The Shape of Nuclear Policy

Book review: Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France

For a brief period from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, the future of nuclear power looked extremely bright. Utility companies around the world were building dozens of nuclear reactors and had plans for hundreds more. Reactors had steadily gotten larger and apparently more efficient, and it seemed as if nuclear power would soon be the cheapest form of electricity, if it wasn’t already. Since the beginning of the 20th century, electricity demand had increased by roughly 7% every year, and it was expected both that this trend would continue and that nuclear power would make it possible to meet this ever-growing demand. Many countries expected to be generating most of their electricity from nuclear power by the end of the century.

But over the course of the 1970s, the prospects for nuclear power dimmed considerably, as the cost of plants grew and safety concerns became more acute. And the trajectory of nuclear power also fragmented. In some cases, countries were able to push past these difficulties, and construct the huge reactor fleets they had planned. But more countries slowed or stopped plant construction, and often imposed such large barriers to new plant construction that it’s hard to see nuclear power ever making a comeback.

In Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France, James Jasper tries to understand the forces that shaped the development and undevelopment of nuclear power. In 1973, the US, France and Sweden all seemed to be following the same nuclear playbook. Each country had adopted the same technology (light water reactors), built several plants, and planned to build enough reactors to generate the majority of their electricity from nuclear power by the year 2000. Each country had a powerful state apparatus that was pushing the technology forward, and each had supplies of uranium to provide nuclear fuel.

But within just a few years, the countries had diverged. By the early 1980s, the US had completely retreated from nuclear power. Utilities had stopped ordering new plants and canceled in-progress ones, and getting a new plant built seemed nearly impossible. Sweden had stopped building nuclear plants and had on paper agreed to phase out the ones it had built, though in practice they left the door open to revisit nuclear power in the future. Only France continued with its plans for a large fleet of nuclear plants, and by 1985 it was generating more than 60% of its electricity from nuclear power. Why did three countries which had started with almost identical plans for nuclear power end up in such different places? This is the question this book aims to answer.

In Jasper’s view, nuclear policy can be thought of as a struggle between three different groups: technological enthusiasts (who wanted to push the technology forward), cost-benefiters (who could be pro- or anti-nuclear depending on how the costs and benefits added up), and moralists (who were opposed to nuclear in principle). The path of nuclear power ultimately was a function of how these three groups took shape, gathered power, and interacted with the existing political system.

Enthusiasts, moralists, and cost-benefiters

Jasper describes three fundamentally different styles of argument in tech policy. 

Technological enthusiasts want to push technology forward, making policy by changing the structure of the physical world itself. New and better technology can create new possibilities and opportunities, defusing difficult negotiations which inevitably result in winners and losers; rather than dividing up an existing pie, new technology can expand the pie and give enough to everyone. While developing new technology requires the difficulty of understanding and manipulating the physical world, in the minds of the enthusiasts this is more tractable and predictable than changing people.

Moralists, by contrast, favor changing people themselves, or simply banning the things they don’t like. In the eyes of the moralists, some things are questions of right and wrong; if people can’t be convinced to stop doing the wrong things, then the state should step in and force them to. With nuclear power, this took the form of ecological moralism; the idea that nuclear power was just another example of industrial civilization run amok, a fundamentally harmful technology that would inevitably harm people and the environment. (While moralist policy styles might sound puritan, stifling, and anti-progress, they need not be; the civil rights movement can be thought of as a fundamentally moralist policy cause.)

The “enthusiast vs. moralist” dichotomy is a common one. We see it in Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, which contrasts the environmental philosophies of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug favored dealing with fundamentally limited resources by developing better agricultural technology, while William Vogt favored conservation and living within limits. This same sort of dispute is arguably playing out today between old-line environmentalists, who want to deal with climate change by slowing down civilization’s industrial machine and having people live with less, and the folks who want to address it through new and better technology (building lots of solar panels and transmission lines, developing new low-carbon energy technology like geothermal, and so on).

But to these two policy strategies Jasper adds a third: the cost-benefiters. Rather than adopting a particular ideological lens, cost-benefiters try to add up the relative costs and benefits of various potential policies, and support whichever option comes out ahead. A cost-benefiter might be for or against nuclear power depending on how expensive it is relative to the benefits, and what other options are on the table.

These are three fundamentally different worldviews, with different assumptions baked in about how the world works, which can make coming to an agreement difficult. Technologists tend to see new technology as fundamentally beneficial, and that any downsides can easily be addressed, while moralists consider much technology to be inherently harmful. While moralists tend to believe things are inherently right or wrong, cost-benefiters think in terms of degree, relative risk, and expected value. And while cost-benefiters try to make decisions based on some “efficient” allocation of resources, technological enthusiasts often see this as a false choice; instead of being forced to compromise, they desire to push technology forward to expand what’s possible. 

Depending on the context, these different groups might take shape and interact differently. For one, they can be influenced by different organizational structures: in the US, for instance, electric power is provided by many private utility companies, while in France it’s provided by a single, powerful state-owned utility with considerable policy influence. And they’re also influenced by what Jasper calls the “dominant partisan cleavages” in a political system: what divides the different political parties, and what arguments tend to be about.

In the US, a fundamental cleavage between the left and right is about the role of markets: how much government intervention and regulation should there be in the affairs of businesses? This cleavage meant that nuclear power policy questions often took the form of whether, and how much, the government should intervene in the decisions of private utility companies to adopt nuclear power or not.

In France, there was a similar right-left divide, but the cleavage was more about capital vs. labor than about markets. Debates focused on whether a policy would “help the working class or increase the profits of the capitalists.” Nuclear power policy questions addressed topics like plant ownership, industry profits, and worker safety.

In Sweden the cleavage was similar to France — a right/left split over capital vs. labor — but with an institutional twist. Sweden at the time had a single dominant political party, the Social Democrats, and a host of smaller parties. The Social Democrats tended to propose policies, and the smaller parties critique them. In Sweden nuclear power became associated with the Social Democrats, and criticized by other, smaller parties.

Early nuclear evolution

Though they took different paths to get there, by the early 1970s the US, France, and Sweden had converged upon seemingly identical nuclear policies.

Early American expansion of nuclear power was due to the technological enthusiasm of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Senate-House Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In 1955 the AEC launched its Power Reactor Demonstration Program to fund private nuclear reactor construction, including research and development and (eventually) even providing free nuclear fuel. When utilities and reactor companies complained that potential liability from nuclear plants made them too risky to build, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnified reactor builders from any liability related to them.

But the electric power industry was still reluctant to build reactors, as the costs were simply too high. Electricity from the first civilian nuclear power plant at Shippingport was more than ten times the cost of electricity from a coal plant. Reactors were built in the 1950s, but only after extensive government prodding; until the 1960s, government technological enthusiasm had only limited success in convincing the cost-benefiters.

Expansion of the US nuclear industry ultimately came about due to technological enthusiasm from the reactor builders themselves. In 1963, GE sold a nuclear plant at a fixed price to Jersey Central Power and Light; the price was low enough that it would provide power for less than a coal plant. Though the plant was sold for far less than it cost to build, GE viewed it as an acceptable loss leader for getting a foothold in the nuclear industry; the costs of nuclear power were sure to fall as reactors were scaled up, experience was gained and GE fell down the learning curve, by which time GE would have a dominant market position. GE’s competitor Westinghouse responded by offering its own fixed-price nuclear plant contracts, and over the next three years, the two companies together had contracts to build 11 more fixed-price nuclear reactors.

Both GE and Westinghouse almost certainly lost enormous amounts of money on these fixed price plants, but the gambit was successful in generating more utility interest in nuclear power. By 1965 the utilities, which were fundamentally cost-benefiters, had been convinced by the enthusiasts that cheap nuclear was just around the corner, and they began to sign non-fixed price contracts. By 1968 utilities had signed contracts for 74 nuclear plants from GE, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Babcock and Wilcox, and General Atomic, in what became known as the “great nuclear bandwagon market.” It became widely assumed that nuclear was the now cheapest source of energy, despite almost no real information on costs. Few commercial plants were operating, and the scant information available was out of date and of little use. Utilities had quickly lept to building larger and larger reactors before even completing smaller ones, and by 1968 the largest reactor under construction was nearly four times the size of the largest completed one. Without solid information on costs, participants fell back on their worldviews, and the inevitability of cheap nuclear pushed by the enthusiasts dominated the conversation. Jasper, quoting Bupp and Derian’s “Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved” notes that “even though more than 100 light water reactors were under construction or in operation in the United States by the end of 1975, their capital cost was almost anyone's guess”

The American bandwagon market ultimately shaped nuclear policy in both France and Sweden. Sweden had started its nuclear power program in the 1940s, and in 1948 the government formed a partially state-owned corporation, AB Atomenergi, to begin studying nuclear reactors. Sweden’s first research reactor came online in 1954, and a 1955 government nuclear commission recommended the construction of 6 to 12 nuclear reactors by 1975. Initially Sweden planned to use a locally-developed heavy water reactor, and began construction on a prototype in 1957. But construction difficulties pushed the delivery date for the plant back and resulted in costs that were twice as high as expected, causing people to lose faith in the heavy water design. The enormous apparent success of reactor construction in the US shifted Swedish nuclear plans away from the heavy water design to American light water reactors, a transition that Jasper describes as a victory for the cost-benefiters (who saw light water as cheaper and more of a “sure thing”) over the technological enthusiasts (who wanted to continue developing their own line of reactors). Between 1966 and 1973, Swedish utility companies ordered 10 nuclear plants, all of them with light-water reactors.

Like Sweden, France’s early nuclear power plans were based on using a locally developed type of reactor, in this case a gas graphite reactor. Early French nuclear enthusiasm came, as in the US, from its atomic energy commission (the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, or CEA), but the state-owned utility company (Electricite de France or EDF) was more reluctant. Like in Sweden, enthusiasm for the locally-developed gas graphite reactor dimmed after a prototype revealed “several embarrassing problems,” and EDF instead turned its eye towards American light water reactors based on their perceived success. Jasper characterizes this as a “selective” use of cost-benefit analysis: the EDF could claim that the gas graphite would be far too expensive, while ignoring the thinness of the evidence that light water was superior. This was in part due to the EDF’s desire for autonomy from the CEA: if foreign technology was used instead of a CEA-designer reactor, CEA’s influence over energy decisions would be greatly diminished.

Though initially somewhat skeptical of nuclear, by the 1960s EDF was firmly in favor. EDF began to support nuclear not only because it became convinced of its technical merits, but because a policy change allowed EDF to market electricity directly for the first time. As a result, EDF pushed for wide-scale electrification (replacing other sources of energy such as gas with electricity), and for generating that electricity from nuclear plants. (In fact, EDF’s slogan became “All electric – all nuclear.”) The greater the demand for electricity, and the more light water reactors replaced gas graphite, the more power and influence EDF would have. Early nuclear plant orders were for gas graphite plants, but by 1970 this almost completely changed to light water reactors.

Through the early 1970s, there were proportionally fewer reactor orders in France than in the US and Sweden, though not because of lack of enthusiasm from EDF and the CEA. A government nuclear committee (staffed by EDF and CEA members) had created a plan to build 8 large nuclear reactors, followed by an even larger plan in 1972 calling for 14 or 15 reactors. But France’s ministry of finance, unconvinced about the economic benefits of such a large reactor buildout, successfully resisted its implementation at first. Jasper characterizes this as a clash between two different groups of cost-benefiters, one (the EDF) that had accepted the assumptions of the technological enthusiasts, and another (the finance ministry) that had remained skeptical.

By 1973, then, the US, France, and Sweden had all built several nuclear plants, and all contained state and institutional apparatuses convinced that nuclear power was the future. In each country nuclear power was driven forward by an alliance of technological enthusiasts (who fundamentally believed in the superiority of nuclear) and cost-benefiters (who had been convinced by the enthusiasts’ assumptions). All three countries had plans in some form for large reactor fleets of light-water reactors, based on the assumptions that an energy expansion was necessary to fulfill future demand and that nuclear power was the best possible way to meet it. All three countries faced anti-nuclear activism, but it had yet to have much impact, and was not considered when the countries were making their nuclear plans. It seemed clear that in all three countries, the future of energy would be nuclear.

The oil crisis and beyond

The 1973 oil embargo, which almost immediately drove up the cost of energy around the world, threw a wrench into these plans. In the US, the embargo first seemed to only further accelerate nuclear’s dominance as an abundant source of non-petroleum-based energy. Three weeks after the embargo, President Nixon announced “Project Independence,” a plan for American energy independence that called for, among other things, 1,000 nuclear plants to be built by the year 2000.

But ultimately the oil crisis hastened the demise of the US nuclear industry. As the embargo hurt Western economies, financing new electrical infrastructure became much more difficult and expensive, and demand for electric power, which for almost the entire 20th century had grown at about 7% per year, suddenly seemed uncertain: electricity demand didn’t increase at all in 1974, and rose only 2% in 1975. Higher financing costs and uncertain future demand made nuclear plants, with their high upfront costs and long building timelines, look like unattractive investments; new orders slowed and already proposed plants began to be canceled.

This situation was exacerbated by the growing influence of anti-nuclear moralists. While they weren’t able to stop nuclear reactor construction generally, they worsened the financial picture for nuclear plants by forcing the adoption of tougher regulations and delaying reactor construction with protests and lawsuits.

The picture for nuclear started to look even worse as under-construction plants were completed and began operating. Plants started in the 1960s and completed in the early 70s ended up costing twice as much as expected, and over the course of the 1970s the amount of labor and material required to build a nuclear plant doubled. And problems didn’t stop once the plants were complete; shutdowns for maintenance and repairs meant that US reactors had exceptionally low capacity factors (the fraction of time a plant is generating power) compared to other countries, and in the 1970s operational costs rose even faster than plant construction costs.

Jasper credits most of these cost increases to utility incompetence. While the best utilities built and operated reactors as cheaply as anyone in the world, the industry was dragged down by numerous poor performers building expensive and poorly performing plants. Many utilities viewed nuclear as simply “another way to boil water” and were unprepared for the special challenges of nuclear plants. The burdensome regulations and constant design changes, which as we’ve seen have driven up the cost of nuclear power, were in Jasper’s view the only rational response to an industry that appeared fundamentally indifferent to building safe nuclear plants.

As a result of the darkening financial picture for nuclear power, American utilities shifted away from building more plants. The rosy projections of the technological enthusiasts carried little weight in the face of so much conflicting evidence and a hostile financial environment, and nuclear no longer seemed attractive to the cost-benefiters. Writing in 1990, Jasper notes that every nuclear plant proposed after 1973 was eventually canceled, and 1978 was the last year that any US utility ordered a nuclear reactor. Even before the Three Mile Island accident, industry experts believed the US nuclear industry was dying. It would have required large-scale intervention by the government to reverse this course and change the decisions of individual utilities, but the will for such intervention didn’t exist.

In Sweden, the rising influence of the anti-nuclear moralists had by the early 1970s caused a rethinking of Sweden’s nuclear policy, particularly in the main opposition party, the Center Party, which, while small, wielded enough influence that it couldn’t simply be ignored. The Center Party was able to secure a two-year moratorium on new nuclear plants in 1973, and eventually the party became full-on anti-nuclear.

Following the oil embargo, a Swedish energy policy was needed, but the opposition of the Center Party to nuclear power limited what options were available. Ultimately an energy law was passed in 1975 which included a small increase in nuclear construction (from 11 to 13 plants), and mandated increased energy conservation efforts. This was a partial victory for the anti-nuclear moralists, but also for the cost-benefiters, who realized that electricity demand was becoming difficult to predict and large increases in electricity supply might not be needed.

In the 1976 Swedish election, disagreements over nuclear power in part caused the pro-nuclear Social Democrats to lose power for the first time since 1932. The leader of the Center Party, Thorbjorn Falldin, became prime minister. But debates about the future of nuclear power in Sweden continued, to the point where the government was effectively paralyzed. Falldin, not willing to compromise on what he viewed as a moral issue, resigned as prime minister in 1978, and the question of nuclear power lingered.

In France, by contrast, the oil embargo served as a cudgel to push nuclear reactor construction forward. Opposition from the ministry of finance to the EDF’s plan for large-scale reactor construction withered in the face of an energy emergency, and in 1974 France announced a plan of large-scale reactor construction. Under the so-called “Messmer Plan” (named for Pierre Messmer, the prime minister), France would build 13 new nuclear reactors in 1974 and 1975, with the goal of by 2000 having 50% of France’s energy (not merely electricity) provided by nuclear power. To reduce costs, only light water reactors would be used, and designs would be standardized. Though such a plan was considered by many economists to be “too much too fast” and incredibly risky (since it put so many of France’s energy eggs in a single, still-uncertain basket), the state machinery pushed it forward regardless. Thus in France, the oil embargo broke the stalemate between the cost-benefiters and the technological enthusiasts on the side of the enthusiasts.

Enthusiasts were also able to sweep aside any objections from the moralists, in part because (according to Jasper) the French partisan cleavages meant discussions tended to be more about who would own the plants (private capital or labor) rather than whether they would be built at all. Neither of France’s opposition parties adopted an anti-nuclear stance, and the French organs of government were able to more or less ignore moralist opposition.

Nuclear paths harden

By the end of the 1970s, the diverging paths of nuclear power in the US, Sweden, and France seemed to be locked in, and would deviate surprisingly little, even in response to major events. The accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), for instance, mostly just reinforced existing trajectories. In the US it seemed to only make the financials for nuclear power even more miserable: the risk of an expensive failure was clearly higher than expected (the owner of TMI nearly went bankrupt), and the accident was followed by a flurry of new, cost-increasing regulations. Plant cancellations spread to plants that were already under construction, and in the 1980s $30 billion dollars sunk into partially-built nuclear plants were essentially abandoned.

In Sweden, the accident shifted the debate in favor of the moralists, who were able to secure a moratorium on new plant construction and a phase-out of nuclear power by 2010. But it failed to completely resolve the debate, and Jasper notes that in Sweden it remains politically viable to revisit the issue of nuclear power in the future. The response to TMI in France was simply that such an accident couldn’t happen in France, and nuclear plant construction in fact accelerated.

At the time the book was published (1990), Jasper described these paths as “hardened” and difficult to dislodge. And indeed, the nuclear stances of the three countries today look remarkably similar to what they did more than thirty years ago. In the US, nuclear remains almost completely dead due to its high costs: of two attempts to build commercial reactors since 2000, one was canceled mid-stream after enormous cost overruns, and the other was extremely delayed and went wildly over budget. In Sweden, the door to reconsidering nuclear power was left open, just as Jasper predicted: in 2010, Sweden’s nuclear phase-out was pushed back. Nuclear power continues to generate almost 30% of Sweden’s electricity. France paused building nuclear plants in 2000, but retains its nuclear enthusiasm, and is one of the few European countries planning major expansions of nuclear power.

Conclusion

There are two major weaknesses of this book. The first is that, while Jasper’s framework for thinking about nuclear policy is useful, it’s not quite as predictive as Jasper thinks, particularly with regards to the idea of “partisan cleavages.”  According to Jasper this is one of the main drivers of why different countries ended up in such different places nuclear power-wise, but in practice he has a hard time making the concept do much work. Sweden and France have (according to Jasper) similar partisan cleavages and yet ended up with very different nuclear policies. And a cleavage around capital and labor in France doesn’t seem like it would obviously result in reactors being supported by both sides (and Jasper doesn’t do much work to make the case).

The second major weakness is that Jasper seems to have internalized much of the worldview of the anti-nuclear moralists (early on in the book he describes himself as mildly anti-nuclear). Nuclear power is often painted as fundamentally dangerous and unsafe, plant builders are described as cavalier with the risks, and special precautions and ratcheting safety requirements appear as a natural consequence (though he does praise the safety of the Swedish plants). There’s not much room in Jasper’s worldview for the idea that regulations might be implemented poorly or needlessly onerous: in fact, rather than making reactor construction too difficult, Jasper accuses the AEC and NRC of making reactor construction far too easy, bending over backwards to give licenses to plants that didn’t deserve them.

But I nevertheless found the book illuminating; Jasper’s framework of moralists, enthusiasts, and cost-benefiters is a useful way of making sense of a complex series of events, and is something I’ll likely use when thinking about other areas of technological policy.

Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France is available at Princeton University Press.