plants.

And that was primarily because when the power plant company, when the utilities were building power plants as they built power plants in those days, which was primarily the utility being the developer.

What that means is that the utility itself would maybe hire a utility consultant, right? But they were generally constructing these power plants and designing these power plants.

And that was their preferred method of doing that throughout the 60s and 70s.

And when they were trying to internally price these plants, they did not find that the nuclear plants were particularly cost competitive and the commercial offerings than what they could get with a fossil fuel power plant in that time period, which is really the late 50s and early 60s.

So just to clarify, we're talking right now about the power reactor demonstration program, utility led AC is saying here, we're going to give you some fuel.