Fission Fizzle?
Fission Fizzle?
One of the sources of great optimism across the West in the early 1970s - particularly in the aftermath of the Arab oil embargo in 1973 - was the potential for nuclear power to revolutionize energy. Fission power plants had been invented in the 1950s and gone through several experimental phases, and by the dawn of the 1970s had gone from a science fiction technology to something that was scalable at a massive level, with many reactors having nameplate outputs of as high as 1,200 megawatts. The benefits of nuclear energy were clear beyond just diminishing dependence on volatile oil and gas prices that were geopolitically fragile - the environmental movement had matured and come into its own in the early 1970s, moving merely beyond conservation as its primary goal but also starting to focus on broader environmental degradation, particularly pollution, which had led to environmental management becoming an often cabinet-level post in many democracies and the passage of laws in the vein of the United States' Clean Air Act, which had been amended numerous times on a bipartisan basis to expand the ability to combat air pollution, or its companion the Clean Water Act, passed by large majorities in a Democrat Congress and signed by a Republican President. Nuclear energy did not pollute the air and indeed did not give off any emissions other than water steam into the air and hot water discharge into adjacent bodies of water, and the promise of clean power that could lead to clear skies was appealing in addition to the broader strategic factors.
The "Fission Fizzle," as detractors came to call it, reared its head by the end of the 1970s, when the Energy Policy Act was signed into law by Gerald Ford in the fall of 1979 and included billions to "expedite and complete ongoing nuclear energy projects," dismissed as a bailout for a major boondoggle - while this was perhaps harsh, it was not incorrect that without the capital injections of the EPA in 1979 and the ESA in 1981, a huge number of nuclear projects would have been severely delayed or outright cancelled. A variety of factions had coalesced by the end of the decade to pop the bubble of optimism around nuclear power. Plants saw bloated cost spirals, both from construction costs but also permitting difficulties and ratcheting regulations from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Commission and equivalent agencies in Europe, which factored into the other component - public opposition. Partially, the opposition was due to the storage of nuclear waste, an understandably controversial subject that provoked "not-in-my-backyard" backlashes, but in large part it stemmed from a generation having grown up fearing nuclear bombs and apocalyptic war coming to believe that the risks of nuclear power were similar, in part thanks to the film The China Syndrome, which had been a huge hit and depicted a disastrous nuclear meltdown making much of Ohio uninhabitable. [1] Environmental groups, increasingly militant, protested nuclear power and tried to get projects blocked. In the United States, utilities often threw up their hands from financial strain, but in Europe, the ballot box became the preferred tool.
There was a very real risk that nuclear energy could have been banned in several countries across Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to popular referenda, but the price spikes of 1978-80 took a lot of the wind out of those sails, creating a muddled result across the continent. Inspired by protests securing the cancellation of the Whyl plant in West Germany, activists turned to sponsoring a referendum to ban nuclear power in Austria before the single-reactor Zwentendorf plant could be finished narrowly failed, but the government never approved any additional plants; referenda in Sweden and Belgium fell shy, too. The Carnsore Point referendum in Ireland was thus seen as the last best hope for the total ban wing of the movement, trying to see to it that Ireland's first nuclear plant, planned for the eponymous point that was the southermost headland in southeast Ireland's County Wexford, placing it favorably near Cork and Dublin to provide power to both. The narrow failure of the referendum was the last time that nuclear energy was put to popular vote in Europe, but much like in Austria, Carnsore would be the only one of what had once been four planned nuclear energy plants in Ireland to ever be built, and like its Austrian cousin it would be shuttered in the mid-2010s, well before the end of its practical life after opening in 1992.
Such issues did not of course concern Eastern Bloc states and they continued apace building nuclear energy plants through the 1980s, and wanting to keep pace on nuclear energy tech was a concern for both parties in the United States. Despite opposition from coal and oil interests, including Senators representing states strong in those industries, the Economic Stabilization Act went above and beyond the Energy Policy Act in providing financing for existing and proposed nuclear projects. In the end, it was mostly under-construction plants that were completed, most prominently the two-reactor Bellefonte Plant in Alabama, two-reactor Marble Hill in Indiana, two-reactor Yellow Creek in Mississippi, two-reactor Black Fox in Oklahoma, three-reactor Cherokee in Upstate South Carolina, the Satsop and Columbia River projects with two reactors apiece in Washington, and most importantly the four-reactor Hartsville Site in Tennessee, which duly became one of the largest power plants in the world with its completion, producing close to 5,000 megawatts of electricity for the TVA. While exciting projects such as the Alan Barton Plant in Alabama with its four 1,400 megawatt reactors had been cancelled earlier, in total, the EPA-ESA injection of capital into the nuclear energy industry saved 38 reactor projects at new or existing sites that otherwise would have been at risk of cancellation or suspension, a total of roughly 41,800 megawatts added to the national grid that would have been cancelled otherwise at "large or very large reactor"-class plants, primarily in the South. Most importantly, with the extra financial cushion, strategically important energy resiliency projects were now more immune to NIMBY activism and legal maneuvering, which allowed thousands of miles of new high-voltage power lines to be built to connect the new plants to population centers.
Still, the promise of nuclear that had been dreamed of decades earlier did not come into being - by the time the last permitted nuclear plant began operations in 1993, there were 142 active reactors in the United States, about 40% more than would have existed without intervention but well shy of the nearly three hundred proposed reactors since 1953, with the majority failing to pan out. In total, a little less than three-tenths of American energy came from nuclear sources, well below what proponents had pushed for [2], compared to Eastern Bloc countries, or France, where the power type soon produced more than half if not more than two-thirds of total baseline energy. Still, though the nuclear revolution had perhaps not arrived at the baseline scale, the "Fission Fizzle" had fizzled; small, “breeder” reactors were tested at Clinch River, Tennessee by the Department of Energy throughout the 1980s and by the early 2000s were able to be deployed at existing plants to avoid the nuclear waste and expense of building larger plants and facilities, often producing 400-500 MW per reactor and requiring much less fuel while easily hooked into the existing grid infrastructure. In combination with greater efficiency and research in solar and wind power in the same decade, as well as the discovery of cheaper natural gas sources onshore, by the mid-1990s the United States had what was referred to as an "electricity glut" with some of the cheapest wholesale prices in the world, which would within the decade help drive the economic boom of the new millennium.
[1] It of course did not help IOTL that this movie came out the same week as Three Mile Island, which ITTL is butterflied, but there's still some cultural impact and the financial difficulties of the nuclear energy industry were already pretty bad by 1977-78, with dozens of reactors cancelled in that period of time.
[2] But better than OTL's 18-19%
(This passage is as soap-boxy as I will probably get, but its a historical subject I feel strongly about. The failure to build a massive fleet of nuclear reactors in the 1970s and 1980s like we should have thanks to a combination of contractor bloat, regulatory creep but most importantly short-sighted 70s-style feel-good NIMBY environmentalism fueled by misinformation put us in the deep hole we're in now in trying to reconcile with climate change, which was in many ways inevitable with all the emissions since the early 19th century but was exacerbated by decisions made between 1960-90. By the late 1970s there's no way to entirely course correct mistakes made in part before the POD but ITTL things at least go somewhat better for the nuclear industry. /endrant)
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