WI: Make Republicans big supporters of renewable energy

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I can't find a nice publicly available graph that shows orders and cancellations side by side each year, but I found one showing reactor capacity by order date, and how much of it was cancelled/completed. Basically, there were a lot of things going on, and Three Mile Island is really more of the symbolic end of the Great Bandwagon Market in nuclear power, as opposed to the actual cause.

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Figure II.2--2. Reactor orders in the United States, 1953-1978, in GWe of total capacity. Annual figures are given for total orders and for those that were not subsequently canceled. [Copied from Ref. 1, p. 11]
 

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from President Ford's Jan. 15, 1975, State of the Union address:

I think synthetic fuel legislation was finally passed in 1980. Maybe it was modestly successful or worthwhile as an experiment. But it wasn't a big new technological success for which Ford and the Republicans could get credit. In OTL, I think President Carter and the Democrats were blamed for it.

So, in an ATL, a Republican administration picks another technological horse and receives credit for it.

That's because the Synthetic Fuels Corporation was a rather high profile failure. $88 billion was planned for synthetic fuels under the 1979 Energy Security Act.

It's not 88 million, as Wikipedia claims, but 88 billion, according to the New York Times, with $22 billion authorized for immediate spending. Around $1 billion to $3 billion was ultimately lost by the time Reagan canceled the program in 1986.

Imagine what $88 billion in guaranteed federal loans for the incomplete nuclear power plants could have done for energy security. If done as matching private funds or something like that, we could have seen dozens of incomplete plants finished.
 

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Sorry for triple posting, but this is relevant for the nuclear issue because the cost overruns that plants experienced were compounded by rising bond rates. Keep in mind that this is for Treasury bonds, which are considered to have essentially no risk, and are used as the benchmark for which all other investment options are weighed. Everything was getting very expensive in the 1970s and 1980s: labor and material costs were rising, inflation was high, new regulations required redesigns and new systems to be added, and to top it all off the bonds to finance things were at record highs. Not a good time to be investing in anything, really. Nuclear was hit very hard because capital costs are the dominant costs for it. Then there was the reduced demand for energy in general due to rising prices from the energy crises, and the fact that something like 100 nuclear plants and 88 coal plants were canceled before the 1979 Crisis, and it was a bad time for energy investment in general. Utilities had 20% to 30% surplus power capacity margins in the 1990s because until the crises everyone just projected power by using a linear formula based on previous years, which was around 7% to 8% growth per year until then. How they thought energy could grow faster than the total economy is a great question.

equity-vs-bond.png
 
As I understand it, nuclear plants in the United States were not cost effective with conventional plants.

So, in this ATL, the Republicans need to find something else. They don't necessarily need a homerun. They just need a solid technological base hit, and this will provide the motivation to look for the next project.

PS Am I reading the graph correctly where it is claiming bonds were a better investment than stocks during the go-go '80s? That may well be the case, but it's a claim which surprises me, and I for one would like to see a couple of different sources.
 

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As I understand it, nuclear plants in the United States were not cost effective with conventional plants.

So, in this ATL, the Republicans need to find something else. They don't necessarily need a homerun. They just need a solid technological base hit, and this will provide the motivation to look for the next project.

PS Am I reading the graph correctly where it is claiming bonds were a better investment than stocks during the go-go '80s? That may well be the case, but it's a claim which surprises me, and I for one would like to see a couple of different sources.

Actually, the economics were initially good. Dresden Generating Station was the first nuclear reactor ordered without subsidies in the United States, and by the mid to late 1960s the Atomic Energy Commission had decided that light water had been successfully commercialized and it was time to begin work on advanced power reactors and the breeder reactors that they thought would be required to provide fuel for them. It was only later that the economics flipped. There's a lot of debate over what happened to cause that.
 
Maybe the Atomic Energy Commission should have stuck with the 'light water' reactors.

And I think they're a classic case of a government agency having the awkward dual mission of both overseeing safety and promoting the industry.
 

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Maybe the Atomic Energy Commission should have stuck with the 'light water' reactors.

That's one option, but the biggest issue with the AEC program was the focus on breeder reactors. Breeder reactors can run on plutonium and nuclear waste, which allows them to be burned off, creates power, and creates new fissile material for power reactors to turn off of. In the early years of nuclear power they greatly underestimated the amount of uranium in the world, so it was thought that the breeders would be vital for ensuring nuclear power could function.

We now know that there is a lot of fissile material for reactors to run off of, so much that we're talking about decades before it will be commercially viable to reprocess spent fuel from power reactors, and a few decades more for breeder reactors to become economical.

The AEC and its successors spent some $20 billion on breeder reactors from 1968 through to the early to mid-1980s, which consumed a massive amount of the budget. It's the largest single energy program in United States history. Spending those funds on more basic research would have given far more value.

And I think they're a classic case of a government agency having the awkward dual mission of both overseeing safety and promoting the industry.
The agency went through several splits and mergers in the 1970s. The first split was into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration, a merger of several federal energy programs. Because the AEC was the largest energy research agency going into the merger, nuclear dominated at the ERDA. Over half the budget, programs, and personnel were carried over from the AEC, so it was really just a continuation of the research branch. Later the ERDA was reorganized into the Department of Energy, and other energy sources, as well as conservation, started to see large research dollars.

There's some argument that the split may have resulted in an NRC that took the Regulatory part of its name a bit too far. The regulations are written in such a way that you can't really build anything but a light water power reactor in the United States now (such as a gas cooled reactor, heavy water reactor, etc.), for example, or you can just add in unneeded equipment mandated by law.
 
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