The Paradox of LWR Development

Abstract

The history of the LWR in Phase II was tinged with paradox. Experience proved, to the satisfaction of most utilities, that LWRs were, as had been promised, competitive and would produce electricity at lower costs than fossil-fuelled plants. They were ordered in great numbers both in the United States and in all other major industrial countries except Britain and Canada. But the cost of constructing the plants, the time taken in building and licensing them and the expected cost of the power they would produce rose to levels remarkably above those confidently forecast in 1963–66, and by 1975 utility purchasing was sharply reduced. The plants continued to have an extremely good safety record, but they were attacked passionately as dangerous sources of radioactivity and of potentially catastrophic disaster. They were widely welcomed as coming ‘in the nick of time’ to provide the only large new indigenous source of energy which could lessen the increasing dependence of the United States (and most other Western industrial countries) on imported energy from the Middle East in the next ten to fifteen years. But their construction and operation was resisted by environmentalist groups in the United States who wished to have a total ban imposed on their use.