DBWI: We Didn't Lose Detroit

[Delta Force]

The United States government was one of the leading advocates for nuclear energy prior to the 1966 Detroit Disaster. It even had an entire government agency in charge of promoting it called the Atomic Energy Commission, and with the backing of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy the Commission could do just about anything. The two were in the process of planning a major new reactor development program for 1967 that Congress was going to sign off on. Before Detroit a sodium cooled design was the leading contender, and then support switched to a molten salt design after the incident due to its safety advantages. The molten salt reactor program and renewal of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Insurance Act barely passed in 1967, but nuclear energy never really took off like predicted. In 1976 the United States government agreed to buy out commercial nuclear power plants to create USAtom, doing for commercial nuclear energy what it Amtrak did for commercial rail.

I'm wondering if nuclear energy could have ever been a major source of electricity in the United States, especially from private utilities. USAtom worked great at boosting efficiency, raising capacity factors, and lowering costs at its nuclear power plants starting in the 1980s, but some American utilities are the size of countries. Alternatively, how could something like the USAtom approach have been adopted earlier? I know there was some talk of a federal nuclear utility when Price-Anderson was being created, but it took until the 1976 renewal of Price-Anderson for that to really be taken up.

Also, how might Detroit have evolved if not for the Detroit Disaster? The city was one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world before it occurred and the birthplace of the American automobile, and now it and the surrounding areas of Michigan and Ohio are basically ghost towns. The manufacturing industry was going to consolidate after the Second Great Depression in the 1970s, but it seems everyone decided to consolidate away from Detroit.

 

[jahenders]

It's hard to imagine what would have happened, but some prognosticators argue that there's a good chance that Detroit might be headed for a decline as a manufacturing hub. I know I'll be laughed to scorn, but I predict that (had they not been lost) Detroit could be a shell of itself within 50 years (2016), racked by crime, full of empty houses and businesses, and nearly bankrupt.

 

[Delta Force]

It's hard to imagine what would have happened, but some prognosticators argue that there's a good chance that Detroit might be headed for a decline as a manufacturing hub. I know I'll be laughed to scorn, but I predict that (had they not been lost) Detroit could be a shell of itself within 50 years (2016), racked by crime, full of empty houses and businesses, and nearly bankrupt.

The rioting that happened after the bus station shooting definitely didn't help. There were quite a few race riots in the 1960s, but nothing like Detroit. There's a reason why radiophobia research took off after the Detroit Disaster.

It probably didn't help that half the Detroit Fire Department was incapacitated from the fallout plume when Fermi exploded. It's an urban legend that the Detroit firefighters tried to use water to put out the fire, but it's definitely not an urban legend that sodium cooled reactors will explode if you put water on them, and that breeder reactors in general are prone to suffering small atomic explosions. The explosion at Fermi turned the pressure vessel and confinement building into nothing more than shrapnel.

 

[Delta Force]

The containment buildings that all reactors were required to be built after the Detroit Disaster definitely helped saved Toledo and the rest of the area from suffering a second second disaster when Davis-Besse suffered a meltdown a few years later. The improved revitalization of Civil Defense and improved alert and evacuation procedures probably helped prevent the chaos seen in Detroit too.

 

[GeographyDude]

It's hard to imagine what would have happened, but some prognosticators argue that there's a good chance that Detroit might be headed for a decline as a manufacturing hub. I know I'll be laughed to scorn, but I predict that (had they not been lost) Detroit could be a shell of itself within 50 years (2016), racked by crime, full of empty houses and businesses, and nearly bankrupt.

Detroit would have been a major computer and high-tech center. Just like Los Angeles and Raleigh-Durham, only probably bigger.

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PS I read one wacky, way-out alt history in which San Francisco and Seattle (!) were the major high-tech centers.

 

[Delta Force]

Detroit would have been a major computer and high-tech center. Just like Los Angeles and Raleigh-Durham, only probably bigger.

-------

PS I read one wacky, way-out alt history in which San Francisco and Seattle (!) were the major high-tech centers.

Seattle has always been more of an industrial city. I don't know why people are still so surprised that General Motors invested so heavily in the city after the Detroit Disaster, especially after the end of Vietnam. Even with the Boeing 2707 project going on, there were still a lot of highly skilled aviation engineers and workers out of work, and the city still had (and has) some of the cheapest electricity rates in the country. Where DeLorean really showed foresight was putting Ed Cole in charge of producing the Chevrolet Astro. All-aluminum cars were a rarity even for European exotica in the early 1970s, but Cole managed to make an all-aluminum economy car. That really helped the company when the Second Great Depression hit.

 

[GeographyDude]

I hate to say it, but I think we would have still had the Second Great Depression even without the Detroit Disaster.

These things are so hardwired into the business cycle. At least they are in my view.

 

[Insider]

Well. Manchester is an example of city which did good switching from classic industrial town to more mixed economy. There is no definite recepy for success or faillure to modernize.

I hate to say it, but mistakes of your engineers saved a lot of lives in Europe. When a reactor in Pripyat in USSR suffered a meltdown all damage and most of the radiation was contained by containment vessel. Imagine what would happen if not the triple redundancy of cooling systems

 

[Dalekiller]

Detroit would've definitely fallen, even in 1960 the White Flight was in full effect (Not NY bad but still). Plus the move towards automation and globalization would've destroyed the town. Could it have risen back the same way NY did, oh yes, but given that regions corruption in the late 50's becoming ingrained the reactor probably gave Detroit a quick death compared to a slow painful fall.

 

[DTF955Baseballfan]

Does Humphrey win 1968? Lyndon Johnson probably doesn't run anyway, his heart was old and I think he'd have died soon after 1971 anyway - though i can see him insisting on running, with his personality. But, scaling back Vietnam and getting peace talks going through 1967 was really prompted by our suffering at home economically, and it was that bad economy that doomed Humphrey; he was forced to pick Wallace as a running mate or the convention woudl have been split.

Of course, Nixon won in that landslide and chose not to go Southern. Dirksen, I think it was, was the guy he eventually chose.

Oh, and I have to also say that one of the most beautiful moments in baseball history wouldn't have happened. I have to give props, after the Tigers were moved to Milwaukee for the rest of 1966 - hey, at least it was a neighboring state - and 1967, having them play that home series anywhere near Detroit in 1968 was so lovely. It's like the whole Upper Great Lakes Area rooted for them to win that Series when they did in '68; really, the whole country.

I wonder when or if Milwaukee would have gotten a baseball team? The way the Hornets' moving to Oklahoma City after Katrina was a similar thing - although Milwaukee had had the Braves before so maybe they didn't have to show off their support for baseball by hosting the Tigers those 1.5 seasons.

 

[Dalekiller]

I think Civil Rights may have started earlier, rumor had it that Johnson got poisoning when visiting the region in the aftermath. Humphrey for all his gifts, was no Johnson who could make a Papist worship Satan with his skills. I mean the Civil Rights Act that Kennedy went for died because his VP was a buffoon.

 

[Delta Force]

Well. Manchester is an example of city which did good switching from classic industrial town to more mixed economy. There is no definite recepy for success or faillure to modernize.

I hate to say it, but mistakes of your engineers saved a lot of lives in Europe. When a reactor in Pripyat in USSR suffered a meltdown all damage and most of the radiation was contained by containment vessel. Imagine what would happen if not the triple redundancy of cooling systems

The Pripyat meltdown could never happen in a gas cooled reactor. There's a reason why General Atomics and Nuclear Power Group gas cooled reactors are the most popular outside of the Soviet bloc. Of course the Canadians have had a few sales for the OCANDU organic reactors in Iraq and Romania, and Pakistan and India are both building OCANDU derivatives.

 

[Insider]

The Pripyat meltdown could never happen in a gas cooled reactor. There's a reason why General Atomics and Nuclear Power Group gas cooled reactors are the most popular outside of the Soviet bloc. Of course the Canadians have had a few sales for the OCANDU organic reactors in Iraq and Romania, and Pakistan and India are both building OCANDU derivatives.

Still, my point holds. Lessons were learned to not treat the forces involved lightly. However safety is achived, by fail safe design, or by installing backups is irrelevant.

I wonder what would happen in sixties and seventies had USA had money to spare.Detroit evacuation and cleanup devoured billions of dollars. I wonder could Apollo programe would be continued after Apollo 14. The things NASA had recently declassified are incredible. Lunar rovers, space stations, reusable orbiters. Hell even plans to build an outpost on the Moon. Of course all these were cancelled, between the Vietnam war, riots in homeland and the Detroit Disaster.

On the other hand it could mean that South America would stay under USA thumbs for longer as CIA would have more money to operate there. A failed attempt to remove Salvador Allende practically pushed Chile into Soviet sphere of influence. The irony is that before it was realised that CIA was behind the coup Allende was against the idea of coperating too closely with USSR. With the popular uprisings in Urugway and Bolivia in 1979 and Argentina in 1983 (where military junta was removed after years of oppresion and completely insane attack on Falkland Isles) the Southern America become fiercely anticapitalist.

 

[Delta Force]

I hate to say it, but I think we would have still had the Second Great Depression even without the Detroit Disaster.

These things are so hardwired into the business cycle. At least they are in my view.

The electric industry was in crisis well before the Second Great Depression, that's just when the extent of it became known outside of investing circles. A lot of utilities and electrical equipment manufacturers were betting heavily on nuclear and suffered heavy losses after Detroit. Most of the larges utilities suffered bond downgrades, many for reactors they never finished, and then they had to invest in petroleum to replace the cancelled and delayed nuclear capacity. They came online right as the petroleum shortages started. If the industry wasn't in a tough spot already it might have been able to weather the crisis better, but the utilities had no choice but to default.

Congress was actually debating new environmental legislation when the crash started, but it was shelved in favor of Nixon's new energy legislation promoting coal, natural gas, geothermal energy, and hydropower. That got the fossil fuel lobby, unions, and quite a few Democrats on board.

The environmentalists are still furious about the whole thing, but the energy mix is a lot cleaner now than it was in the 1960s, and the bill did include a lot of funding for fish ladders, advanced coal, and basic environmental research. Without those funds the Energy Research and Development Administration wouldn't have been able to conduct the research that resulted in the London Conference on Climate Change in 1978. It's ironic the environmentalist movement and fossil fuel industry joined together on that issue, but not surprising given it was developed by former Atomic Energy Commission scientists.

 

[SactoMan101]

After the Detroit disaster, GE--who preparing to start construction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power generating station in eastern Japan--promptly stopped preparation work at the site not only to assess the dangers of a reactor meltdown from a boiling-water reactor (BWR) in case an earthquake cuts off the coolant supply, but also to assess the potential danger of a tsunami at the shoreline site (GE looked up historical accounts of the Great Kanto Earthquake and realized the tsunami waves hitting the shoreline could be as high as 33 feet). It was decided to indefinitely postpone construction until the entire power plant site was redesigned to be more earthquake and tsunami proof.

As a result of the Detroit disaster, GE, along with Westinghouse, poured a LOT of money into molten-salt reactor (MSR) research starting in 1970, building on Alvin Weinberg's research at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The test reactors built in the early 1970's at Arco, Idaho proved Weinberg's research could be scaled up to commercial operation, and by 1981 the first commercial MSR, a 300 MW Westinghouse unit, went into operation at Batavia, Illinois, providing power for the Fermilab particle accelerator.

In 1984, GE restarted construction work at the Fukushima Daiichi site in cooperation with Hitachi, this time with six 600 MW MSR's (all Hitachi units based on a GE design) with compact, but very effective, containment structures, and they decided to raise the land where the reactors are located some 50 feet higher than the surrounding land with water redirecting channels between each reactor and also build a seawall to reduce the energy of the tsunami waves. The first two reactors went online in 1991, and all six were operational by 1996.

The inherent natural safety of MSR's were proved during the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. When the earthquake initially struck, the earthquake sensors automatically commanded a SCRAM shutdown, where the liquid nuclear fuel (essentially thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts) was quickly dumped out of the reactor into safe holding tanks next to the reactor. When the tsunami wave hit, the seawall dissipated much of energy of the wave, and when the wave finally reached the reactor site, the water from the waves--which were reduced only 11 feet high--were deflected away from the reactors using the water channels mentioned earlier. Fukushima Daiichi went offline for the rest of 2011 while they cleaned up the land near the reactor and emptied the emergency holding tanks to reprocess the nuclear fuel for use again. The reactors began to be restarted on January 1, 2012, and by January 15, 2012, the plant was running at full power again.

The very success of Fukushima Daiichi with its inherently safe operation and shutdown during perhaps the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the Japanese home islands became a huge turning point for the revival of interest in nuclear power, let alone the fortunes of the USAtom company. Small wonder why GE and Westinghouse are busy with plans to build MSR's around the world, including starting construction work on rebuilding the San Onofre nuclear plant site near San Diego, CA to accommodate five 600 MW MSR's to replace the original two 1,120 MW pressurized water reactors (PWR's).

 

[Delta Force]

Does Humphrey win 1968? Lyndon Johnson probably doesn't run anyway, his heart was old and I think he'd have died soon after 1971 anyway - though i can see him insisting on running, with his personality. But, scaling back Vietnam and getting peace talks going through 1967 was really prompted by our suffering at home economically, and it was that bad economy that doomed Humphrey; he was forced to pick Wallace as a running mate or the convention woudl have been split.

Of course, Nixon won in that landslide and chose not to go Southern. Dirksen, I think it was, was the guy he eventually chose.

Oh, and I have to also say that one of the most beautiful moments in baseball history wouldn't have happened. I have to give props, after the Tigers were moved to Milwaukee for the rest of 1966 - hey, at least it was a neighboring state - and 1967, having them play that home series anywhere near Detroit in 1968 was so lovely. It's like the whole Upper Great Lakes Area rooted for them to win that Series when they did in '68; really, the whole country.

I wonder when or if Milwaukee would have gotten a baseball team? The way the Hornets' moving to Oklahoma City after Katrina was a similar thing - although Milwaukee had had the Braves before so maybe they didn't have to show off their support for baseball by hosting the Tigers those 1.5 seasons.

Humphrey played a crucial role in getting President Nixon's catastrophic health insurance program through Congress, and also his cancer research initiative. Nixon was only going to try to push for $100 million in funding, but Humphrey told him to push for $1 billion and assured him the votes would be delivered. No one could vote against the proposal after Humphrey went public with his terminal cancer diagnosis on the floor of the Senate. It literally ended the debate.

 

[Delta Force]

Still, my point holds. Lessons were learned to not treat the forces involved lightly. However safety is achived, by fail safe design, or by installing backups is irrelevant.

I wonder what would happen in sixties and seventies had USA had money to spare.Detroit evacuation and cleanup devoured billions of dollars. I wonder could Apollo programe would be continued after Apollo 14. The things NASA had recently declassified are incredible. Lunar rovers, space stations, reusable orbiters. Hell even plans to build an outpost on the Moon. Of course all these were cancelled, between the Vietnam war, riots in homeland and the Detroit Disaster.

On the other hand it could mean that South America would stay under USA thumbs for longer as CIA would have more money to operate there. A failed attempt to remove Salvador Allende practically pushed Chile into Soviet sphere of influence. The irony is that before it was realised that CIA was behind the coup Allende was against the idea of coperating too closely with USSR. With the popular uprisings in Urugway and Bolivia in 1979 and Argentina in 1983 (where military junta was removed after years of oppresion and completely insane attack on Falkland Isles) the Southern America become fiercely anticapitalist.

NASA's investments in electronics and programming for automated probes have really reaped dividends in a way manned space exploration probably never could. Without that investment the era of Big Data and the big breakthroughs in cancer treatment, physics, and material science just wouldn't be possible. I don't see how transparent aluminum would have gone from being a plot point in Star Trek IV to a reality within a few years without NASA's research.

 

[GeographyDude]

Ah, yes, the London Conference on Climate Change in '78,

and really pretty timid and tame targets at the beginning, but then we got rolling,

and I think the main selling point was that this is energy diversification which we ought to be doing anyway

 

[Archibald]

As for Molten salt reactors, the Soviet flew one in orbit attached to their huge space station, the MKBS "space industry park" that need enormous amount of power, much more than any solar arrays could provide. After Cold War ended Soviet space nuclear technology was adopted in civilian ground reactors, on behalf that, if it survived the hardness of space, it could only do well on the ground.

It should be reminded that, when he failed to kill the Boeing 2707 in Congress, Proxmire turned its wrath against NASA space shuttle, and got it killed. NASA found itself very embarrassed - they had to build their own giant space station (similar to the MKBS) with expendable rockets - although they had touted the shuttle as necessary to any viable, large scale space station...

 

[glenn67]

Food for thought. If there was no Detroit disaster, would Berry Gordy still move his Motown record label out west?