Entering the Atomic Power Race: Science, Industry, and Government

Abstract

On 6 September 1954, a grinning President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood in Denver, Colorado and waved a neutron wand, setting in motion an unmanned steam shovel over 2,000 miles away in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Thus, in a celebration appropriate to the age of high technology, the ground was broken for the nation's first commercial nuclear power plant. In the words of Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Shippingport reactor was a pioneer venture, more significant for America's industrial progress than the first railroad to the West.' This inauguration of the nuclear power industry puzzled a reporter for the New York Times. The reactor was being built in a part of Pennsylvania rich in coal, he pointed out, and moreover, Duquesne Light, the utility that would own and operate the plant, actually owned coal mines itself. The reporter deemed these facts significant but did not explore the implications. Today, in light of the questions that have been raised about the safety and economic soundness of nuclear power, the paradox pointed out by the Times is worth studying. Why did a nuclear power industry arise in the 1950s, a time when by all accounts conventional fuels were cheap and in virtually limitless supply in the United States? Little has been written about the origins of the nuclear power industry. The recent literature that does examine the early years (the 1940s and 1950s) points