Synthetic Fuel Technology Development in the United States: A Retrospective Assessment by Michael Crow, et al

Abstract

350 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE bureaucracy. Consequently, politics often caused the corporation to accept tasks beyond its own priorities. Bothwell candidly discusses, for instance, AECL’s poor decision to agree to place a heavy-water plant on Cape Breton Island owing to the “regional” politics of the federal administration. Bothwell also points out that, as a national entity, AECL’s nuclear power activities rarely touched geographical areas of Canada outside the important St. Lawrence River—Windsor corridor where industrial growth demanded electricity. So to appeal to a broad constituency, AECL leaders argued that as a high-technology and skilled industry the company was a Canadian asset that contributed to the nation’s prestige and nationalism. Partially because of its image-seeking role, AECL became a supplier of reactors to the nonnuclear nations of the world. In taking this course, the Crown corporation had to compete with the other nuclear nations as well as with international private enterprise. Bothwell is fair-minded in relating this aspect of AECL history. Noteworthy is his analysis of negotiations concerning safeguards for construction of a research reactor for India. That nation’s duplicity in this episode enabled it to explode a nuclear device in 1974 and gave a black eye to Canada. Bothwell often and quite rightly captures the personalities that played leading roles in AECL. His emphasis on this aspect adds a human quality to his story. It reminds us that people (in this case men; there are no women in Bothwell’s chronicle) are the key elements in any corporate history. AECL was no exception. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of such topics as reactor safety, waste disposal, and decommissioning activities. These are quibbles, however, about a generally thorough book that is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature not only on nuclear energy but also on the role government has played in its development. George T. Mazuzan Dr. \l··,·. .···.'·, is ihe historian at the National Science Foundation. He is the coauthor (with ). Samuel Walker) of Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962 (Berkeley. 1984). Synthetic Fuel Technology Development in the United States: A Retrospective Assessment. By Michael Crow, Barry Bozeman, Walter Meyer, and Ralph Shangraw, Jr. New York: Praeger, 1988. Pp. xii-l-175; figures, tables, notes, appendixes, index. $39.95. What happened to the development of synthetic fuel in the United States? And why? According to the authors oi Synthetic Fuel Technology, retrospective technology assessment (RTA) may provide answers to these important questions. RTA is a broad historical method that includes technological, public policy, and economic issues, and for this TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 351 reason the authors have applied it to their study of synthetic liquid fuel obtained from the direct liquefaction of coal (DCL). The history of synthetic fuel began in 1913 when Friedrich Bergius invented DCL. In the 1920s and 1930s, I. G. Farben improved the process and, by the end of World War II, twelve large plants were providing the German military with much of its liquid fuel. The U.S. Bureau of Mines had conducted small-scale research on DCL during this same period, but it was not until after the war and a perceived petroleum shortage that the bureau began a demonstration program at Louisiana, Missouri. The bureau succeeded technologically in liquefying American coals, and though the economics of DCL were in dispute, the discovery of oil in the Mideast in the early 1950s rendered the bureau’s 1949-53 program unnecessary. The events of the 1950s set the pattern for later U.S. research on DCL. It would be conceived in times of crisis and aborted once the crisis had passed. This happened in the 1960s when the United States first became a net petroleum importer and again in the 1970s with the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian hostage seizure. The stop-and-start pattern is the single reason, the authors say, why DCL never achieved scientific and technological maturity. Any new technology needs twenty to twenty-five years of continuous nurturing and growth, and DCL has not had them. To this day, neither government nor private industry has constructed a commercial-size DCL...