As Commercial Nuclear Power Turns 50, Its Future Is Brighter

By Jim Dawson
American Institute of Physics
December 19, 2007

Summary: The threat from global warming is spurring a revival of the nuclear power industry

(College Park, MD) -- It was 50 years ago this week, in the small Pennsylvania town of Shippingport, that a U.S. nuclear reactor first generated electricity that was fed into the commercial power grid, lighting up homes in Pittsburgh. The reactor, though small by today's standards, marked the beginning of the peaceful use of atoms in the U.S., a dream of then-President Dwight Eisenhower.

Indeed, on May 28, 1958, after five months of testing the new reactor, Eisenhower waved a symbolic light bulb-topped wand at the White House as a switch was thrown in Shippingport to mark the official opening of the facility.

"The Soviet Union and the United Kingdom had begun using nuclear power in 1954, and the U.S. was concerned about losing the race," said Dave Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington, DC. "That is why Shippingport was so important."

Shippingport marked the beginning of what has grown in the U.S. to 104 nuclear power plants providing 20 percent of the nation's electrical power.

"We've moved several generations beyond Shippingport," said Paul Genoa, the director of policy development for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based organization that represents the nuclear industry. "Most of the plants now operating in the U.S. are second generation, but a few are third generation, and we're working on enhancements of the existing facilities."

While there is much talk in the federal government and industry of a nuclear "renaissance" spurred by concerns over global warming, Genoa is more cautious. If the first of the new generation of nuclear plants, with heavy federal government liability protections and shared costs, can be built on time and on budget, then the industry might build more plants without federal money, he said.

"By 2016 I'd like to see three to six new plants moving forward on schedule," he said. "I'd like to see us get up to generating 30 percent of the U.S. power from nuclear." But there are a host of issues ranging from finding enough trained workers to mining enough uranium that must be solved, he said. "If it is a renaissance, it won't be a quick one."

And that is fine with Lochbaum, who visited the Shippingport plant with his father when he was a boy. He still remembers the blue glow created by the spent radioactive fuel being stored in a water-filled pool.

As impressive as that image was, he said, he doesn't want to see a rush to build new nuclear plants. "The operating licenses for the current ones have been extended, so we have time, a couple of decades, to figure out what we need, what is the right mix of energy supply in the future."

Lochbaum is the coauthor of a new UCS report, Nuclear Power in a Warming World, that acknowledges the role of nuclear power as an essentially carbon-free energy source in a world threatened by global warming. But the report says "nuclear power is riskier than it should—and could—be."

Renewables such as solar, biomass, and hydrogen fuel cells should play a bigger role in the future, he said. New nuclear power plants will also be part of the energy mix, he said, but federal regulators shouldn't become so focused on new reactors that they lessen efforts to improve safety at the existing plants. One accident at existing plant and the nuclear renaissance could end before it begins, Lochbaum noted.

But for the moment nuclear power, long derided by much of the environmental movement, is becoming a "green" solution to climate change. "We're enjoying the best public opinion ratings we've ever had," Genoa said. "It's a treat to be on the other side of this."

Inside Science News Service is produced under the auspices of the American Institute of Physics, publisher of several leading journals in the physical sciences.