Fukushima is the BEST Possible Advertisement for Nuclear Power and its Safety.

About a decade ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists broadcasted an urgent request to U.S. citizens.

They were to write their governors and congress people to demand one thing: improved nuclear safety.

Sounds like a noble pursuit, in theory.

Except that in all of U.S. history…

In fact, nuclear is the safest industry in the entire United States. Working in a nuclear plant is safer than working in a library.

That’s not particularly easy to improve on.

Yet there remains a widespread misconception that nuclear plants are ticking time bombs, just waiting to level an entire city.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Large-scale nuclear accidents generally involve a nuclear meltdown, which safety is simply due to damage to a nuclear reactor core from overheating.

Two really improbable things have to happen for a meltdown to occur:

• A loss of coolant or coolant pressure to the core, allowing it to heat up.
• A complete failure of both Emergency Core Cooling Systems (ECCS).

In the nearly 20,000 years of combined nuclear operations, there have only been three core meltdowns.

When a meltdown occurs, the danger is not from the core itself. No, it’s not going to melt all the way through to China.

The real danger is from radioactive particles escaping from the reactor.

Fortunately, the release of radioactive matter is generally reduced by the nuclear infrastructure that remains after the meltdown. Except, of course, if the infrastructure that should be there – isn’t.

That’s exactly what happened at the most famous (and worst) nuclear meltdown in history: Chernobyl.

A Rocket without a Windshield

In early 1986, inexperienced personnel attempted an experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.

The plant itself was a particularly cheap, shoddy design.

All other reactor types have a crucial containment dome. It’s a massive, thick steel-and-concrete “lid” that keeps radioactive material inside the nuclear plant if anything goes wrong.

Not having one is like building a rocket that doesn’t have seatbelts, or a windshield.

The perfect combination of untrained personnel, shoddy design, and deliberate violation of safety rules meant that the nuclear experiment went very, very wrong.

The meltdown it triggered caused a chain of explosions—then a massive fire. The fire spewed at least five percent of the reactor core into the surrounding countryside.

It was the largest uncontrolled civilian release of radioactive material in history.

Unlike the nuclear plant, the Soviet Union kept a tight lid on what was happening.

It wasn’t until nuclear workers all the way in Sweden identified high levels of radiation that the Soviet Union was forced to admit the accident had happened.

By then, ten days had passed.

• By every measure, it was the worst possible handling of a nuclear accident.

While what happened was horrible, the official number of deaths directly attributed to the accident is about thirty.

But what about radiation exposure for people near the plant?

More than 200,000 “liquidators,” Soviet citizens, helped with recovery and cleanup of the accident site.

Those who were exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation—the average for a Chernobyl liquidator—saw their mortality risk increase by 0.4 percent.

If you live with someone who smokes cigarettes, you increase your mortality risk by 1.7 percent.

Even today, the people living around Chernobyl get about as much radiation exposure as people in Colorado, where there’s low-level radiation from granite.

“Where Probability Says We Shouldn’t Be”

A quarter-century after Chernobyl, an 8.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, shifting the entire country a dozen feet east.

Many Japanese nuclear plants had only been built to handle an earthquake with only one-fifth of that magnitude.

Yet none of the eleven reactors in the region suffered any damage.

And in Fukushima, Japan, everything functioned perfectly as planned. Systems detected the earthquake and shut down the reactors. When the power went out, diesel generators kicked in to keep the cores cool.

Soon after the earthquake, a forty-two-foot wave slammed into the coast of Japan. It swept over the sea wall in front of Daiichi, killing the emergency generators… and the backup generators.

A second tsunami hit eight minutes later.

Fortunately, the battery-powered backup of backup generators at Fukushima kicked in, and the cores remained cool—all according to plan.

Eventually, they also failed, resulting in the first and only triple nuclear meltdown in history: All three cores rapidly overheated.

Due to the containment domes, fallout from the accident remained limited.

• There were no reported deaths or cases of radiation sickness in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima.

And of the more than 200 workers who continued to mitigate damages on the site, not a single one died from radiation.

Overall, the loss of life expectancy in the town most affected by Fukushima… was less than that experienced by a London resident from air pollution.

To Sum It All Up…

A crumbling, outdated nuclear plant with poor safety features was hit by the fourth-largest recorded earthquake, then a forty-foot wall of water.

• The electricity supply
• The cooling system stopped functioning.
• The reactors melted down and exploded.

And it killed fewer people than operations at an average coal plant does every single year—when everything goes according to plan.

Fukushima is the best possible advertisement for nuclear power.

Scrams Go Away

The only civilian nuclear meltdown on U.S. soil was at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in early 1979. The ECCS was turned off, which led to a partial melting of the core—almost no radioactive material escaped.

While the accident destroyed a billion-dollar reactor, it did not harm people nearby, either during the incident or in the aftermath.

• Total number of deaths from Three Mile Island: zero.

More than a dozen studies conducted since the accident have shown that the amount of radiation released was too small to even measure the health effects.

But just to be safe, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) quickly established the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). Its job was to help provide training for nuclear plant operators.

The efforts of the INPO have steadily made nuclear energy safer and more reliable for the past forty years.

One of the best measures of nuclear safety is called a “scram.” A scram is an automated shutdown that occurs if necessary to prevent damage to the core.

Control rods are inserted into the core, causing all nuclear reactions to stop.

A scram takes a total of about three seconds.

In 1985, there were 530 scrams in U.S. nuclear reactors.

By 2021, there were only 37—a 93 percent decrease.

Nuclear By Any Other Name

But that’s not important. Because the question is not whether nuclear reactors have a perfect safety record.

Like every source of energy, nuclear is dangerous, and it can cause injury or death.

But are other sources of energy safer?

When Japan halted nuclear production after Fukushima, guess what replaced it.

Not renewables.

Mostly coal and gas.

In two years, Japan started eight new coal-fired power plants, with plans for the biggest coal-power expansion in any developed nation.

Nobel Prize physicist Burton Richter estimated t he years of life lost due to energy sources in Japan.

For nuclear—including the losses attributed to the Fukushima accident—it’s 30 years per TWh.

For coal? 142.

About 20,000 premature deaths are expected over the seventy years following Chernobyl. Compare that to the estimated number of deaths each year from fossil fuel pollution, as identified by Harvard researchers: 8 million.

• Burning fossil fuels creates another Chernobyl—every single day ad. space

The fact is that even first-generation nuclear reactors are an order of magnitude safer than every other fuel source.

Americans will write their congress people, certainly.

But they’ll be begging for nuclear.

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You see, it doesn’t matter how expensive nuclear is; it matters how cheap other energy is. When the oil crisis of the early 1970s hit, 82% of electricity was generated using either fossil fuels such as coal.Overnight, the price of both oil and coal increased by 100 percent.

Utilities eagerly placed orders for turnkey nuclear plants.

It seemed to be the answer to all their problems.

And it was, for a while.

When fossil fuel prices were sky-high, nations were rationing oil, and coal was outrageously expensive, the nuclear power buildouts paid off handsomely.

Only the utilities didn’t count on the oil crisis causing electricity demand growth to slow sharply. At the same time they had to increase prices, no one wanted their product.

That’s the same time as when nuclear construction prices started to spiral out of control due to new regulations and ways looking for clean energy. Utilities found themselves stuck between a rock and a very hard place:

• Go bankrupt due to high fuel prices, or
• Go bankrupt due to high nuclear construction costs.

Then the prices of oil and coal started to fall, and fall some more—from 1980 all the way through 1985.

Utilities quickly switched to building fossil fuel plants again.

Not a single new reactor began construction in the United States from 1980–2010.

Instead, coal and natural gas dominated—and CO2 emissions were off the charts and the option for a clean energy like nuclear melts into thin air.

The world built a decades-long addiction to cheap, dirty energy that became nearly impossible to break.

Freaking Fracking

In the mid-2000s, natural gas prices were rising. Popular opinion held that the U.S. was going to severely limit CO2 emissions.

And all those nuclear plants built in the ‘70s suddenly looked appetizing again.

Their operating costs averaged only $0.02/kWh.

An efficient combined-cycle plant was running four to five times as much… just for the fuel.

In that market, nuclear was king.

• Every GW of capacity—about the size of a single reactor—was spinning out up to half a billion every year.

That lasted for four glorious years, from 2004–2008.

Utilities took note.

From 2007–2009, thirteen companies applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for construction and operating licenses to build twenty-six new nuclear reactors.

For context, that’s 25 percent of the U.S. current nuclear reactor base in just two years.

Then it was de ja vu all over again. The Global Financial Crisis reduced the demand for natural gas, causing prices to plummet.

Then in the early 2010s, a new technology called “fracking” made natural gas much cheaper than nuclear. This forced plants offline.

By 2013, most of the new nuclear applications had been abandoned. Natural gas electricity was about 4 cents per kwh, versus 10 cents for nuclear.

In the northeastern United States, electricity prices fell more than 50 percent from 2008–2016.

A study by MIT in 2015 showed that the current price trajectory of electricity made about two-thirds of nuclear power in the U.S. uneconomical—forcing about 20 percent into early retirement.

In 2019, Exelon announced that it would close one of its nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania unless it received subsidies. Why?

Because cheap natural gas sliced regional electricity prices in half. That meant Pennsylvania’s nine nuclear reactors (which power 33 percent of the state) were quickly becoming unprofitable.

Natural Gas Is Out; Nuclear Is In

The subsidy request is not far-fetched.

Wind and solar already received massive federal subsidies, which is part of what makes them competitive with nuclear.

Nuclear is the only form of energy that is not being valued by the market for its low emissions and extreme reliability. Fortunately—despite the best attempts of oil and gas companies at stopping them—politicians in several states are rewriting the rules.

• “Zero-emission credits” are being created so the market accounts for the value of carbon-free, clean energy like nuclear.

And the federal government created a $6 billion Civil Nuclear Credit Program last year to help preserve the existing nuclear infrastructure in the U.S.

In the end, the subsidies might not even be necessary.

In the last three years, natural gas has spiked 400%—most of that before 2022. It’s at its highest level in thirteen years.

It was at $8 when all those applications were filed, then dropped as low as $2 in 2019.

Now natural gas is back at $8.

Meanwhile, coal has risen from $50 a ton to $400 a ton in just two years.

Energy prices in the EU are already far beyond extremely expensive nuclear plants.

In fact, natural gas increases have pushed prices in the UK to $225 per MWh for the first time in fifteen years. And that’s in the summer, when energy demand is about 50 percent lower than the winter.

That’s about double the price the UK government guaranteed to pay a French company building a reactor in England.

• In other words, they’d get an immediate discount on energy just by building more nuclear reactors.

So that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

In 2000, nuclear power supplied about 10% of the U.K.’s electricity. It was 20% in 2020 and they’re going to take it to 25%.

They’ve set up a new organization called Great British Nuclear. Its purpose is to ensure every new nuclear plant is built faster than the last.

In the future, it won’t matter how cheap other energy is.

Nuclear will be even cheaper than any clean energy.

And best of all, it will be carbon-free.

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• Over the course of building twenty-eight reactors from 1971–2008, the average cost decreased by 50 percent.

In fact, that decline is similar to Germany’s experience with solar panel pricing over the same period.

France experienced a similar performance, with nuclear construction costs dropping from 1960–1970.

After that, costs remained relatively level as they built out a nuclear fleet that powers more than 70 percent of the country.

So the United States—the nuclear power pioneer—should be building nuclear plants cheaper than anyone else, right? Also wrong.

In fact, a few years ago, two reactors in South Carolina were cancelled after their estimated price tag skyrocketed from $9.8 billion to $25 billion.

This year, two reactors under construction in Georgia saw their expected costs pushed once again—this time, to $30.3 billion.

The massive amounts of carbon-free electricity generated by nuclear power is coveted by utilities, just not with massive price tags attached. They believe that nuclear energy and net zero are so compatible. And they seemed to be right.

But here’s the thing: even the starting price tags on those U.S. nuclear reactors have risen by hundreds of percent over the past few decades.

Now, nuclear is not expensive on its own. And most of the plants that are in operation now were relatively cheap when they were built. In fact, in the early days of nuclear, prices were on a steady downward trend similar to that of wind and solar.

As each successive nuclear reactor was built, the price naturally dropped.

That’s due to a natural phenomenon known as the “learning rate.”

First-Mover Disadvantage

A learning rate is the rate at which a technology decreases in cost as it increases in use.

For example, a learning rate of 10% means that every time installed capacity doubles, the price drops by 10%.

Until 1970, the learning rate for nuclear in the United States was a fantastic 23 percent. In other countries, it was high as 35%.

• If those learning rates had continued through 2015, nuclear reactors would be less than one-tenth of their current cost.

And if the accelerated deployment of nuclear through the mid-‘70s had continued…

• Nuclear would have replaced the U.S.’s entire coal and gas-powered electricity by 2015 and help the country’s race to net zero.

It also would have avoided more than 150 GT of CO2 emissions, as well as about ten million deaths from that pollution.

Only it didn’t. Because sometime around 1970, the learning rate broke. And the price started to rise for every additional reactor built.

Suddenly, learning rates around the world became negative—the United States dropped to – 94%.

Part of the problem was that too many nuclear plants were being built at once.

Demand for nuclear plants skyrocketed in the late ‘60s, causing supply chain issues for both skilled craftsmen and huge, complex nuclear reactor components.

Prices on even simple parts and labor skyrocketed.

More importantly, if a part or worker was unavailable when they were needed, construction was delayed. And since utilities were financing the debt, every additional day meant additional millions of dollars in interest.

But that’s only part of the picture.

A New Expensive Point of View

In the early days of nuclear, every project was “First of a Kind”—or FOAK.

No manufacturer or developer had experience building new nuclear reactors.

• In fact, the first nuclear reactors in Israel and Pakistan were built by a manufacturer of bowling equipment.

So with dozens of plants being brought online all at once, it was a time of learning the wrong way to do things. Then implementing insanely expensive fixes to plants still under construction.

For example, tectonic plates weren’t even discovered until 1967. Suddenly, dozens of plants under construction had to be retroactively earthquake-proofed.

Reactors being built in the 1970s in the U.S. were in an environment of constant change that made controlling or even knowing costs impossible.

Each new snag or accident at an operating reactor introduced a new regulation or standard.

• Between 1970 and 1978, the number of engineering standards nuclear plants had to abide by soared from 400 to more than 1,800.
• During the same time period, regulatory guides and positions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased from 4 to… 304.

Every time a new guide or standard was released, every reactor under construction had to be brought up to code.

And every minor change risked a “ripple effect” that could force an overhaul of entire related systems.

For example, the David-Besse reactor was budgeted for $136 million when construction started in 1967; when it was finished a decade later, the price tag was $650 million.

A study found that modifications (and their chain effects) forced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were responsible for more than $400 million of that cost.

While the learning curve may have broken, this was the system working.

As operating experience built up, reactors became insanely safe—in fact, the safest form of energy on the planet.

The Nuclear Bomb for Nuclear Power

Then the real bomb dropped.

A partial meltdown of a reactor at the Three-Mile Island (TMI) plant in 1979 threw the entire nuclear industry and its net zero potential into disarray.

Overnight, the construction costs and timelines of nuclear plants spiraled out of control.

For the fifty-one reactors under construction when TMI occurred, regulatory delays and retrofit requirements were everywhere.

Median costs soared nearly 300 percent—more than $7,000/kW for some reactors.

Applications for new nuclear reactors evaporated instantly.

And more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled—more than the entire current U.S. nuclear fleet.

With no new reactors being built, the learning rate was completely dead.

And the price of nuclear construction had no way of going down.

From the mid-‘80s until now, every nuclear project has been another ultra-high-cost FOAK.

But here’s the good news: The United States is beginning to return to its pre-disruption deployment and learning rates.

• And the learning curve is quickly restarting in the United States.

As new constructions rise, the cost is already dropping and is set to drop more than 30 percent from 2015–2030.

If the U.S. invests about $1 trillion into nuclear energy by 2050, it could supply more than 3,500TWh of energy per year.

• Nuclear would provide 85 percent of current energy consumption—all carbon-free—for less than half of the CARES Act stimulus.

And the cost of nuclear per MWh would drop by about 60 percent, which would have been great for the clean energy and net zero transition.

Studies have found that there is nothing inherently expensive about nuclear.

And as the learning curve comes alive again, nuclear is set to get much, much cheaper.

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Most of the Sierra Club board voted for the nuclear plant. After all, nuclear was (and still is) the safest, cleanest, most reliable energy on the planet. Environmentalists and lobbyists at the time gave full-throated endorsements of the new technology:

But Martin was hell-bent on making sure that plant wasn’t built…

You see, he believed that California didn’t need any new power plants—period.

“You don’t need power… you can go back to using a spear and picking berries.” – Martin Litton

In fact, California didn’t need any more people.

You see, for Martin and two other directors of the Sierra Club, nuclear plants presented a problem:

They brought humans with them.

And Martin wanted a drastic reduction in population to keep California wild. “There are too many people anyway,” he said.

Along with two other directors of the Sierra Club, he fought for years—tooth and nail—against the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

They quickly decided playing fair was optional. They’d lie, cheat, and steal to keep nuclear from blowing up.

But their radical anti-growth, anti-human message was never going to work on Californians.

So these environmentalists and other anti-nuclear activists changed their tactics.

Instead of persuading the public, they would prey on their ignorance—and scare the fire out of them.

The Day Nuclear Died

Their first objective became to get people to confuse nuclear energy with nuclear bombs.

Since atomic energy had first been used to level cities at the end of World War II, it was child’s play. Millions became convinced that a nuclear meltdown was the same as a nuclear bomb.

Then, they fed generations of people the lie that radioactivity from nuclear energy could kill them.

The logic was sound: When people thought nuclear was a threat to their lives, they’d regulate it out of existence.

“Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation… and add to the cost of the industry.”

– Sierra Club Executive Director Michael McCloskey, 1974

The campaign was wildly effective. Due to new regulations, parts of plants that had already been built had to be ripped out and rebuilt—leading to absurd cost increases.

The DC Circuit Court handed the environmentalists a gift on a silver platter. They opened the door for citizen lawsuits to intervene in the licensing and construction process.

That slowed construction even further, causing costs to skyrocket and nuclear plans to be abandoned.

For any nuclear plant started in the U.S. in the early ‘70s, the price of construction skyrocketed.

Two nuclear reactors, Vogtle 1 and 2, were proposed in 1971 for $660 million. They opened in 1987 and 1989 for a total cost of nearly $9 billion.

In 1974, activists were successful in getting the Atomic Energy Commission abolished.

It was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which became responsible for licensing new nuclear reactors.

• Since the NRC was formed, the number of new nuclear plants that have broken ground in the United States is zero.

Two years later, the California Energy Commission decided it only approve nuclear plants if the developers could give precise fuel and waste disposal costs for the lifetime of the plant—a deliberately impossible task.

As goes California, so goes the nation. And more than 30 states followed suit.

In 1978, Kern County voters rejected a nuclear power plant for the first time in U.S. history—with 70 percent voting against. It would have been the highest-capacity nuclear plant in the world.

• Radical regulations, rising costs and a scared public caused more than 60 nuclear units to be canceled between 1975 and 1980.

Thanks to the help of Martin Litton and the Sierra Club, nuclear was dead on arrival.

When the Rubber Meets the Rolling Blackouts

Two plants, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, barely made it out alive.

For decades, they provided more than 20 percent of California’s energy consumption.

It was exactly that massive amount of clean energy from nuclear that became its undoing.

You see, figuring out how to shut down nuclear would create a profitable billion-dollar business for solar, wind, and natural gas companies overnight.

When renewable lobbyists caught wind of the opportunity, they went into hyperdrive. No need to play clean for this round, either.

And they very nearly succeeded in killing off nuclear for good.

They started with San Onofre, which was forced to close in 2012.

Its main energy replacement? Carbon-heavy natural gas.

• Shutting down San Onofre was the equivalent of putting two million cars on the road.

Those two million cars lined end to end would make a convoy from Los Angeles to NYC (and back again).

Then the lobbyists moved on to Diablo Canyon, forcing PG&E to agree to shut it down by 2025.

They claimed it would be cheaper to shut it down and replace it with other sources of energy than to continue operations.

Here’s the kicker.

That claim is based on a single study, funded by Friends of the Earth—whose founder was the executive director of the Sierra Club.

And it flat out lies about everything . . .  from fuel costs to capital costs to the cost of energy.

In fact, a report from MIT and Stanford says that keeping Diablo Canyon running until 2035 would reduce California’s carbon emissions by 11 percent.

It would also save the state $2.6 billion—or $21 billion if it stays open until 2045.

(Or they could decommission the plant, which would cost nearly $4 billion.)

Fortunately, the side playing dirty is going to lose this time.

Because hundreds of thousands of Californians are already experiencing rolling blackouts—during triple-digit heat waves.

“We are in a very bad situation compared to even the worst case that we anticipated.”
– California Energy Commission vice chair Siva Gunda

One politician put it simply: If the plant gets decommissioned, “we don’t have enough juice to keep the lights on and keep air conditioners working and keep people’s EVs charged.”

Shutting down the cleanest, most readily available form of energy is political suicide.

The last time widespread outages occurred, the governor was kicked out of office.

And everyone knows it.

So at 1 a.m. on the last day of session, the state legislature voted to keep Diablo Canyon open.

For a half-century, Diablo Canyon has predicted the fate of nuclear.

And now, it’s a signal of a broad revival of nuclear power across the country.

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• Those 1,000 plants would have provided 200% of the U.S.’s power needs… in 2022.

No coal, no wind, no solar, no natural gas, no hydro. No carbon emissions. Just 100-percent-clean, made-in-America nuclear power.

Like others of his time, President Nixon saw the incredible promise held in the atom.

Nuclear power plants use tiny amounts of uranium, an abundant natural resource, as fuel. That means they only have to be refueled every 1.5 years.

And because uranium is extremely energy-dense, the mining impacts are minimal compared to coal, oil… even wind power.

Nuclear produces zero pollution from operations. It doesn’t care if it’s windy or sunny or rainy. It just goes—operating more than 90 percent of the time.

Best of all, nuclear provides massive amounts of baseload power—about 1GW per reactor. That makes a single two-reactor plant capable of powering more than one million homes.

It should be powering much more of the planet. But it isn’t.

In fact, nuclear power has been stagnant for the past thirty years… and declining for the past decade.

In the United States, zero nuclear power plants ordered since 1972 have been completed. And nuclear provides only 20 percent of electricity in the United States.

As nuclear power plants reach the end of their forty-year lifespans, one by one, the lights are going out all around the world.

Which begs two questions:

• If nuclear power is so star-spangled awesome, then how exactly did it end up on life support? And when—if ever—is that going to change?

The Nuclear Boom That Went Out with a Bang

Twenty-five years before Nixon famous speech, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had funded four different types of “atomic piles,” as experimental nuclear reactors were then called.

Their purpose was not to generate massive amounts of power. The AEC was just throwing atoms at the wall to see what would stick.

Because of World War II, AEC worked mostly in secret—few in the outside world had even heard of nuclear power.

That changed suddenly in 1953. President Eisenhower decided the world needed to know the vast energy potential held by the atom.

It was time for the U.S. to reorient its research efforts from using atomic energy for destructive purposes and toward generating electricity.

So Eisenhower went before the United Nations in New York City and delivered a powerful speech titled “Atoms for Peace.”

When he finished, the entire chamber leapt to its feet, giving Eisenhower a 10-minute standing ovation.

• In just a few moments, the President had set in motion decades of civil nuclear energy development in the U.S.

It was an Atomic Race of sorts, with the U.S. vying with other countries to create a civilian nuclear power sector as quickly as possible.

The following year, the AEC announced a government-sponsored five-year plan to explore various types of commercial nuclear reactors to find the best one. Every configuration of coolant and fuel and system had to be tried in order to identify a safe, economical nuclear system.

Early projects were extremely expensive.

But within a decade, GE and Westinghouse, figured out how to build giant, economical light water reactors (LWRs).

That move kicked off what is now known as “The Great Nuclear Bandwagon.”

GE and Westinghouse sold dozens of turnkey plants in just four years—without any subsidy from the government.

It was a daring effort to jumpstart a global commercial nuclear power market.

And it worked.

More than 100 reactor orders were placed to meet the growing electricity demand.

And two years later, nuclear power plants were being sold at costs that were competitive with fossil-fuel plants.

Construction costs for new reactors dropped to $600–$900/kW in today’s dollars.

• For context, that’s cheaper than modern gas plants.

With energy that cheap, nuclear business boomed, spreading across the U.S.—and the world—like wildfire.

Just as soon as it started, it was over. By the early ‘70s, many utilities stopped ordering new reactors and cancelling in-progress projects.

By 1980, nuclear plant orders had come to a dead halt.

The Four Bogeymen of the Nuclear Boom

On its rocket-ship trajectory from Eisenhower’s speech to executing Nixon’s Project Independence, nuclear power faced five major problems.

The first of those was public perception. Nuclear’s initial downfall was orchestrated by radical environmentalists who stirred up hysteria against nuclear plants.

Starting in the ‘60s, they waged a well-funded, well-organized War on Nuclear.

Their work caused strict regulations to be passed. The resulting high prices—especially compared to other forms of energy—caused nuclear projects to be cancelled or decommissioned.

They were benefited by declining energy costs from other forms of energy like coal and gas, which made nuclear uneconomical.

Then there was the problem of waste management. There was no federal program for storing the small amounts of radioactive waste created by nuclear power.

Then, two high-profile nuclear accidents—Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—confirmed the public’s safety concerns with nuclear energy.

With public support plummeting, countries like Austria made nuclear power illegal.

But over the past few decades, the real horseman of the apocalypse has come riding in: climate change.

While countries like Austria and Germany are struggling to meet carbon emissions reduction targets with intermittent wind and solar, the wind is shifting in another direction.

• Public perception toward nuclear is rising just as fast as the temperature
• The price of new nuclear reactors is dropping thanks to modular innovations
• The price of natural gas has more than quadrupled in one year
• Several countries have figured out efficient, long-term waste storage solutions
• And nuclear reactors have become the safest form of energy on the planet.

It’s not a moment too soon.

The International Energy Agency says that the nuclear industry will need to double in size over the next two decades for us to meet net zero emissions targets.

There are just over 400 nuclear reactors in operation around the world right now.

Looks like Eisenhower made the right move.

And Nixon might have been ahead of his time when it comes to nuclear power.

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