Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk

Abstract

Thomas R. Wellock's Safe Enough is the sixth volume of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's history project published in the University of California Press's remarkable library of atomic/nuclear history. This book is a strong addition to that collection. The history of nuclear power goes back a scant seventy years. The first nuclear reactor that produced electricity in December 1951 was Argonne National Laboratory's Experimental Breeder Reactor that lighted one bulb. Two years later in his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed vigorous pursuit of the “peaceful atom,” including the development of atomic-generated electrical power. Wellock picks up the story in 1965 when the unproven American nuclear power industry seemed ready for takeoff. Like many new technologies, nuclear power confronted numerous economic, political, and social hurdles. The development of more powerful nuclear reactors seemed to march in concert with the testing of unimaginably destructive nuclear bombs. Consequently, the memory of the deadly mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima muffled the Atomic Energy Commission's (Aec) boast in 1954 that nuclear power reactors would soon be generating electricity that was “too cheap to meter.”