Human Capital Was The Goal And The Achievement

The 1977 Act required “plac[ing] major emphasis on the development and commercial use of solar, geothermal, recycling and other technologies utilizing renewable energy resources.” The ambition was vast and hopeful. Less than a decade earlier, the U.S. had put people on the Moon and brought them back. The capability was surely there to create these new systems.

The Revolution that didn’t Happen, and the One that Did

I did not see Mike again. We weren’t particularly close, and there was no reason to expect a letter (no email in those ancient times). I do know, however, what happened to him.

When the Reagan Administration came to power in 1981, the federal R&D momentum that had been building toward a nationwide wave of training and innovation ran into a brick wall. Reagan’s worldview, inherited from laissez-faire social philosophy and economics, redefined the role of government as having been vastly overextended to that of a meddling threat, not least in economic-related matters. The market, not government, was the rightful power to solving problems related to supply and demand and to energy resources and technologies.

The “Reagan Revolution,” as it was called in the early 1980s, declared that companies were far more qualified to make decisions about energy sources and innovation. They were the experts, not “bureaucrats in Washington D.C.,” as he often said.

Between 1981 and 1983, funding was cut by 60% for renewables, then by another 50% at the start of Reagan’s second term. The Solar Energy Research Institute (later reconstituted as the National Renewable Energy Lab), founded in 1977, lost more than 75% of its funding and two-thirds of its staff. All four regional solar energy R&D centers established under President Carter were eliminated entirely. Those solar panels on the White House did not long survive.

The net result was that the U.S., which had established global leadership in solar and wind technology, ceded this position to Japan and Germany, which bought up American technology and hired researchers laid off by the cuts.

But the greater loss by far was an entire generation of scientific and engineering expertise.

More than two decades later, when such expertise was in high demand, the Obama Administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) brought back significant federal support for energy R&D, though at a fraction of what had been available in 1978. Still, it proved helpful to advancing a new cohort of technical talent in the domain of renewables.

I’m convinced that, like many others who have contemplated this history in light of our current climate and energy situation, Mike in his retirement sometimes wonders what might have been.

Nuclear Story: In the Beginning both Heat and Light

The year was 1953, the month September, and Clifford Beck had much to celebrate. On the fifth of that month, North Carolina State College, where he was head of the physics department, became the first academic institution in the western world to bring online a research nuclear reactor. It was the culmination of his own effort to create a complete course of undergraduate and graduate study in nuclear engineering, a field he was convinced would expand hugely in the years ahead.

Beck had gained a contract from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for a small, low-power, boiling water reactor on campus. Students could get hands-on training and research experience, and the college could make its mark in creating a new field.

Over the next 20 years, many dozens of U.S. universities launched their own nuclear engineering departments, quickly followed by those in Europe, Canada, Japan, and elsewhere. These new programs were greatly helped in the U.S. by fellowships offered through the Atomic Energy Commission for undergraduate, graduate work, and post-doctoral study.

Administered through Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), it was a statutory function of the AEC, designated in the 1954 revision of the Atomic Energy Act. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, it helped train and prepare thousands of students as qualified engineers to design, operate, analyze, and improve nuclear power plants during the period of their most rapid growth.

Also during this period, nuclear energy found application in the physical and life sciences, as well as medicine, agriculture, and industry. By the 1970s, as many as 75 universities in the U.S. had nuclear engineering departments or degree-granting programs. No fewer than 87 research reactors had been built on or near college campuses for academic work, from New York to California.

The Wages of Fear Sank a Non-Carbon Industry

Then came the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island (TMI) and, seven years later, Chernobyl. The dark halo of radiation fear generated by these two events brought a quick and lasting death to the era of favor for nuclear. Lack of efforts to provide corrective knowledge about the unthreatening reality of TMI and the unique Soviet circumstances of the Chernobyl accident encouraged widespread belief that nuclear represented an essentialist threat to public safety.

Americans largely turned against the technology. Financial support weakened, then evaporated. Hundreds of reactors in the U.S. and Europe were cancelled, and enrollments in nuclear-related fields sank. Reagan, in this case, kept federal support for nuclear untouched, after applying the sword to renewables. This did not last; by 1987, as public opposition to nuclear grew, R&D funding was cut more than 50%.

Federal R&D support for nuclear reached its lowest levels under the Clinton Administration. In his 1993 State of the Union Speech, Clinton said nuclear energy would be zeroed out of the federal budget, a promise echoed by the lack of any further plans by private companies to build new reactors.

White House went further, cancelling the highly successful EBR-II reactor—a non-water design that had proven the ability to shut itself down in a loss-of-coolant emergency. Thus died the Integral Fast Reactor concept, widely viewed as a key technology for improved efficiency, proliferation resistance, economics, and safety.

Between 1986 and 2003, the great majority of degree programs in nuclear engineering closed their doors. Enrollments naturally followed suit. While these began to rise again, as interest in nuclear power rose as a result of climate concerns, they flattened and fell once more after the Fukushima accident in 2011.

University research reactors, meanwhile, expensive to maintain and under-used during the long period of declining enrollments, decreased from 87 to 27 in 2001, and, without significant federal or private support, to 24 by the late 2010s.

We might be forgiven for concluding that nuclear-generated electricity also fell during these decades. No new construction permits were granted after 1979, and the total number of operating reactors peaked in 1991 at 112, falling to 94 in 2022 (increasing to 96 by 2026). All the more reason to think that the contribution to U.S. generation dropped.

But exactly the opposite occurred. Output grew more than 40%, from about 580 Trillion Watt-hours to 820 TWh, due to upgrades and, more importantly, to the allowance for reactors to increase their output from under 70% to more than 90% of their total capacity, with a number of top-tier plants like Peach Bottom (Pennsylvania), Browns Ferry (Alabama), and Cooper (Nebraska) achieving up to 99% – 100%.

For more than 40 years, nuclear has generated 18%-20% of U.S. power and over 55% of its non-carbon electricity. Because of the turn away from renewables by government and private industry and the embrace of coal and natural gas, nuclear plants are estimated to have prevented more than 16 giga-tonnes of carbon emissions.

Losses and Gains, But Mostly Losses

These two tales about lost generations of expertise pose a single question: where might we be now if this never happened? What technological advances might have been pursued, what expanded levels of non-carbon energy use, what improvements to the flexibility and reliability of the grid, would have been possible?

Powerful but ill-informed forces acted to hold back U.S. energy self-reliance and security. Ultimately, a significant portion of the urgency and foresight created by the first energy crisis—above all, the intellectual supply chain of human capital that had drawn so much investment—were thrust aside.

America’s nuclear fleet, in particular, operating safely and reliably for more than half-a-century, today generating half of U.S. non-carbon electricity, could have been considerably larger and more advanced—exactly where China plans to be by the 2040s. Almost certainly, the U.S.—and the world—is decades behind where it might have been.

If there are lessons in this story, they might be two-fold. First, that government support for energy R&D is essential if we accept that the technologies powering the economy, the military, the grid, and daily life define a national security concern. Second, that removing such support from proven energy technologies for ideological or other reasons, will prove counter-productive, even enfeebling, giving away U.S. competitiveness.