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Fizzling the Economy: Origins of the April 1977 Carter Administration Fuel Cycle Policy Transition

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Citation Williams, Peter King. 2010. Fizzling the Plutonium Economy: Origins of the April 1977 Carter Administration Fuel Cycle Policy Transition. Master's thesis, Harvard University, Extension School.

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Fizzling the Plutonium Economy:

Origins of the April 1977 Carter Administration Fuel Cycle Policy Transition

Peter Williams

A Thesis in the Field of History

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

May 2010

© 2010 Peter Williams

Abstract

This study examines the scientific advocacy that shaped President Carter’s

April 1977 policy decision to block the domestic implementation of so-called

“plutonium economy” technologies, and thereby mandate the use of an “open” or

“once–through” fuel cycle for U.S. nuclear power reactors. This policy transition was controversial, causing friction with U.S. allies, with the nuclear power industry, and with Congress. Early in his presidential campaign, Carter criticized the excessive federal financial commitment to developing plutonium-based reactors and adopted the view that the weapons proliferation risks of plutonium economy technologies were serious and needed to be addressed. President Carter announced his intention to implement these policy views through statements in April 1977 that defined his administration’s policy to forgo so-called “plutonium economy” technologies. This study traces the origins of President Carter’s once-through fuel cycle policy via a close analysis of the networks that channeled policy advice on this matter to Carter.

A key finding is that Carter’s opposition to the plutonium economy technology program represented a purposefully nuanced compromise within the larger context of his nuclear power and national energy policies. While Carter was very much the author of this position, key scientific advocacy efforts framed the policy debate and reinforced his confidence in the technical, economic, and diplomatic feasibility of his fuel cycle policy.

Frontispiece

© Robert Mankoff/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com

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Dedication

For my family, with love –

This work is as much a product of your support and encouragement as my effort.

v

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I thank my wife Lisa and my daughters Erica and Grace for their support and forbearance during the time that I worked on this project. I have drawn heavily on reservoirs of good will that I hope now to refill.

I offer thanks for the supervision and indulgence of Dr. Donald Ostrowski and

Professor Everett Mendelsohn in guiding me through the process of selecting a suitable topic and then completing this project. It has been my great good fortune to meet both of you. Thanks also to Peter O’Malley and Kerry Buchannan for their advice and assistance at critical points in my transit through the ALM program.

Thanks also to my fellow ALM program students. I gained insight and encouragement from our monthly group sessions with Don Ostrowski.

It would have been more difficult to glean new insights into this topic had I not been able to interview many of the protagonists. I would therefore like to heartily thank the following busy people for so generously agreeing to be interviewed and for encouraging me in my task: Dean Abrahamson; Peter Bourne;

Joe Browder; Chris Brown; Albert Carnesale; Cochran; Stuart Eizenstat;

David Freeman; Richard Gardner; Spurgeon Keeny; Joe Nye; Gus Speth; Steven

Stark; Lynn Weaver; and Mason Willrich. While I benefitted enormously from the insights I derived from my interactions with all of the people mentioned above, any error in interpreting or presenting their views is my own. In this context, it is important to mention that I was unable to arrange interviews, despite attempts to

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do so, with several persons significant to these events. The most notable such omission was President Carter, whom could undoubtedly shed much light on his influences and motivations in these matters. I have had to therefore rely on analysis and inference to form my conclusions and build my narrative, as is usually the case in historical scholarship. I apologize to President Carter in advance for any misjudgments that derive from this approach.

A brief encounter with Professor David Hackett Fischer was decisive in influencing the structure of this work. In following Professor Fischer’s example, I wrote a series of analytical appendices to help make sense of persons, events, and connections before I made final decisions about how to structure the narrative chapters. I therefore thank Professor Fischer for his example and advice.

I would also like to thank David Stanhope, Jay Hakes, and Bert Nason of the

Carter Library in for their hospitality and assistance. Thanks particularly to

Mr. Nason for helping me make the most of research opportunities while there.

After meeting Mr. Hakes, I enjoyed reading his recent book, A Declaration of Energy

Independence, which educated me on the history of the idea of energy independence in U.S. political discourse.

I spent many productive hours in Harvard’s Widener Library and thank the staff there for many episodes of assistance and for maintaining such a magnificent research resource.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...... v

Acknowledgements...... vi

List of Tables ...... viii

List of Figures ...... xiv

I. Introduction...... 1

Carter Campaign Platform on Nuclear Power...... 4

Ford Administration Response on Reprocessing Policy...... 9

The Ford/MITRE Study...... 10

Carter Nuclear Policy Statements of April 1977 ...... 13

Rethinking the Origins of Carter Administration Fuel Cycle Policy..... 18

II. Background to the Plutonium Economy Policy Debate...... 21

The Nuclear Subgovernment ...... 26

NASA Challenge and the 1962 Report to the President ...... 28

The Great Bandwagon and the Plutonium Economy ...... 37

Nixon Administration Budget Contests...... 39

President Nixon Promotes the LMFBR...... 41

Emergence of Opposition to AEC Reactor Programs...... 43

Adversary Science and Technology Assessment...... 48

viii

Dismantling the AEC...... 50

1973 Oil Shock Effects ...... 52

The U.S. Enrichment Capacity Crunch ...... 54

1974 Indian Test ...... 56

Issue Networks and the Nuclear Subgovernment...... 57

III. The Anti-Plutonium Issue Network...... 60

NRDC Origins ...... 62

SIPI versus AEC Lawsuit ...... 64

NRDC Plutonium Economy Policy Analysis...... 67

Contesting the Uranium Shortage Assumption ...... 68

LMFBR Program Misallocates Federal Resources...... 70

“Hot Particle” Theory of Plutonium Toxicity ...... 71

Plutonium Diversion and Civil Liberties...... 72

Confederates in Anti-Plutonium Economy Advocacy ...... 74

NRDC Intervention in LMFBR and GESMO EIS Proceedings...... 79

NRDC Role in Framing Plutonium Policy Choices in Early 1975 ...... 83

NRDC Involvement in the Carter Campaign...... 85

IV. Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project 1972-1974...... 87

Origins of the Ford Foundation EPP Study...... 88

EPP Staffing and Mandate ...... 90

Analytic Framework Emphasized Conservation...... 96

Nuclear Supply Scenarios...... 99

Plutonium Economy Recommendations ...... 104

ix

Controversy and Industry Reaction...... 107

Freeman’s Involvement with the Carter Campaign and

Administration...... 112

V. The Nonproliferation Issue Network ...... 115

Nixon Administration Conflicts with the Arms Control Community.116

The Shift to Extra-Governmental Nonproliferation Advocacy...... 119

The New Concern over Nuclear Terrorism ...... 121

The Taylor/Willrich/McPhee Collaboration...... 122

Nexus to Carter ...... 125

Rise of Nonproliferation Discourse within Foreign Policy Fora...... 127

Tone of Urgency...... 129

The Ford/MITRE Study...... 131

Assessing a Delay in the Plutonium Economy...... 136

Addressing the Sufficiency of Uranium Resources...... 138

Primacy of Nonproliferation Concerns...... 141

Nonproliferation Issue Advocacy Context of the Campaign...... 143

VI. Technology Alternatives to the LMFBR ...... 145

The CANDU Reactor...... 145

Rickover’s Light Water Breeder Reactor...... 148

VII. Plutonium Economy Policy Development in the Carter Campaign...... 158

Political Context of the Campaign...... 159

Carter’s View of Nuclear Power...... 162

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Carter as an Environmentalist ...... 165

Context of Carter’s July 1975 Energy Policy Speech...... 170

Constructing a Pragmatic Stance on Nuclear Energy...... 172

Elaborating Plutonium Economy Policy ...... 178

VIII. Conclusions...... 184

Appendix I. Spectrum of Relevant Issue Networks—Summary as of July 1975...197

Appendix II. Analysis of the Anti-Plutonium Issue Network in 1975...... 203

Appendix III. NRDC Involvement in the National Council of Churches Statement of

Concern over the Plutonium Economy...... 212

Appendix IV. Influential Energy Policy Sources in Early 1975...... 219

Appendix V. Analysis of Key Elements in ’s Speech on Energy Policy

Delivered July 11, 1975, at the Washington Press Club...... 229

Appendix VI. Analysis of Public and Leadership Attitudes towards Nuclear Power in

1975...... 242

Appendix VII. Ford/MITRE Study Background...... 250

Origins and Team Selection...... 250

Process and Subject Matter Responsibilities...... 252

Prior Associations of the Ford/MITRE Study Team ...... 256

Nexus to the Carter Campaign in May 1976...... 263

Subsequent Roles in the Carter Administration...... 266

Appendix VIII. Chronology of Relevant Events ...... 269

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References...... 295

xii

List of Tables

Table 1. Provenance of Key Policy Elements of Carter 4/77 Nuclear Policy

Statements ...... 16

Table 2. Fission Energy Content of Domestic Nuclear Resources—Civilian

Nuclear Power: A Report to the President 1962...... 35

Table 3. Summary of Advocacy Positions Relevant to Nuclear Power Policy,

1975...... 202

Table 4. Relative Participation Frequency in Anti-Plutonium Advocacy 1971-

1975...... 205

Table 5. Anti-Plutonium Advocacy Events: Participants and Cited Sources ...206

Table 6. Citation Analysis of Relevant Energy Policy Analyses...... 224

Table 7. Analysis of Carter’s July 11, 1975, Speech on Energy Policy ...... 232

Table 8. Ford/MITRE Study Participants by Source ...... 251

Table 9. Chapter Authorship—Ford/MITRE Study...... 253

Table 10. Advisors Consulted for the Ford/MITRE Study...... 255

Table 11. Common Associations among Ford/MITRE Study Participants...... 256

Table 12. Chronology of Relevant Events...... 269

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List of Figures

Fig. 1 Comparison of Selected Federal R&D Expenditures, 1956-1964 ...... 29

Fig. 2 Cumulative U.S. Primary Energy Demand Projection—Civilian Nuclear

Power: A Report to the President 1962...... 34

Fig. 3 LMFBR Program Expenditures, 1959-1975...... 37

Fig. 4 Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project Scenario Projections and

Actual Energy Use, 1975-2000...... 99

Fig. 5 Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project Scenario Projections and

Actual Data for Primary Energy Derived from Nuclear Fission, 1973-

2000...... 101

Fig. 6 Ford/MITRE Study, Primary Energy Demand Projection Compared

with FFEPP Scenarios and Actual Historic Use Data...... 137

Fig. 7 Selected Energy Policy Analysis Citation Relationships as of July

1975...... 228

Fig. 8 Schematic of Likely Influences: July 1975 Energy Policy Speech ...... 241

Fig. 9 U.S. Public Perception of Energy shortages 1973-1975...... 243

Fig. 10 Public Support, by Party Affiliation, for Nuclear Plant Construction,

1975 ...... 246

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Fig. 11 Leadership Support, by Category, for Nuclear Plant Construction,

1975...... 247

Fig. 12 Credibility, among Democratic Voters, of Policy Elites by Category,

1975...... 248

Fig. 13 Schematic of Prior Associations, Ford/MITRE Study ...... 258

Fig. 14 Nexus between Ford/MITRE Study and the Carter Campaign, May

1976...... 265

Fig. 15 Ford/MITRE Study Team Subsequent Involvement with Carter

Administration ...... 268

xv

Chapter I.

Introduction

Light water reactor (LWR) nuclear plants operating in the presently use a once-through or “open” fuel cycle that harvests less than two percent of the potential energy available in the loaded nuclear fuel.1 This inherent shortcoming of light water reactors and a persistent belief that uranium was a scarce resource prompted a long-running U.S. government-led research program to achieve dramatically higher energy yields from nuclear fuels. As originally envisioned by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the U.S. agency initially responsible for developing and regulating nuclear power, the key to supporting a transition to nuclear power without eventually exhausting uranium reserves would be to build a second generation of “fast breeder” reactors that would more efficiently convert uranium to plutonium while producing energy.2 The Liquid Metal

Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR), the proposed design most favored by the AEC, carried the potential to “breed” more plutonium than it consumed, offering the prospect of a virtually unlimited energy source if the spent fuel were reprocessed to recover and reuse the surplus plutonium. In 1970, AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg

1 Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons (Chicago: Press, 2001), 150. For an overview of technology, see also Richard Wolfson, Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology, Rev. ed., New Liberal Arts Series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 2 Glenn T. Seaborg and Benjamin S. Loeb, The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 152.

2 coined the term “plutonium economy” to both succinctly capture this vision of a power industry anchored by LMFBRs and to connote the accompanying prosperity that he believed this plutonium-fueled technology would engender.3

Until late 1976, it was the policy of the U.S. nuclear bureaucracy to eventually close the uranium/plutonium fuel cycle in order to achieve the potential benefits that this step seemed to offer. This consensus began to fray in the waning days of the Ford Administration, however, and then was promptly repudiated by the incoming Carter Administration. This sudden U.S. policy reversal, announced in

April 1977 was jarring to the U.S. nuclear industry, the U.S. nuclear research establishment, and U.S. allies, and was controversial at the time. The once-through fuel cycle has been the continuing operating policy of the U.S. nuclear power industry since 1977, despite the divergent example of fuel cycle policies in other

OECD nuclear programs, so the 1977 U.S. fuel cycle policy transition has had lasting significance. A reexamination of the policy advocacy that drove this shift is timely, as the debate over the merits of the open vs. closed fuel cycles continues, and U.S. fuel cycle policy is once again under review.4

Apart from the continuing relevance of the debate that led to this transition, a further reason for undertaking a study of the origins of the once-through fuel cycle

3 Deborah Shapley, “Reactor Proliferation Threatens a Nuclear Black Market,” Science 172, no. 3979 (1971).This article refers to a speech that Seaborg made in October of 1970 titled “The Plutonium Economy of the Future.” 4 “Notice of Cancellation of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS),” Federal Register 74, no. 123 (2009). For example, the George W. Bush Administration initiated a program called the Global Nuclear Partnership (GNEP), the effect of which would have been to close the fuel cycle. The Obama Administration has recently announced (June 29, 2009) its intention to discontinue GNEP, but in January 2010 appointed a blue ribbon panel to once again study the issue of closing the fuel cycle.

3 in the U.S. is that gaps remain in the existing scholarship in this area. Much of what has been written about Carter Administration energy and nonproliferation policies focuses on the challenges President Carter experienced in implementing his proposals once elected and on the infeasibility of his stated goals.5 Implicit in many accounts is the notion that Carter developed and pursued his energy policy and nonproliferation goals as an outgrowth of a misguided and perhaps naïve moralism, and that his support for these policies was therefore contrary to his political interest.6 Because Carter described himself as an environmentalist and consulted with during his campaign, many accounts assume that Carter was an opponent of nuclear power.7 Many retrospective sources further ascribe a decisive influence to a high profile study of nuclear power policy that the Ford Foundation published shortly after Carter took office, noting that many persons involved took roles in the Carter Administration. A final widely held view worth commenting on is the notion that the turn away from the plutonium economy technology program was

5 For a typical treatment of Carter’s difficulties in navigating his national energy policy legislation through Congress, see Burton I. Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006). For a critique of the utility of Carter’s nonproliferation policy, see Ryukichi Imai and Henry S. Rowen, Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Proliferation: Japanese and American Views (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980). 6 For example Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech of July 15. 1979: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005). 7 Glenn Theodore Seaborg, A Chemist in the White House: From the to the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1998), 259. Seaborg wrote “President Carter … was not an advocate for civilian nuclear power during or after his presidency.”James Schlesinger, Final Edited Transcript: Interview with Dr. James Schlesinger, July 19, 1984 . Schlesinger stated: “Carter had a very high regard for Ralph Nader, and Nader was all over him on energy issues, most importantly on nuclear power.”

4 all but inevitable by the time Carter formed his policy and that the Ford and Carter

Administrations had essentially joint authorship of this transition.8

A common root for these misconceptions about the origins of Carter’s nuclear energy and nonproliferation policies is that all of these accounts fail to adequately consider the context in which Carter developed his positions prior to and during the early period of his campaign, before he was the Democratic front- runner and nominee. A close examination of this early period reveals a more complex and logical rationale for Carter’s nuclear policy development. This study therefore attempts to examine the context, influences, and particularly the early development of President Carter’s fuel cycle policy in order to improve upon the portrayal available in existing sources.

Carter Campaign Platform on Nuclear Power

From the beginning of his presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter focused significant attention on nuclear power and energy policy in framing his issues platform. Carter’s familiarity with nuclear technology from his tenure in the Navy allowed him to position himself as a credible authority on an issue that had political salience, particularly with Democratic primary voters. His capsule description of

8 For examples, see Michael J. Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Garwin and Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons; Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon. The ongoing Congressional opposition to terminating the Clinch River breeder reactor that Carter faced throughout his term makes clear that killing the plutonium economy program was not a consensus position until well past the end of Carter’s term in office, and such eventual consensus was only temporary.

5 himself, repeated in some form during numerous stump speeches, prominently featured the (somewhat exaggerated) claim that he was a nuclear :

I am a Southerner and an American. I am a farmer, an engineer, a father and a husband, a Christian and politician and former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a naval officer, a canoeist, and among other things, a lover of Bob Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’ poetry.9

In the December 1974 speech in which Carter announced his campaign, he devoted a section to energy and the environment, asserting that “we are grossly wasting our energy resources,” and another section to the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation.10 In July of 1975, Carter first directly addressed plutonium economy programs and nuclear power in a speech on energy policy, arguing that the

LMFBR program was economically unjustified and that it should be downscaled. He also outlined specific safety measures that should be put in place for nuclear reactors. He concluded by arguing that unless the U.S. adopted a policy combining energy conservation with increased investment in solar and coal based generation, there would be “no alternative to greatly increased dependence on nuclear power.”11 So, a year before he won the Democratic nomination, and well before he had risen to national prominence, Carter had already articulated a position that foreshadowed key aspects of the nuclear policy announcements that he would make shortly after taking office. Notably, he did not adopt a broad antinuclear position, as

9 Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1975), 2.

10 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 5 vols., vol. 1, part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1978), 7, 9. 11 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol. 1, part 1, 74-76.

6 would have been the case had he endorsed the idea of a moratorium on nuclear power, as Ralph Nader and others at the time were advocating. Instead, he proposed technical and regulatory measures to address safety concerns, and framed nuclear power as an acceptable but last choice alternative. The plutonium economy technology program represented a plan to accelerate dependence on nuclear power, so Carter could oppose it without opposing nuclear power as a matter of broad principle. This nuanced position allowed Carter to appeal to environmentalists and those committed to a more uncompromising antinuclear position without associating himself too closely with their controversial demands.12

During 1976, after becoming the Democratic front-runner, Carter made two more significant speeches that addressed plutonium economy policies. He spoke at the U.N. on May 13 1976, at a conference on nuclear power and world order. In his

U.N. speech, Carter again presented nuclear power as a last alternative among other sources. He went on to describe his concerns that the spread of fuel cycle technologies, particularly spent fuel reprocessing plants, to non-nuclear weapons states would increase the risk of weapons proliferation. He proposed that such technology should not be sold to non-weapons states and that existing nuclear powers such as the United States should ensure enough uranium enrichment capacity such that they could indefinitely supply the low enriched uranium (LEU)

12 Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), 304-311. Glad and others argue that this pattern of straddling controversial issues was characteristic of Carter’s campaign.

7 requirements of any LWRs sold to non-weapons states.13 In effect, Carter was advocating in this speech a policy that if fully realized would require states with advanced nuclear industries to cooperate in ensuring that non-weapons states could only operate LWRs and only do so via a once-through fuel cycle. In this way, the risk of plutonium diversion could be mitigated.

To address the obvious asymmetry that this approach implied between fuel cycles for advanced and developing states, Carter asked the rhetorical question, “If the United States does not want developing nations to have commercial plutonium, why should we be permitted to have it under our sovereign control?”14 So, Carter in this May 1976 speech introduced the idea that in order to encourage the international adoption of a once-through fuel cycle that would have a lower associated weapons proliferation risk, the United States should lead by example.

Carter made another speech in San Diego on September 25, 1976, on the topic of nuclear proliferation in which he made many of the same points as the U.N. speech, but also added an explicit promise to call for a moratorium on the sale of enrichment and reprocessing plants that would apply retroactively to deals that the

13 LWRs require that their uranium fuel be isotopically enriched such that the proportion of fissile U235 to the more naturally abundant U238 be raised to a level sufficient to overcome the effects of absorption by the light water coolant and moderator. For most U.S. reactors, this level is at or above 3%. Any uranium enriched to less than 20% is classified as LEU. See Wolfson, Nuclear Choices, 158. 14 James Earl Carter, “Three Steps toward Nuclear Responsibility,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 32, no. 8 (1976): 13.

8

French and Germans had already announced to supply such facilities to Pakistan and Brazil.15

By May of 1976, when Carter spoke at the U.N. conference on nuclear proliferation, there was already substantial interest in elite policy-making circles, both in Congress and among what Dye terms “private policy-making organizations”16 such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral

Commission, Brookings Institution, and related ad-hoc panels in the escalating risk of weapons proliferation. For example, there were six attempts in Congress during

1975-1976 to produce legislation to limit the proliferation of sensitive nuclear technology, with one, the so-called Symington Amendment passing in July 1976.17

The Ford Administration had acted to address the issue of proliferation, but had done so via Kissinger’s preferred method: quiet diplomacy via discreet meetings among nuclear supplier nations.18 The fact that these meetings were not public and that they were ineffective in preventing the French and West Germans from striking deals for export of fuel cycle facilities left President Ford exposed to Carter’s criticism for a lack of an effective nonproliferation policy.

15 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 5 vols., vol. 1, part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1978), 815-819. 16 Thomas R. Dye, “Oligarchic Tendencies in National Policy-Making: The Role of Private Policy-Planning Organizations,” Journal of Politics 40, no. 2 (1978): 309-331. 17 Robert L. Beckman, “The Nuclear Non Proliferation Act of 1978: Origins, Contradictions and Implications for Control of Peaceful Nuclear Activities” (Washington, DC: American University, 1984), chapter 6. The Symington Amendment nominally would trigger a ban on appropriations to any country that sold or acquired reprocessing equipment, but as Beckman argues (345) was so watered down as to be practically useless. 18 Beckman, “The NNPA of 1978,” 324-328.

9

Ford Administration Response on Reprocessing Policy

Presumably at least partly due to pressure from Carter on this issue,

President Ford authorized a study in the spring of 1976 led by Robert Fri, the deputy director of the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), the successor agency to the AEC, to examine the rationale for providing additional federal support for the development of a large private reprocessing plant planned for Barnwell, South Carolina, in light of domestic, international, and proliferation concerns. The Fri report was completed in September 1976 and led to an internal debate among Ford’s advisors about how far to go in restricting plutonium reprocessing. Ford opted for the least restrictive option proposed.19 On October 28,

1976, with a week to go before the election, Ford released a statement in which he announced that

the United States should no longer regard reprocessing of used nuclear fuel to produce plutonium as a necessary and inevitable step in the nuclear fuel cycle, and we should pursue recycling and reprocessing in the future only if they are found to be consistent with our international objectives.20

President Ford had by this statement made the first step to back away from the prior policy of implementing the plutonium economy vision. It was arguably only a tentative step, and taken defensively. The statement stipulated only a delay in proceeding with reprocessing, and did not back away from the LMFBR. Ford appears to have been responding to elite opinion and merely acknowledging the

19 Les Gapay, “Environment, Arms-Curb Aides Opposed Ford's Plutonium Reprocessing Policy,” Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1976. 20 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 272.

10 new regulatory status quo: On May 27, 1976, a U.S. Appeals Court had ruled that the

Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s interim plan to allow LWRs to use reprocessed plutonium fuel was unacceptable due to unaddressed proliferation risks and mandated a delay to allow further study, so as a practical matter, plutonium fuel use in U.S. reactors was already under judicial restriction by the time Ford made his statement.21 Ford’s step back from reprocessing, while perhaps tactically important in addressing pressure from Carter and Congress, was fundamentally ambiguous.22

It did not resolve the conflicting implications that stalling reprocessing and proceeding with the LMFBR program presented. After Carter won the election a week later, resolving the ambiguities in President Ford’s plutonium economy policy would fall to the new administration.

The Ford/MITRE Study

Among the most prominent of the independent reviews of nuclear power under way during the 1976 presidential campaign was an effort undertaken by the

Ford Foundation Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group (hereafter referred to as the

Ford/MITRE study).23 McGeorge Bundy, former Dean at Harvard and National

Security Advisor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had been president of the

21 David Burnham, “Court Bars Plutonium's Commercial Use,” New York Times, May 28, 1976. 22 Robert Keatley, “...And a Strategem for Upstaging Carter,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 1976. 23 Bundy selected Spurgeon Keeny Jr., an arms control expert whom he had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and former deputy director of ACDA under Nixon, to head the nuclear power study. Because Keeny was at the time employed by the MITRE Corporation, the Ford Foundation contracted with the MITRE Corporation to administer the study under Keeny’s leadership. As a consequence of this arrangement, the resulting study became known as the Ford/MITRE report.

11

Ford Foundation since leaving government service in 1966. Bundy drove the Ford

Foundation to support progressive social causes to an extent that he provoked political reprisal and scorn from Congressional Republicans and the Nixon

Administration.24 In the area of energy and environmental policy, this progressive thrust was manifest in Bundy’s early and broad support for public interest environmental law firms, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and in his establishment and considerable financial support for a Ford Foundation

Energy Policy Project (FFEPP) that ran from 1972 to 1974. The controversial recommendations that emerged from the FFEPP were broadly critical of Nixon/Ford

Administration energy policy and in particular challenged core assumptions that undergirded the AEC’s plutonium economy roadmap.25 Responding to the controversy that the FFEPP studies provoked and recognizing the importance of nuclear power as an issue in the upcoming presidential election campaign, Bundy decided in 1975 to initiate a further study of the pressing nuclear energy policy decisions that would face the next administration.26

The Ford/MITRE team reached conclusions that were consonant with the positions that Carter had outlined during his campaign: They rejected calls for a moratorium on nuclear power, instead finding that LWRs had social impacts and

24 Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1998), 387-390. Bird quotes then Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan as complaining that “… The Ford Foundation has become the Exchequer and Command Post for the entire American Left.” 25 S. David Freeman, A Time to Choose: America's Energy Future (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1974), Chapter 13, particularly 343. 26 Martin Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares: The Energy Decade in Retrospect (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1983), 152-153.

12 cost characteristics that were broadly comparable to coal-fired generation.27 They found little if any economic benefit in either commercial reprocessing or LMFBRs and saw associated proliferation risk. Therefore, they concluded that both of these plutonium economy technologies should not be introduced at least until the end of the century.28 They recommended that both the reprocessing plant under development in Barnwell, SC, and the first LMFBR demonstration plant in Clinch

River, TN, be cancelled or defunded. The report made a number of further policy recommendations directed at the matters for decision facing the new administration regarding nuclear energy and asserted that “we are convinced … that the President must be directly involved in the formulation of both overall energy and nuclear energy policy.”29 Indeed, the report was timed and written with the intention of influencing the incoming presidential administration.30

Carter, by the time of his campaign, was quite familiar with the Ford

Foundation’s energy policy studies and had purposefully cultivated contacts within the ranks of the elite New York and Washington private policy-making establishment in which the Ford Foundation was embedded.31 While Governor of

Georgia, he had joined the Trilateral Commission and through this association met

27 Spurgeon M. Keeney et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977), 4. 28 Keeney et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, 29. 29 Keeney et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, 27. 30 Spurgeon Keeny, Interview by Author, May 26 and June 1, 2009. 31 S. David Freeman, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007), 1; Laurence Stern, “Carter Taps Establishment for Brain Trust,” Washington Post, May 8, 1976.

13 former government officials who were likely candidates for appointed positions in any future Democratic administration.32 Carter was aware of the Ford/MITRE study effort well before it published its final report. Several of the study participants had assisted indirectly in preparing Carter’s speech on nonproliferation that he had delivered to the U.N. in May 1976.33 So, there was a rich nexus between the

Ford/MITRE study group, the larger Democratic elite policy-making and arms control establishment, and the Carter campaign. Perhaps the best measure of

Carter’s regard for this stratum of policy elites was his appointment of twenty fellow members of the Trilateral Commission and several members of the Ford/MITRE study team to posts in his administration.34

Carter Nuclear Policy Statements of April 1977

Within a week of taking office on January 20, 1977, President Carter launched two staff efforts that involved a reassessment of nuclear power: A policy statement on nuclear nonproliferation (internally referred to as Presidential Review

Memorandum 15 or PRM-15); and a comprehensive national energy plan (NEP) that would consider nuclear power within the context of an overall plan for meeting U.S. energy needs. Both projects were urgent priorities: PRM-15 was initially scheduled

32 Glad, Jimmy Carter, 267-268. 33 Richard N. Gardner, Interview by Author, January 23, 2010. 34 From the Ford/MITRE study: Abram Chayes and Albert Carnesale as representatives to INFCE; Spurgeon Keeny, Deputy Director of ACDA; Philip Farley, Chief Deputy to the Special Representative for Nonproliferation; Joseph Nye, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology; and Harold Brown. For an extensive analysis of Carter Administration appointee associations with the Trilateral Commission and related private policy- making organizations, see Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond: Power and Politics in the 1980s (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1980), 104-105.

14 for completion by March 21 (later pushed out to April 7) and the NEP was scheduled for announcement on April 20. A team under Joseph Nye at the State Department, in close coordination with staff from various agencies, including NSC and ERDA, worked on PRM-15 policy development.35 A team under Jim Schlesinger, Carter’s

Special Assistant for Energy, worked on developing the NEP.36 With these policy development efforts nearing completion in the background, Keeny, Bundy, and most of the Ford/MITRE team presented their report in person to President Carter at a meeting in the Oval Office on March 21, 1977. Carter was so pleased with the recommendations that he is reported to have told Prime Minister Fukada of Japan, who visited him later the same day, that the Ford/MITRE report corresponded closely with his own views on nuclear power.37

On April 7, 1977, President Carter made a speech and answered follow-up questions on nuclear power policy. He followed this with a televised speech on April

18th and an April 20th speech to a joint session of Congress to introduce his National

Energy Policy.38 Taken together, these policy statements outlined a new approach to

U.S. nuclear energy policy that was remarkably close to what the Ford/MITRE report had recommended. Significantly, Carter announced that the U.S. would

“indefinitely defer” commercial reprocessing of plutonium and would “restructure the U.S. breeder program” away from plutonium-based designs (i.e., away from the

LMFBR) and would delay the introduction of breeders. After some initial confusion

35 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 132-140. 36 Schlesinger, Interview 1984. 37 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 156.

15 about whether Carter intended to cancel both the Barnwell reprocessing plant project and the Clinch River LMFBR project, Carter clarified that he favored discontinuing both of these high-profile aspects of ERDA’s plutonium economy implementation plan. Carter also called for an international effort to evaluate technical means of reducing proliferation risks of closed fuel cycles. The intent of these moves was to influence other states to either emulate the U.S. example and implement an open fuel cycle, or in the case of states determined to employ a closed fuel cycle, to seek technical alternatives to the existing plutonium cycle, and most importantly, to discourage states with advanced nuclear industries from exporting closed fuel cycle technology to non-weapons states.39

Table 1 summarizes the key policy elements of President Carter’s April 1977 nuclear policy statements, relevant prior advocacy by Carter during his campaign, and by the Ford/MITRE study in their volume Nuclear Power: Issues and Choices.

The correspondence apparent in table 1 suggests that Carter’s April 1977 policy had origins early in his campaign.

39 James Earl Carter, “Nuclear Power Policy Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters on Decisions Following a Review of U.S. Policy, April 7, 1977,” The American Presidency Project Online .; James Earl Carter, “National Energy Plan—Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress, April 20, 1977,” The American Presidency Project Online, .

16

Carter Carter Carter Ford/MITRE Key Policy Element Campaign 4/7/77 4/20/77 Study41 Statements40 Speech42 Speech43

Emphasize Energy Conservation 7/11/75 p.147-155 X

Nuclear power as a lowest 7/11/75 X priority among energy sources

Increase safety measures in 7/11/75 p. 242 X nuclear plants

Defer commercial reprocessing 9/25/76 p. 333 X of plutonium

Discontinue funding to p. 53 X Barnwell, SC plant

Restructure breeder program: 7/11/75 p. 363 X X Deemphasize LMFBR

Defund Clinch River LMFBR p. 363 X demonstration plant

Initiate international collaboration to reduce risks of 5/13/76 p. 381 X closed fuel cycles

Streamline approval process for X LWRs to speed construction

Table 1. Provenance of Key Policy Elements of Carter 4/77 Nuclear Policy Statements.

40 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol 1, part 1; The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol 1, part 2. 41 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group. 42 Carter, “Nuclear Power Policy Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters on Decisions Following a Review of U.S. Policy, April 7, 1977.” 43 Carter, “National Energy Plan—Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress, April 20, 1977.”

17

Areas of difference between President Carter’s April statements and the recommendations of the Ford/MITRE study were subtle: President Carter echoed his campaign formula of casting nuclear energy as a “last resort” among power sources, stating that safety measures should be increased, implying that the hazards of nuclear power justified this lowest priority, for example, when compared with coal. The Ford/MITRE study, by contrast, found that “the ranges of possible social costs, such as health and environmental impacts, associated with coal and nuclear power … overlap to such an extent that neither has a clear advantage.” The

Ford/MITRE team, therefore, found no justification for consigning nuclear power to a “last resort.”44

A notable point of apparent inconsistency between Carter’s campaign statements and April 1977 nuclear policy statements concerned streamlining the approval process for LWR licensing, implying both a push back against environmentalists and local opponents who were slowing approvals through intervention, and an assertion of federal over state or local regulatory prerogatives.

Ralph Nader, who was one of the more outspoken critics of nuclear power at the time, criticized this apparent inconsistency by pointing out that speeding plant approvals did not conform with the rhetoric of nuclear energy as a “last priority,” ascribing this portion of Carter’s new policy to the influence of James Schlesinger,

44 Keeney et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, 4. It is worth remarking that the Ford/MITRE team did not consider climate change effects in reaching this conclusion about roughly equivalent social costs or “externalities.”

18

Carter’s energy advisor and former Chairman of the AEC.45 Rather than an anomalous inconsistency, however, this simultaneous rejection of the plutonium economy technology program and rhetoric about nuclear energy as a “last resort,” together with measures to facilitate the siting and construction of LWRs defined the essence of a nuanced nuclear energy policy that Carter crafted early in his campaign.

While this policy formulation would appear discrepant to those who were either broadly opposed to or supporters of nuclear power, within the context of Carter’s own experience before and early in the campaign, his nuclear policy had ample internal coherence. To best understand how this could be so, it is necessary to trace the energy policy advocacy environment around Carter during his campaign.

Rethinking the Origins of Carter Administration Fuel Cycle Policy

Many existing treatments of the April 1977 U.S. fuel cycle policy transition credit the Ford/MITRE study as the decisive influence behind this shift. This is true of retrospective third-party accounts such as Bupp and Derian’s The Failed Promise of Nuclear Power (1981),46 Brenner’s Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation (1981),47 and Beckman’s The Nuclear Non Proliferation Act of 1978: Origins, Contradictions and

Implications for Control of Peaceful Nuclear Activities (1984).48 Seaborg’s memoir,

45 Luther J. Carter, “Carter Energy Message: How Stiff a Prescription?” Science 196, no. 4290 (1977): 630. 46 Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, The Failed Promise of Nuclear Power (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 172. 47 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 118-122. 48 Beckman, “The NNPA of 1978,” 417.

19

The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times (1993)49 also ascribes a decisive influence to the Ford/MITRE study. Contemporary accounts asserted the causative link between the Ford/MITRE study and Carter’s policy statements. The Washington Post on April 7, 1977, for example, stated that “Carter’s declaration … is the Ford Foundation report [i.e Ford/MITRE study] translated into policy.”50 All of these accounts note the close correspondence between the

Ford/MITRE recommendations and Carter’s policy (apparent from figure 1), the timing of the report’s release as Carter was finalizing his policy, and the uptake of many Ford/MITRE team members into relevant roles in the Carter Administration as suggestive of the interpretation that the Ford/MITRE study was the decisive influence behind the decision to forgo the plutonium economy vision.

It is evident, however, that Carter’s turn away from the plutonium economy vision began before the Ford/MITRE study began, so the question of identifying influences is necessarily a more complex problem. The fact that Carter had by July of 1975 already articulated core precepts such as the potential of conservation to reduce energy demand growth, a pragmatic acceptance of water cooled reactors, and his rejection of the LMFBR suggests that the Ford/MITRE study was important as a confirmation of Carter’s views and perhaps an elaboration more than as the original source. This study, therefore, seeks to reconstruct the context and identify relevant influences around Carter during the early period of his campaign in order

49 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 182-183. 50 J. P. Smith, “President to Ask Congress to Stop Breeder Reactors,” Washington Post, April 7, 1977, A1.

20 to better explain the motivation and logic that guided his choices in forming his fuel cycle policy. It is evident that Carter held fairly tenaciously to his views on fuel cycle policy once in office, so understanding this early campaign period appears especially important in developing a more complete theory of the origins of Carter

Administration plutonium economy policy.51

51 Carter’s use of the first veto of his administration on November 5, 1977, to block a bill that authorized funding for the Clinch River LMFBR project highlights his tenacious commitment to the plutonium economy policy positions that he formed early in his campaign.

Chapter II.

Background to the Plutonium Economy Policy Debate

Soon after the achievement of criticality in the first chain reacting “pile” (or reactor), ’s research team began to study various technical possibilities for power reactor designs.52 In April 1944 at one such meeting of the “New Piles” study group, Fermi and Leo Szilard described concepts for fast neutron reactors that would generate a surplus of fissile material and shortly thereafter coined the term

“breeders” to describe reactors exhibiting this characteristic trait.53 At the time they first conceived of breeder reactors, Fermi’s group thought that the total worldwide resource of uranium was less than 20,000 tons.54 Given this very limited resource and the priority assigned at the time to weapons production, it seemed obvious to

Fermi and his colleagues that civilian application of nuclear power would only be possible via breeder reactors. This view became a “common knowledge” shared belief within the AEC and became durable enough that the AEC was still defending the notion of uranium scarcity in the early 1970s despite the fact that, by this time,

52 Alvin Martin Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer (New York: Springer, 1994), 40. 53 Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 39. 54 Alvin Martin Weinberg, Nuclear Reactions: Science and Trans-Science (New York: Springer, 1992), 324.

22 official estimates of total U.S. uranium resources had increased by almost three orders of magnitude since World War II.55

Alvin Weinberg, one of the researchers in Fermi’s group at the University of

Chicago during the Manhattan Project, would spend much of his subsequent career developing reactor technology for the AEC, serving as the director of Oak Ridge

National Laboratory (ORNL) from 1955 to 1973. While at ORNL, Weinberg collaborated in the development of the LWR, which was initially intended just for the specialized purpose of naval propulsion, and supervised research into the various breeder reactor concepts that the AEC investigated. Weinberg’s autobiography presents an overview of the many approaches that the AEC explored to develop a practical breeder reactor.56 The title of Weinberg’s autobiography reflects the theme running through his career of seeking “technological fixes” to social problems, particularly the energy and resource scarcity that seemed certain to develop as world population growth continued.57 Weinberg later explained his greater confidence in technological fixes such as breeder reactors over what he termed “social fixes,” such as encouraging people to conserve energy, by observing

55 See for example Robert D. Niniger, “Uranium Reserves and Requirements,” in Nuclear Fuel Resources and Requirements (Washington, DC: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Production and Materials Management, 1973). By this point, even though the AEC acknowledged a total U.S. theoretical uranium resource of over 20M tons, they emphasized that total reserves available in high grade deposits recoverable at less than $30/lb was only slightly more than 2M tons, an amount inadequate to support projected nuclear power industry requirements without plutonium recycle or breeding. Implicit in this argument was the assumption that higher cost uranium ores would be impractical to develop. 56 Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era. 57 In this respect, Weinberg was influenced by his former colleague Harrison Brown who in the mid-1950s published several works examining the theme of eventual neo-Malthusian resource pressures. See Harrison Brown, James Bonner, and John Weir, The Next Hundred Years (New York: Viking Press, 1957); Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man's Future (New York: Viking Press, 1958).

23 that social fixes require “lots of individual decisions” to achieve behavioral changes whereas technological fixes could be deployed centrally and with less uncertainty.58

In 1959, Weinberg outlined his belief in the unique importance of nuclear power as such a technological fix in a paper titled “Energy as the Ultimate Raw

Material, or—Problems of Burning the Rocks and Burning the Seas.”59 In this article,

Weinberg addressed the long-term “asymptotic” future of humanity, a point in the distant future when world population would have stabilized (as an expected consequence of the spread of industrialization) at approximately seven billion.60

Eventually, Weinberg reasoned, such a large population would exhaust all fossil fuel deposits and high-quality mineral ores, and would then have to rely on just the sun, the earth, the oceans and the air to supply most of the energy and mineral requirements of civilization. The title of his paper referred to the central importance in this long-range context that Weinberg attached to nuclear energy in the form of fusion technology (which would consume deuterium extracted from seawater— hence “burning the seas”) and fission (which would consume uranium and thorium extracted from common rocks such as granites—hence “burning the rocks”).

Reflecting the “common knowledge” assumption that high-grade ores of uranium and thorium were scarce and thus likely to be rapidly exhausted, Weinberg

58 Weinberg, Nuclear Reactions, 208. 59 Alvin M. Weinberg, “Energy as the Ultimate Raw Material: Or—Problems of Burning the Rocks and Burning the Seas,” Today 12, no. 11 (1959): 18-25. 60 At the time Weinberg was making this forecast, world population was ~ 3B. We are now (2010) approaching Weinberg’s projected asymptotic figure! Weinberg drew the conclusion that world population would eventually stabilize after living standards typical of industrialized societies spread to developing nations from Harrison Brown’s analysis of national population growth rates in The Next Hundred Years (1957).

24 concluded that an essentially endless supply of primary fission energy might nevertheless be derived from the very dilute but abundant traces of these elements distributed in common granites. But the energy that could be derived from these abundant deposits balanced against the energy requirements of mining and refining this material would yield a net positive result only if fission reactors could extract most of the potential energy from the fuel. Consequently, Weinberg concluded:

Thus it seems inescapable that the solution to the ultimate energy problem by way of rock burning depends on reducing to practice the nuclear breeding process: i.e. making practical breeder reactors with reasonably short doubling times—of the order of 10 years.61

Weinberg reasoned that an endless supply of nuclear energy could solve all of the other major resource problems of mankind in the “asymptotic” state. Primary energy from nuclear sources could be used to: desalinate seawater for irrigation; extract nitrogen from the atmosphere to produce fertilizers; and separate hydrogen for use as transportation fuel. Thus, Weinberg argued that the technologies of the fission breeder reactor and the more speculative fusion reactor offered the compelling prospect of a technological fix that might avert a long-term Malthusian resource crisis. Beyond merely noting the feasibility of averting such a crisis,

Weinberg argued that the United States had both a moral responsibility to future generations to do so and a self-interested motive in promoting world order:

Should we succeed in supplying energy really cheaply from the rocks or, with good luck, from the seas … then the problem of have-not nations ought to become much less acute than it now is. Much of what countries do internationally nowadays is intended to forestall future

61 Weinberg, “Energy as the Ultimate Raw Material,” 23.

25

actions of neighbors beset with population and raw materials problems. But everyone has granite and air and sea and sun. One would hope that solving the problem of living relatively abundantly with only these raw materials would help to dispel these historic causes for strife among men….62

Clearly, this was a utopian vision, and one driven partly by a need to balance the ominous long-term social consequences of nuclear weapon technology development with benign effects and partly by sheer excitement over the potential power of the breeder reactor as a technological fix. A notable aspect of Weinberg’s presentation was the wishful thinking in advocating distribution of breeder reactor technology to developing countries (“everyone has granite”) in the hope of reducing grounds for eventual conflict without considering that doing so might greatly exacerbate the means for pursuing such conflicts. This implicit dissociation of the effects of nuclear energy technology diffusion from nuclear weapons proliferation risk perhaps reflected a misplaced confidence that plutonium produced in power reactors would be unsuitable for use in nuclear explosives.63

Beyond revealing an evident disregard of potential negative consequences that might attend breeder reactor technology, Weinberg’s presentation of the case for this technology conformed well to the norms of justification for nuclear power prevalent within the confines of U.S. nuclear officialdom in the late 1950s. As

Balough argues, during the chairmanships of Lewis Straus (1953-1958) and John

62 Weinberg, “Energy as the Ultimate Raw Material,” 25. 63 Albert Wohlstetter, “Moving toward Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? ACDA/Pab-263,” (Los Angeles: Pan Heuristics / Science Applications, 1975), 10. Wohlstetter explains that this false confidence arose from the belief that plutonium extracted from power reactors would be “denatured” by the presence of a large proportion of the higher plutonium isotopes, and would therefore be unsuitable for use in explosives without first undergoing isotopic separation. It was later proven that effective explosives could be produced from such denatured or “reactor” plutonium.

26

McCone (1958-1961), the AEC was largely unsuccessful in expanding its customer base for nuclear energy beyond the U.S. military. Repeated efforts to induce U.S. electrical utilities and electrical equipment manufacturers to invest in commercial nuclear power plants faltered due to a widespread conviction among industrial interests that nuclear power investments would not be economically viable.64 This ongoing hesitancy in the private sector to invest in nuclear reactors induced a promotional tenor in the relations between AEC leadership and private industry, particularly during the tenure of Strauss, who coined the term “energy too cheap to meter,” and linkage of nuclear power development to more abstract national priorities such as enhancing U.S. international prestige.65

The Nuclear Subgovernment

That such an abstract and utopian justification as Weinberg’s in 1959 could animate ongoing reactor development without drawing serious scrutiny or public challenge reflected the prestige and enclosed nature of the nuclear enterprise in the

United States in the late 1950s. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created both the

AEC and the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) as the sole legislative branch oversight mechanism for the AEC. By this arrangement, the AEC was mostly insulated from the broader congressional scrutiny that other administrative agencies were subject to. The justification for this unique

64 Brian Balough, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97. 65 Balough, Chain Reaction, Chapter 4.

27 circumstance was the imperative to maintain a pervasive secrecy regime around the activities of the AEC during the period from 1946 to 1953, when the focus of the agency was primarily on maintaining primacy in nuclear weapons development.

While private enterprises had been involved as contractors since the beginning of the Manhattan Project, security requirements and tight restrictions on private ownership of fissile material and nuclear equipment before 1954 kept private nuclear technology development completely contained within the auspices of federal programs in this early period.

This type of close relationship between a federal agency, a congressional committee with oversight responsibility, and the corporations that do business with the federal government in the associated domain has been classically described as an “iron triangle” or “subgovernment.”66 The subgovernment framework suggests a dynamic of political symbiosis among the inhabitants of such a network and a corresponding insulation from outside agents. Balough argues that in the area of nuclear power policy development, the nuclear subgovernment dynamic that developed after the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 conformed well to this model, with the distinctive feature that the JCAE and the AEC were initially the more enthusiastic components of this triad.67 Indeed, argues Balough, it took the threat of

66 For an example of the use of this concept as a common political science analytic framework applied to federal policy-making, see James E. Underwood, “Review: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: President, Congress & the Administrative Branch,” Polity 9, no. 2 (1976): 208- 219. 67 For the classic contemporary discussion of the insularity and relative lack of accountability enjoyed by the nuclear subgovernment during the height of its prestige, see Harold P. Green and Alan Rosenthal, Government of the Atom: The Integration of Powers, ed. Cornelius P. Cotter, The Atherton Press Political Science Series (New York: Atherton Press, 1963).

28 public ownership of nuclear power and pervasive subsidies to induce private utilities to take their first steps in experimenting with nuclear power.68

Notwithstanding this promotional leadership by the AEC and the JCAE, the corporate leg of the triangle was well organized and represented by its own industry association, the Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF). As the Eisenhower

Administration came to a close, the U.S. electrical utility industry was making the first tentative moves towards yielding to this promotional pressure, but with skepticism about the stand-alone economic feasibility of the small-scale plants that they were building. As Balough notes, all of the thirteen U.S. power reactors under development in 1959 were recipients of federal subsidies.69

NASA Challenge and the 1962 Report to the President

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 brought about a number of new challenges to the AEC’s program of reactor development and promotion. The first of these was an intrusion into the almost exclusive franchise on nuclear policy that the

AEC and JCAE had enjoyed previously. The Kennedy White House Bureau of the

Budget (BoB) reduced proposed appropriations to the AEC Power Reactor

Development Program, a funding vehicle that had been set up by the JCAE under the previous administration to supply subsidies that might induce utilities to invest in reactors. The BoB plan essentially terminated the program, reducing funding from

$45M in the 1961 budget to zero by 1963. The rationale for this proposed shift was

68 Balough, Chain Reaction, Chapters 3 and 4. 69 Balough, Chain Reaction, 191.

29 twofold: The light water reactors covered under the program were considered a mature technology by 1961, and therefore the case for subsidy seemed increasingly dubious; and perhaps more significantly, the Kennedy Administration quickly set a high priority on the space program as a vehicle for establishing international prestige through science. The AEC’s power reactor technology program was consequently threatened in the budget scramble.70

Federal R&D Expenditures by Policy Area ($M) 4,000 3,500 3,000 2,500 NASA 2,000 Atomic Energy General Science 1,500 Energy 1,000 500 0 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

Figure 1. Comparison of Selected Federal R&D Expenditures, 1956-196471

Figure 1 depicts the magnitude of the programmatic shift in federal research and development priorities that President Kennedy’s commitment to the space program set off. For the first time since its inception, the AEC had a budgetary competitor

70 Balough, Chain Reaction, 187. 71 Office of Management and Budget, “Table 9.8—Composition of Outlays for the Conduct of Research and Development: 1949-2011,” Whitehouse.gov .

30 that challenged both its scientific prestige and potential ability to garner appropriations for its nondefense research activities.

In 1961, Kennedy appointed Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate and the co- discoverer of plutonium, to chair the AEC. As he took on this role, Seaborg encountered pressure from the JCAE to address the apparent lack of Kennedy

Administration support for continuing development of nuclear power. Chet

Holifield, chairman of the JCAE, wrote to Seaborg in March of 1962 exhorting him to address the issue of ongoing support for nuclear power development.72 Seaborg eagerly took up the task of promoting nuclear power both inside the Kennedy

Administration and externally. The first manifestation of Seaborg’s effort in this direction was his arranging for a request from the White House to the AEC for a report on the status of civilian nuclear power. Seaborg duly delivered the AEC report to the Kennedy White House in November of 1962.73

Seaborg’s report to the president laid out the blueprint that would persist as the organizational program of the AEC’s (and subsequently ERDA’s) efforts in commercial nuclear power up to the 1976 election cycle and set the pattern for the promotional strategy that he and his successors would employ. Seaborg emphasized the importance of promoting the near-term commercial adoption of

LWR technology and the urgency of shifting federal development focus to breeder reactors. Whereas doubts among utilities about the commercial viability of LWRs

72 Balough, Chain Reaction, 190. 73 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power; a Report to the President, 1962 (Washington1962). Seaborg in his memoir claims credit for “instigating” Kennedy’s request for the report. Seaborg, A Chemist in the White House, 101.

31 without federal subsidy had prevailed to that point, Seaborg argued that new larger

LWRs under construction would produce power at lower cost than coal-fired plants in areas with high fuel costs. Consequently, Seaborg asserted, LWR “converter” reactors would with only modest additional AEC assistance imminently cross the

“threshold of economic competitiveness …and bring about widespread acceptance by the utility industry.” 74 Given this assumed commercial viability, Seaborg projected that nuclear fuels would supply half of the primary energy consumed for

U.S. electricity generation by the year 2000 and over 90% by 2020.75

The more significant aspect of Seaborg’s 1962 report, however, was the importance it attached to developing breeder reactors that could work in concert with the anticipated fleet of “converter” LWRs that would soon proliferate. Despite elaborating a wide range of as yet unresolved technical and economic uncertainties associated with breeder reactors, Seaborg judged that:

Breeders will, of course, be attractive to the utilities only if they compete economically with the best available converters. This will depend on the relative capital costs, the operating efficiencies and, importantly, on the relative abundance and values of the various nuclear fuels. Considering all the facts, we believe that fast breeders will become competitive with converters in the next decade or two, and will be built on an increasing scale along with additional converters.76

So not only were breeder reactors technically feasible, but fast-neutron breeders that operated on plutonium (i.e., LMFBRs) would potentially be commercially viable within one to two decades, according to Seaborg. But commercial feasibility of such

74 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 33-34. 75 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 44. 76 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 40.

32 breeders, Seaborg believed, would depend on their incorporation into a nuclear power infrastructure in a manner that coupled their fuel cycle with that of the first generation LWRs:

"fast" reactors required to breed an excess of plutonium are economically attractive only when plutonium rather than U-235 is used to fuel them. Hence the most promising arrangement for incorporating them in a rapidly expanding nuclear power economy would undoubtedly be to use thermal converters [LWRs] to help provide the plutonium needed for added installations. This combination would continue until increases in the relative "yield" of plutonium from the breeders, together with a lower relative rate of growth of electrical energy consumption enabled the breeders to catch up and produce enough plutonium by themselves.77

Beyond the technical and economic feasibility of developing the breeder reactors that would form the apex of the envisioned nuclear power infrastructure,

Seaborg argued for the urgency of developing this technology. In doing so, he invoked Alvin Weinberg’s conceptual “asymptotic” scenario of a future after the exhaustion of readily recoverable fossil fuels and high-grade uranium ores and asserted that the U.S. must have its electricity infrastructure substantially adapted for this asymptotic condition by the year 2000 rather than some distant and indeterminate date.78

Seaborg presented his outlook for energy demand growth and nuclear fuel resources in a format intended to reinforce the notion of an ultimate inevitability of the need to transition to breeder reactors. Figure 3, taken from Seaborg’s report,

77 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 40. Seaborg explained that this dependency arose from the circumstance that LMFBRs initially fueled with U-235 would have much higher fueling costs and a lower breeding ratio, significantly impairing the economics of such plants. 78 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 45.

33 presents projections of long-term U.S. total primary energy demand superimposed on estimates of remaining fossil fuel resources. Notable in this figure are the long- range time scale and the choice of a very large unit for measuring primary energy demand and resources: The unit Q represents 1 quintillion (1018)BTU.79 In accompanying discussion, the report suggests that “CurveB” on the chart is the more credible demand projection, and that relying on estimates of fossil resources substantially beyond the 6Q of known reserves would be unwise. The resulting conclusion was that conventional fossil fuel reserves would be entering exhaustion early in the twenty-first century, necessitating a transition to nuclear fuels by this period.

79 The more common unit for primary energy used in other energy studies of this period was the “Quad,” representing 1 quadrillion(1015) BTU. 1Q therefore = 1,000 Quads. It appears that the unit Q was chosen to present the primary energy resource available via LWRs as insignificant.

34

Figure 2. Cumulative U.S. Primary Energy Demand Projection—Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President 196280

In an accompanying table (reproduced as table 2), the report presents estimates of the energy content of domestic nuclear fuel resources, again using the very large unit, Q, representing 1018 BTU.

80 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 18.

35

Energy in U-235, Q Total Energy Content, Q Cost Range, Reasonably Estimated Total Reasonably Estimated Total $ per Pound Assured Resources Assured Resources of Oxide Resources Resources I. Uranium 0-10 $/lb 0.16 0.4 22 50 10-30 $/lb 0.17 0.3 24 40 30-100 $/lb 5 10 700 1,400 100-500 $/lb 220 900 30000 120,000

II. Thorium 0-10 $/lb does not apply does not apply 6 25 10-30 $/lb does not apply does not apply 6 13 30-100 $/lb does not apply does not apply 700 2,200 100-500 $/lb does not apply does not apply 63,000 190,000

Table 2. Fission Energy Content of Domestic Nuclear Resources—Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President 196281

Notably, the report projected that less than 1Q of primary energy could be obtained from U-235 recovered from ores available at less than $30/lb: Essentially, this would be the practical limit of cumulative primary energy that the proposed first generation fleet of LWRs would produce economically before exhausting fuel resources.82 Although the projection identified substantially larger resources of U-

235 available at prices above $30/lb, these larger quantities referred to the very dilute deposits in shale and granite formations, and per Weinberg’s assumptions,

81 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 23. 82 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 22.

36 these were deemed impractical because it would require more energy to process such dilute ore than could be extracted from the resulting fuel in a LWR.

Seaborg projected that the cumulative financial benefits of lower generating costs arising from this hybrid system of breeder and converter (i.e., LWR) reactors compared to a hypothetical case of continuing to use only fossil fuels for electricity generation would be $30B by the year 2000, noting that this figure equated to a present value of $10B if discounted back to 1970 at a 5% interest rate.83 This potential savings appeared enormous in the context of a federal development program that was consuming less than $20M annually at that time.84 Thus, in the

1962 Report, Seaborg transformed Weinberg’s conceptual futurology into a vision stirring and urgent enough to justify a priority role in the federal science budget by promising to permanently solve the problem of energy resource adequacy and offered a first and very favorable financial cost/benefit justification for the program.

Balough argues that the 1962 Report to the President had a decisive effect on securing program support from the Kennedy White House, from the JCAE and from the electrical utilities that had been previously reticent to invest in nuclear plants.

Indeed, the AEC in subsequent hearings called by the JCAE discussed a twelve-year program of the projects outlined in the report, the centerpiece of which was the

LMFBR program.85 Figure 3 presents federal expenditures on the LMFBR program

83 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 46. 84 Brian G. Chow and AEI National Energy Project., The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Economic Analysis, National Energy Study 8 (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), 13. 85 Balough, Chain Reaction, 198.

37 that ensued over this period. A continuous increase in funding over this period is evidence of ongoing JCAE support for the program outlined in the 1962 report.

LMFBR Program Expenditures ($M) 600

500

400 Nixon Endorses 300 LMFBR Report to Prioritized 200 President

100

0 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Figure 3. LMFBR Program Expenditures, 1959-1975.86

The Great Bandwagon and the Plutonium Economy

Once he had restored budgetary priority for the nuclear power program,

Seaborg continued to enthusiastically promote the cornucopian vision of nuclear power as a technical solution to worldwide resource constraints, adopting the same asymptotic frame that Weinberg had articulated. Events seemed to confirm the optimistic projections in the 1962 report. In December 1963 New Jersey Power and

Light signed a deal with General Electric to build a boiling water LWR plant at their

Oyster Creek site. What was distinctive about the deal was that there was no

86 Chow and AEI National Energy Project., The LMFBR: An Economic Analysis, 13.

38 government subsidy and General Electric had agreed to a fixed “turnkey” price that was projected to yield a lower cost for generating electricity than achievable with a similarly sized fossil fueled plant. Alvin Weinberg described the effect of this news that nuclear power seemed to have finally reached cost parity with fossil fuels as a watershed. In his autobiography, Weinberg wrote: “I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the GE economic breakthrough had on us.”87 The effect of the Oyster Creek deal on the electric utility industry was dramatic, as a scramble soon developed to place orders for LWR nuclear plants.

Bupp and Derian describe the most intense phase of this period, from 1966 to 1967, as the “Great Bandwagon Market.” 88

This market success stoked great optimism for the future of nuclear power.

Seaborg became a relentless promoter of the vision of the many social and economic benefits that would follow from commercializing nuclear power and plutonium fuel cycle technology. In a 1968 article, for example, Seaborg envisioned cheap and abundant nuclear energy from breeder reactors driving desalination plants and greatly expanding food production in developing countries, accelerating economic growth in developed economies, and even powering moon colonies.89 Seaborg reflected this enthusiasm in reaffirming in a 1967 report to President Johnson on

87 Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 119. 88 Bupp and Derian, The Failed Promise, Chapter 2. 89 Glenn T. Seaborg, “Need We Fear Our Nuclear Future?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 24, no. 1 (1968): 36-42. For examples of Seaborg’s boosterism for all aspects nuclear technology including “peaceful” explosives, see also Glenn T. Seaborg, Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy: Speeches of Glenn T. Seaborg (Oak Ridge: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Division of Technical Information, 1970); Glenn Theodore Seaborg and William R. Corliss, Man and Atom: Building a New World through Nuclear Technology, [1st ] ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971).

39 the status of AEC nuclear power programs that the LMFBR program was the top priority among breeder concepts that the AEC had been developing and that it would continue as the main focus of commercialization efforts.90 Despite this prioritization of the LMFBR, however, Seaborg continued funding at a more modest level for three alternative breeder reactor development programs: a molten salt breeder reactor (MSBR) that was a particular interest of ORNL director Alvin

Weinberg; a high temperature gas cooled breeder (GCBR); and a program that

Hyman Rickover’s Naval Reactors group within the AEC was running to develop a thorium-based breeder core that could be retrofitted into existing pressurized water reactor LWRs. The Naval Reactors breeder used light water as coolant and moderator and so the concept was called the Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR).

Under the auspices of the Johnson Administration, Seaborg had been able to justify these alternative breeder programs by arguing that research should continue on them in case the LMFBR program encountered insurmountable technical problems.

Nixon Administration Budget Contests

After the Nixon Administration came to office, however, the AEC began to once again encounter difficulty in securing budget support for reactor development.

Brenner argues that the “true believers” in the Nixon Office of Management and

Budget (OMB) and Domestic Council came into office with a strong predisposition towards reducing the federal government’s role in commercializing energy

90 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future. Comptroller General of the United States. General Accounting Office. 1975. 6.

40 technologies due to a “commitment to a free enterprise philosophy.”91 This philosophy was soon manifest in the fall of 1969 as a determination by the Nixon

Administration OMB to reduce funding for the LMFBR program and to zero out funding for three alternative breeder programs. Through Rickover’s personal and forceful intervention with OMB, funding was restored to his LWBR program. But the

GCBR and the MSBR projects were put on starvation budgets, essentially ending their prospects for commercialization.92

Nixon OMB officials continued to pressure Seaborg for greater economy in the LMFBR budget through the following two years, but the JCAE continued to fund the program close to the plan set out under the Johnson Administration. OMB resistance to the LMFBR program evidently irritated Representative Chet Hollifield, chairman of the JCAE, and according to Seaborg, “one of the most enthusiastic advocates” of the LMFBR program.93 Hollifield shared a flight to on

Airforce One with President Nixon in March of 1971 and took the opportunity to personally lobby Nixon to support the LMFBR program. Hollifield presented the cornucopian vision of the LMFBR and argued that this program could be a positive legacy that might offset the negative legacy of the involvement. Nixon was interested and asked for a follow-up briefing. On April 13 at a Cabinet meeting,

Seaborg and Hollified presented the case for accelerating the LMFBR program, with

Seaborg promising that the LMFBR technology would save the U.S. $1-2B per year

91 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 17. 92 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 156-177. 93 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 162.

41 once commercialized against a total projected development cost of $2B. Senator

Pastore, who was by this point the Chairman of the JCAE told Nixon that the JCAE unanimously supported the program.94

President Nixon Promotes the LMFBR

Beyond abstract concerns about his legacy, Nixon had a political reason to consider measures directed to increasing electricity supply. During the summer of

1970, numerous brownouts had taken place as utilities were periodically unable to meet peak electrical demand. These brownouts had occurred despite an increase of almost 8% in U.S. generating capacity from 1969 to 1970.95 Oil, coal, and natural gas prices rose in this period also, as various supply disruptions disturbed U.S. energy markets.96 By the summer of 1971, the perceived energy crisis was sufficiently alarming to prompt President Nixon to make a first of its kind speech to Congress on the energy situation and his plan to address both short and long-term solutions. In his speech, which was written by presidential aide David Freeman,97 Nixon argued that the energy crisis stemmed from rapidly expanding demand for energy and new constraints on supply that derived from recently enacted environmental regulations that mandated cleaner energy practices such as burning low sulfur coal. Nixon proposed conservation measures, a range of tactical measures aimed at increasing

94 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 162-167. 95 William D. Smith, “Utilities Trace Problems,” New York Times, January 1, 1971. 96 Wayne King, “Worse Shortage of Heating Fuels Feared; Some Urge Federal Action to Provide Relief,” New York Times, September 28 1970. 97 Freeman, Winning Our Energy Independence, xii.

42 oil and coal production, and a portfolio of long-term research and development to produce technical solutions to the problem. Nixon argued that:

Our best hope today for meeting the nation’s growing demand for economical clean energy lies with the fast breeder reactor. Because of its highly efficient use of nuclear fuel, the breeder reactor could extend the life of our natural uranium fuel supply from decades to centuries, with far less impact on the environment than the power plants which are operating today.98

Nixon went on in this speech to set the goal of having a commercial demonstration fast breeder reactor completed by 1980, promising increased federal research funding, but also exhorting the nuclear industry to collaborate with the AEC in support of this goal.99 It is worth remarking that Nixon saw the LMFBR as a solution to both the supply side of the U.S. electrical power problem and also as a solution to the environmental problems associated with the growth of other sources of energy, such as fossil fuels. This faith that LMFBR technology solved multiple problems, with little apparent negative impact, environmental or otherwise, was a clear indication that the Nixon Administration had by 1971 been persuaded by the AEC’s plutonium economy vision that Seaborg, Hollifield, and Pastore had sold in lobbying for an acceleration of the LMFBR program. Nixon’s conspicuous endorsement and prioritization of the LMFBR program would provoke a significant reaction. Seaborg stepped down from the AEC on August 17, 1971, leaving his successor, James

Schlesinger to deal with the backlash.

98 , “Special Message to Congress on Energy Resources: June 4, 1971,” . 99 Nixon, “Special Message to Congress on Energy Resources: June 4, 1971.”

43

Emergence of Opposition to AEC Reactor Programs

By the end of Nixon’s first term, the build-out of U.S. LWR generating capacity was well under way, the AEC and its corporate partners had a high priority mandate to develop LMFBR demonstration facilities to pave the way for eventual scale-up and commercialization, and the White House was firmly supportive of the plutonium economy vision. But opposition to LWR technology and to the plutonium economy vision had emerged by this point as well. At first, antinuclear activism consisted mostly of local groups aimed at opposing specific power plants, such as the effort that led Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) to abandon plans in 1964 for a reactor at Bodega Bay, California.100 In this case, the decisive criticism of the plant was that PG&E had selected a site that sat on top of a seismic fault and that therefore an earthquake could produce a major accident and catastrophic release of radioactivity.

By the late 1960s, however, some of these local conflicts were yielding arguments against nuclear power that were more broadly applicable. An important milestone was the 1968-1971 conflict in Monticello, Minnesota, over permissible levels of radioactivity that a proposed Northern States Power nuclear plant could routinely release into the Mississippi River upstream from the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. This was the first case in which the AEC was challenged over the safety of routine effluent protocols for LWRs: Prior challenges had mostly focused on

100 Thomas Raymond Wellock, : Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). See chapter 1 for a full discussion of the Bodega Bay reactor conflict.

44 thermal pollution and siting.101 Dean Abrahamson, a physicist/physician and professor at the University of Minnesota, was instrumental in challenging the credibility of the utility, the reactor manufacturer, and the AEC in their assurances that such releases of radioactive effluents would be below “safe” limits.102

Ultimately, the AEC had to sue and prevail against the State of Minnesota to assert its primacy in regulating releases, but in the end also had to drastically reduce permissible effluent limits.103 Perhaps the worst consequence of this episode for the AEC, however, was that through their collaboration with

Abrahamson in scrutinizing the basis for radioactive exposure limits, two senior

AEC scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL), Arthur Tamplin and

John Gofman, became convinced that even radiation exposure substantially below the AEC’s prescribed limits would yield thousands of cancer cases among the public if nuclear power facilities were widely deployed. In developing this view, Tamplin and Gofman relied on the work of their LLNL colleague Donald Geesaman.104

Tamplin and Gofman went public with their concerns in 1969 and became

101 Philip M. Boffey, “Radioactive Pollution: Minnesota Finds AEC Standards Too Lax,” Science 163, no. 3871 (1969). 102 Dean E. Abrahamson, “The Peaceful Atom's Rise, Fall, and Prospects for Resurrection,” in A Symposium in Honor of George M. Woodwell: The Great Issues of Environment: Ecology and the Public Good (The Woods Hole Research Center 2008). Abrahamson worked as a reactor physicist for Babcock and Wilcox after graduate school and then later went to medical school, so he was well qualified to develop a critique that synthesized a detailed understanding of reactor operations with health physics considerations. 103 Gerard H. Clarfield and William M. Weicek, Nuclear America: Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1940-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 357. 104 Gofman at the time was Associate Director of LLNL and head of the AEC’s Biomedical Division. Tamplin was a group leader in the Biomedical Division. Abrahamson had contacted Tamplin and Gofman through Don Geesaman, with whom Abrahamson had attended graduate school. Prior to meeting Abrahamson, Tamplin and Gofman had been studying the health effects of fallout from peaceful nuclear explosives. Geesaman had been studying the health effects of plutonium. Dean E. Abrahamson, Interview by Author, June 30, 2009.

45 outspoken and widely quoted critics of the AEC reactor program. In 1971, Tamplin and Gofman published Poisoned Power: The Case against Nuclear Power Plants, an impassioned polemic urging citizen action to halt the construction and operation of nuclear plants.105 Tamplin and Gofman’s roles with the AEC at Lawrence Livermore

Labs made their warnings difficult to dismiss.

This period of increasing concern with the potential dangers of nuclear power spawned a number of new organizations that were focused on critically examining and challenging various aspects of the government/industry nuclear power complex. In 1969, a group of students and professors at MIT formed the

Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) initially to protest defense research at MIT, and in particular, the development of anti-ballistic missile technology, which many thought would trigger an intensification of the nuclear arms race.106 In July 1971, the UCS, under the leadership of Henry Kendall, a physicist who would later win a

Nobel Prize, took the lead in challenging the AEC on the subject of nuclear reactor safety, contending that the emergency core cooling systems installed in LWRs were inadequate to prevent meltdown accidents in the event of a serious coolant leak.107

Another prominent organization opposed to nuclear power was formed in

1970 when David Brower founded Friends of the Earth (FOE), an advocacy group that would oppose nuclear power technology on ethical and ecological grounds.

105 John W. Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, Poisoned Power: The Case against Nuclear Power Plants before and after Three Mile Island, 2nd ed. (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1979). The original edition was published in 1971. 106 Richard Todd, “The 'Ins' and 'Outs' at M.I.T.,” New York Times, May 18 1969. 107 Daniel F. Ford, : The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission, Rev. and updated ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 102.

46

Brower had been the controversial Director of the during the 1960s, a period when internal strains in the organization developed over questions of how activist the club should be in lobbying and how to respond to nuclear power projects in California. Brower was forced to step down from his post at the Sierra

Club over his uncompromising opposition to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.108

John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich had been associated with Brower while he led the

Sierra Club, and Brower advocated Ehrlich’s ecological precepts after he formed

Friends of the Earth.109 Wellock notes with irony, that the Sierra Club eventually adopted a posture towards nuclear power similar to that of FOE, but this did not occur until January of 1974.110 Notable persons affiliated with Friends of the Earth were , who soon joined the FOE advocacy campaigns against the

LMFBR and for a broader reactor moratorium and later still published an influential article arguing for a decentralization of energy technologies,111 and Joe Browder, who split off from FOE in January 1972 to form the Environmental Policy Center and the League of Conservation Voters.112 Browder would later emerge as an advisor to

Jimmy Carter early in his presidential bid.

108 John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 208-220. In his profile of Brower, McPhee recounts in some detail the coup that deposed Brower from the Sierra Club. 109 Wellock, Critical Masses, 91-92. Wellock notes that Brower in founding Friends of the Earth stated as a goal to adhere to the ecological precepts of Aldo Leopold and Paul Ehrlich. 110 Wellock, Critical Masses, 92. 111 Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (October 1976). 112 “The EPC: Environmental Lobby,” Science 182, no. 4115 (1973).

47

As antinuclear advocacy gathered momentum, a sharper critique of the AEC emerged. Ralph Nader in the summer of 1970 decided to champion the cause of John

Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, who through publicly criticizing their patrons at the

AEC for maintaining excessive radiation exposure limits had drawn a prompt withdrawal of funding and staff. Tamplin, for example, lost eleven of his twelve research assistants under the ostensible guise of overall budget cuts, but the retaliatory intent of the AEC’s reaction to Gofman’s and Tamplin’s dissent was clear.113 Ralph Nader wrote to Senator Muskie, who chaired the committee that

Gofman and Tamplin had testified to about the radiation dangers and excess cancer deaths they estimated would follow from a nuclear power build-out, to accuse the

AEC of punishing dissenting scientists in an effort to censor criticism and thereby hide the public risks of nuclear power.114 From this point forward, Nader was an outspoken critic of the AEC and of the nuclear power industry, using the

Gofman/Tamplin controversy over radiation exposure limits to paint the AEC as a tool of the nuclear industry and an arrogant agency with a sinister disregard for public safety.115 By 1972, Nader was campaigning for a moratorium on nuclear power plant construction, and openly criticizing other environmental activists if he

113 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 133-134. One of the fired researchers from Tamplin’s group was Donal Geesaman, who joined Dean Abrahamson’s department at the University of Minnesota. 114 Thomas O'Toole, “Muskie Enters AEC- Fight,” Washington Post, August 6, 1970. This retaliation against Tamplin and Gofman by the AEC was part of a larger pattern. Dean Abrahamson states that he, Bob Williams, and others of his acquaintances were threatened by AEC attempts at professional censure (email from Dean Abrahamson October 21, 2009). 115 Ralph Nader and John Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1977), 75. Nader wrote in 1977 that even after the AEC in 1971 reduced their allowable exposure standards, the guiding logic of the new limits was to set limits as low as practical, but without damaging the economic interests of the utility industry.

48 judged them insufficiently hostile to the AEC.116 On January 3, 1973, Nader and

Kendall announced a joint campaign to oppose the AEC on nuclear power policy, calling for a moratorium on further plant construction and an immediate 50% down-rating of operating plants.117 The Nader/Kendall collaboration brought negative attention to the AEC and cast doubt on the safety of reactors through a series of contentious hearings that the AEC held on the subject from January 1972 to

December 1973.

Adversary Science and Technology Assessment

The participation of scientists such as Gofman, Tamplin, Geesaman,

Abrahamson, Kendall and many others in anti-nuclear advocacy in this period was occurring in a larger context of a movement to encourage scientists to consider themselves advocates for the public interest, and thereby “adversarial” towards the corporate and governmental promoters of technologies that might yield risks to the public that were either poorly understood or ignored. Gus Speth describes the animating spirit of this movement:

It was driven primarily by concerns about nuclear power, environmental deterioration, and invasion of privacy. Then and since, many perceptive critics have found technology and its organization at the core of social and environmental problems. With some consistency, they liken present society to a corporate conglomerate

116 “Sierra Club Called 'Front' by Nader,” Washington Post, June 6, 1972, A2. Nader, for example, accused the Sierra Club of being in league with the AEC for not as a matter of principle supporting a nuclear power moratorium initiative. 117 Anthony Ripley, “Nader Attacks Policy on Nuclear Power,” New York Times, January 4, 1973, 18.

49

dominated by technology imperatives and divorced from real human needs and aspirations.118

Many of the participants cited above self-consciously thought of their work in these terms and sought to generalize the principle of their anti-nuclear advocacy.119 As

Speth notes, this genre had a long provenance in environmental circles.120 The classic from this period that makes the case, albeit in somewhat less dramatic terms, for careful assessment of new technology programs before they have a chance to cause irreversible harm is von Hippel’s and Primack’s Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena, in which the authors present case studies of the excesses of

DDT and Agent Orange, the effort to develop anti-ballistic missiles, and the federal program to subsidize the development of a supersonic transport (SST) plane.121 Von

Hippel and Primack present an argument about the sociology of science as applied to major technology programs that contends that the participants in such programs experience many pressures to support program goals without questioning possible adverse consequences. This movement found institutional expression when in 1973,

118 James Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 130. 119 See for example, Dean E. Abrahamson and Donald P. Geesaman, “Forensic Science—a Proposal,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 29, no. 3 (1973): 17-24; Frank von Hippel and Joel Primack, “Public Interest Science,” Science 177, no. 4055 (1972): 1166-1171. 120 For example, , The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971); James Gustave Speth, “The Federal Role in Technology Assessment and Control,” in Federal Environmental Law, ed. Erica L. Dolgin and Thomas G.P. Gilbert (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1974), 428. 121 J. R. Primack and Frank von Hippel, Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Von Hippel has subsequently become an outspoken defender of the once-through fuel cycle and continues in that advocacy to the present. See “Nonproliferation Briefing Book,” Peace and Security Initiative, .

50 the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was formed.122 Presumably, one effect of the establishment of a self conscious “movement” for technology assessment during the period when anti-nuclear activism was building was to bolster the commitment and determination of those involved in such activism.

Much of the plethora of nuclear energy policy analysis originating outside of the AEC and its successor organizations that would follow in the balance of the decade was animated by this ethos of technology assessment. The NRDC, for example, justified their campaign against the plutonium economy technology program through this framework.123

Dismantling the AEC

As a consequence of the rising level of criticism directed at it, the AEC was becoming a political liability to the Nixon Administration as early as 1970.124 As part of a broader effort to reorganize and rationalize the federal government, the

Nixon Administration began investigating the possibility of breaking up the AEC and redistributing its functions. A long-standing complaint about the AEC was that it had a conflicting mandate to both promote and regulate nuclear power and that the regulatory role suffered as a result.125 Further congressional and executive branch criticism stemmed from the unique arrangement whereby the insular and

122 Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 130. 123 James Gustave Speth, Interview by Author, July 22, 2009. 124 Thomas O'Toole, “Once-Immune A.E.C. Drawing Heavy Fire,” Washington Post, June 15, 1970. 125 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 217.

51 essentially autonomous congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) had sole jurisdiction for oversight of the AEC.126 Seaborg half-heartedly cooperated with the Nixon White House in considering how to dismantle and reorganize the

AEC, all the while attempting to minimize the changes that actually were mandated in proposed legislation.127 After Seaborg stepped down as chairman of the AEC in the summer of 1971, Nixon appointed James Schlesinger as the new Chairman of the

AEC. Schlesinger came to his post with a mandate to complete the reorganization of the AEC, so the bureaucratic rearguard action to preserve the AEC in all of its prior autonomous grandeur lost a powerful sponsor when Seaborg departed.128 Just as the environmentalist challenge to the AEC was getting under way in earnest, the seeds for an erosion of its protected bureaucratic autonomy were sown. This process would ultimately culminate in the 1975 cleavage of the AEC into the Energy

Research and Development Agency (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

(NRC), to separate the promotional and regulatory functions, and in the dissolution in early 1977 of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), the powerful congressional patron of the AEC, and the concurrent broadening of congressional oversight of nuclear activities.129

126 For a full discussion of the unprecedented degree of unaccountable power concentrated in the JCAE, see Green and Rosenthal, Government of the Atom. Green and Rosenthal called the JCAE “the most powerful Congressional committee in the history of the nation” (266). 127 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 218-230. 128 “The Future of the A.E.C.,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1971. 129 ERDA became a major part of the new Department of Energy, which was formed in 1977.

52

1973 Oil Shock Effects

The energy crisis and economic shock brought on by the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 after OPEC enacted an oil embargo in response to U.S. assistance to

Israel during the underlined for many policy-makers the urgency of hastening the transition away from fossil fuel sources, particularly from imported oil. President Nixon, in a special message to Congress in January 1974, outlined

“Project Independence,” a multi-point plan to address the short- and long-term challenges of the energy crisis. Once again, Nixon promoted the LMFBR as the long- term solution to U.S. energy problems, reaffirming the importance of continuing development and commercialization of LMFBR technology.130 By this point, the AEC had formed a partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority, Westinghouse,

Consolidated Edison, and other industry partners to build a commercial demonstration LMFBR plant at Clinch River, Tennessee. Due to already high costs of developing this large-scale plant, the Clinch River LMFBR project was by 1973 consuming 80% of the AEC’s total budget for advanced fission reactor research.131

The 1973 energy shock spurred an even more urgent determination among

U.S. allies to embrace nuclear power and the plutonium economy vision as a long- term solution to dependence on imported oil because many OECD allies, such as

France, West Germany, and Japan were substantially more vulnerable to this threat than was the U.S. Most OECD countries were in 1973 importing fossil fuels to supply

130 Richard Nixon, “Special Message to Congress on the Energy Crisis: January 23, 1974,” . 131 Linda R. Cohen, The Technology Pork Barrel (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 234. The 80% figure encompassed advanced converters and various breeder concepts.

53 more than 50% of their primary energy needs, and for France, Italy, and Sweden, this figure was over 75%.132 The French government, for example, announced in early 1974 that a national program to shift from reliance on oil to nuclear power for the majority of primary energy must be undertaken in order to achieve a measure of energy independence. The French nuclear program by 1974 had eschewed an earlier French reactor design and had adopted the entire U.S. AEC technology program: a first phase of LWR power reactors based on the Westinghouse pressurized water design; a spent fuel reprocessing facility; and eventual plans to add LMFBRs to the system after a sufficient plutonium inventory could be accumulated from reprocessed LWR spent fuel.133 The French CEA (Atomic Energy

Commission) was already operating an experimental LMFBR in 1974 (the Phénix plant), and was planning a larger version (the Superphénix).134 So, by 1974, in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, the U.S. and its allies were redoubling commitments to nuclear power and to the plutonium economy technology program, not only because of the purported cost and environmental advantages of nuclear over fossil fuels, but also to secure the strategic goal of enhancing energy independence.

132 Bupp and Derian, The Failed Promise, 98. 133 Bupp and Derian, The Failed Promise, Chapter 6. See also Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), Chapter 8 for a longer overview of the conflict between domestically designed and American reactor technologies and how France ultimately adopted the U.S. AEC technology program. 134 Garwin and Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons, 131.

54

The U.S. Enrichment Capacity Crunch

As U.S. LWR technology became dominant during the late 1960s, European and Japanese reactor customers relied on the U.S. AEC for much of their supply of low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel.135 Since its founding, the A.E.C. maintained a monopoly on U.S. uranium enrichment, operating three large and expensive gaseous diffusion plants. When the Nixon Administration took office, one of its first-term policy initiatives was to help reduce the cost of the AEC by privatizing uranium enrichment. Brenner argues that this enrichment privatization effort, initially led by

OMB staffers including James Schlesinger, was one of the highest priorities of Nixon

Administration AEC policy until 1974.136 Due to conflicts with an uncooperative AEC and JCAE in Congress, however, there was an impasse throughout the Nixon and

Ford administrations on the issue of enrichment privatization: The AEC retained exclusive control over this process throughout this period, but because of the deadlock, no new enrichment facilities were authorized or built. Despite this lack of capacity expansion, demand for enrichment services steadily mounted as more

LWRs were commissioned. By the summer of 1974, the AEC, under the direction of then chairperson Dixie Lee Ray, unilaterally and without warning decided to refuse to accept any further enrichment contracts. Brenner dissects the bureaucratic dysfunction that led to this unfortunate outcome, arguing that the net effect was to further convince Western European and Japanese partners that the U.S. was no

135 Unlike early French, British, and Canadian reactor designs that used natural (i.e., unenriched) uranium, LWRs require that the proportion of fissile uranium235 to non-fissile uranium238 be increased or “enriched” from the naturally occurring 0.7% to approximately 4%. The uranium enrichment process at the time required large, energy-intensive gaseous diffusion plants. 136 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 19.

55 longer a reliable nuclear fuel cycle supplier and to underline the importance of implementing key plutonium economy capabilities such as spent fuel reprocessing facilities and LMFBRs.137

So, by 1974, the U.S. AEC was promoting the uranium/plutonium closed fuel cycle paradigm, with a shift to a greater reliance on separated plutonium as LMFBRs would be phased in, and had through its enrichment debacle, perhaps inadvertently signaled the importance even to non-weapons states of owning and mastering all phases of the plutonium economy technology vision and all associated fuel cycle facilities. That this signal conflicted with the advocacy of the Arms Control and

Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in promoting the safeguards regime enacted in the

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 did not appear to overly concern the Nixon

Administration. Nixon and Kissinger were suspicious of arms controllers and had purged ACDA’s leadership and scaled down its funding immediately after the 1972 election.138 Brenner argues that Nixon and Kissinger thought nuclear weapons proliferation was inevitable and that it would be essentially futile to overemphasize such concerns at the expense of nuclear trade.139

137 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 15. See Chapter 12 for a full treatment of the enrichment capacity crisis. 138 Gerard C. Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 164.; See also Duncan L. Clarke, Politics of Arms Control: The Role and Effectiveness of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (New York: Free Press, 1979), 52-53. 139 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 17.

56

1974 Indian Test

This ambivalence towards proliferation concerns in the Nixon White House was challenged by events on May 18, 1974, when India conducted a test of a

“peaceful” atomic explosive device. The seemingly oxymoronic label of an atomic bomb test as “peaceful” was arguably another reflected signal of AEC hubris: The

AEC under Seaborg had conducted a research program called “Plowshare” to search for peaceful uses of atomic bombs. Uses envisioned included excavating canals and harbors, stimulating natural gas production, and damming rivers.140 Perkovich argues that India first articulated the rationale for a “peaceful” weapons program in

1964, when shortly after China tested a nuclear device, Homi Bhabha, the leader of

India’s Atomic Energy Commission publicly commented on the cost effectiveness of nuclear explosives in deterring adversaries and in their potential utility for peaceful, civil engineering uses, citing the example of the U.S. Plowshare program.141 Once established, India maintained this ambiguity between peaceful and military nuclear explosives to provide diplomatic cover for weapons development efforts.142

The Indian peaceful nuclear explosion test provoked alarm within the U.S. arms control community and raised public awareness of the risks of weapons proliferation. The most salient aspects of the test were that the device used plutonium that had been reprocessed from spent fuel removed from power reactors

140 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, Chapter 1. 141 George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 67. 142 Roberta Wohlstetter, “U.S. Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb,” in Nuclear Policies: Fuel without the Bomb: A Policy Study of the California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy, ed. Albert Wohlstetter (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976), 60.

57 that had been built with U.S. and Canadian assistance, and that the diversion of this separated plutonium had occurred despite a set of bilateral safeguards.143 Further stoking this sense of alarm was the spreading impression that Nixon and Kissinger were slow to incorporate the implications of the Indian test into U.S. nuclear export policy. In June 1974, while on a visit to the Mideast, Nixon proposed agreements with both Egypt and Israel to supply nuclear reactors and LEU fuel.144

Issue Networks and the Nuclear Subgovernment

Over the period of the early 1970s as environmentalist and consumer advocacy opposition to the AEC nuclear power developed and as academics and private policy-making organizations built an independent corpus of nonproliferation policy analysis, various issue networks emerged within the broad area of nuclear policy advocacy, contributing to a transformation in the nuclear policy-making environment. Political scientist Jeffery Berry describes the transition:

policymaking moved away from closed subgovernments, each involving a relatively stable and restricted group of lobbyists and key government officials, to much broader policymaking communities. Policymaking in earlier years is typically described as the product of

143 Walter Sullivan, “India Seems near Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, May 20, 1974. India had agreed to various bilateral safeguards requirements with the U.S. and Canada, but was not under the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA) safeguards regime established by the 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as India had refused to sign this, contending that it unduly disadvantaged the non-weapons states. 144 Richard Nixon, “Joint Statement Following Discussions with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel: June 17, 1974,” ; Richard Nixon, “Principles of Relations and Cooperation between Egypt and the United States: June 14, 1974,” .

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consensual negotiations between a small number of back-scratching participants.

Policymaking is now best described as taking place within issue networks rather than in subgovernments. An issue network is a set of organizations that share expertise in a policy area and interact with each other over time as relevant issues are debated….

The result of issue network politics is that policymaking has become more conflictual, and more broadly participatory.145

Berry’s model of issue networks and conflictual relations with the remnants of the formerly insular subgovernment seems especially apt in describing the state of nuclear power policy-making in late 1974 as Jimmy Carter announced his campaign for the presidency. Indeed, a careful analysis of the relevant issue networks at that time suggests a rationale for the nuclear energy policy position that Carter crafted early in his campaign.146

A related phenomenon that accompanied the emergence of issue networks seeking environmental or nonproliferation policy goals in the early 1970s was an upwelling of private and official energy policy studies over this period. Whereas the

AEC had justified the development of nuclear power by invoking the imperatives of an “asymptotic” future in which a cornucopian energy source would save mankind, the AEC’s critics had developed a starkly different view of utopian energy arrangements. One of the first venues for contesting this clash of views was through the many energy policy studies that were conducted over the course of the 1970s.

145 Jeffrey M. Berry, “Citizen Groups and the Changing Nature of Interest Group Politics in America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528 (1993): 34-35. 146 See Appendix I for an analysis of nuclear power issue networks as of July 1975 when Carter first stated his platform on nuclear power policy.

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The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project (FFEPP) was arguably the most politically significant of these studies that had concluded prior to July of 1975, but many other such studies were under way at that moment as a consequence of the impetus from the 1973 oil price shock.147 What follows is an account of the origins of and interaction among nuclear power issue advocacy networks, prominent energy studies, and the presidential candidates in the 1976 election cycle and how these interactions ultimately framed plutonium economy policy choices.

147 Please see Appendix IV for an analysis of the political relevance of various sources of energy policy analysis to the Carter campaign in July 1975.

Chapter III.

The Anti-Plutonium Issue Network

In the 1974 election that followed the Watergate scandal, the Democratic party strengthened its congressional majorities, picking up three seats in the Senate and forty-one in the House of Representatives. A further manifestation of the evident political momentum for the Democratic Party was the scramble that soon followed among Democrats interested in contending for the presidential nomination in the 1976 election cycle. In the aftermath of the oil crisis of the previous year, over

80% of the U.S. public believed that the potential for energy shortages was very or somewhat serious, but among political leaders, opinion was nearly evenly divided over whether speeding construction of nuclear reactors would be an appropriate response to energy supply worries.148 Various issue advocacy networks had been active in making the case with legislators that nuclear power should be reevaluated, and as the 94th Congress began, Representative Morris “Mo” Udall of Arizona, the

Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Interior and Insular Committee, and a Democratic presidential candidate, soon announced that he would convene comprehensive hearings to conduct such an evaluation.149

Udall’s campaign plan was to focus his issues platform on Economics, Energy, and

148 See Appendix VI. 149 Morris K. Udall, “Energy and the American Future April, 1975,” University of Arizona Library .

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Environment, so presiding over hearings on nuclear energy would allow him to both demonstrate his judgment on this highly contentious matter and to burnish his appeal among voters concerned about nuclear power.150

Udall held ten days of hearings over the course of 1975 covering all aspects of the U.S. nuclear power program including whether the ERDA LMFBR program should be continued.151 Udall’s initiative in holding these hearings and encouraging deliberation of these matters represented an affront and a profound challenge to the traditional purview of the JCAE in overseeing atomic energy matters. The JCAE responded to this implied threat that was directed towards the LMFBR program by holding seven days of hearings on this topic over June and July.152 Not surprisingly given its long-standing role as congressional patron of the AEC and now ERDA, the

JCAE reported after concluding its hearings that the LMFBR program should continue exactly as planned, stating:

Continuation of the breeder development program, as a high priority effort, is essential to the energy future of this Nation…. Vigorous pursuit of Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) development at this time, including construction of demonstration plants, is essential ….

A very substantial review effort on breeder development plans, approach and strategy has been and continues to be made by advisory groups and others. The conduct of such studies should not be allowed to occasion delay in the program.153

150 Donald W. Carson and James W. Johnson, Mo: The Life and Times of Morris K. Udall (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 151-153. 151 The hearing dates were: April 28-May 2; June 2-6; July 21-24; and November 14. The hearings to consider whether to continue the LMFBR program were held on June 2, 5, and 6. 152 The hearing dates were: June 10, 11, 17, 18, 24; July 10, 17. 153 Review of National Breeder Reactor Program. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1976. vii. Letter of transmittal from Hon. Mike McCormack to JCAE.

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The last sentence is notable both for the pique it expresses and for the concern it contains that “advisory groups” might influence policy-makers enough to threaten plutonium economy programs.

Who were these “advisory groups and others” that were influential enough by mid 1975 to endanger ERDA’s highest priority program and how had they come to a position of such influence? Against the backdrop of a broader network of parties opposed to nuclear power, a more narrowly focused issue network had since

1971 formed to campaign particularly against the LMFBR and the use of plutonium in LWRs. Appendix II presents an analysis of the activities of individuals and organizations involved in what I have called the anti-plutonium interest network over the period leading up to these hearings in 1975. The most active of these organizations were the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the

Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI). Some of the individuals most closely involved in this effort were Thomas Cochran, Dean Abrahamson, John

Holdren, Arthur Tamplin, Gus Speth, Ted Taylor, and Amory Lovins. Many others were involved as well, but on a less sustained basis.

NRDC Origins

James G. (Gus) Speth, a Yale Law School graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, together with friends from Yale founded NRDC in 1970 with an original vision of operating as a public interest law firm that would

63 represent clients in environmental litigation.154 The Ford Foundation provided initial funding. When the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 became effective in 1970, the NRDC and other environmental groups gained a powerful tool to challenge the AEC and other federal agencies. A provision of NEPA required that any federal agency proposing a program that might significantly alter the human environment must prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) that would describe environmental impacts of the program and consider alternatives. Speth at

NRDC saw this NEPA requirement for environmental impact statements as a tool for allowing third parties to participate in technology assessment of major federal programs.155

The AEC initially did not perceive the same imperative for this new form of public oversight. It would ultimately require litigation to bring the AEC to recognize and accept the full technology assessment implications of NEPA. The Calvert Cliffs verdict in January 1971 established the precedent that the AEC could not rely on its own regulations in certifying that environmental impacts of nuclear power plants were acceptable, and instead would have to seek a public consensus to this effect through an open and contested process for each new plant.156 While this change was a major step in the direction of greater public oversight of the AEC, Speth and his

154 Speth, Interview by Author. 155 Speth, “Federal Role in Technology Assesment,” 432. 156 Arthur W. Murphy, “The National Environmental Policy Act and the Licensing Process: Environmentalist Magna Carta or Agency Coup De Grace?” Columbia Law Review 72, no. 6 (1972): 972. The effect of this decision was to paralyze reactor licensing for eighteen months while the AEC struggled to develop a new licensing approach. Ninety-three reactors in various stages of development were affected in the interim. See also Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 132.

64 colleagues at NRDC sought to bridge from this first step to a more fundamental challenge that would address AEC programs rather than just specific site issues.

SIPI versus AEC Lawsuit

Shortly after establishing the Washington office of the NRDC in 1970, Speth approached a staff member at the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI) to see if SIPI would be interested in serving as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the

AEC that would seek to force the AEC to develop and publish an EIS for the entire

LMFBR program. Speth targeted the LMFBR program because this was the highest priority project for the AEC, and because he believed it threatened to vastly increase risks of plutonium pollution or diversion.157 SIPI was a public advocacy group that had been established during the late 1950s by Barry Commoner, Margaret Mead,

Linus Pauling, Réne Dubos, and others to advocate for a halt to atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons on the grounds that this testing was contaminating the biosphere with hazardous . So SIPI already had a history of seeking to expose AEC safety claims to public scrutiny and was a logical plaintiff.158

The NRDC filed suit against the AEC in federal court on behalf of SIPI on May

25, 1971, shortly after the AEC requested $100M from Congress in 1972 fiscal year appropriations, and two weeks before Nixon issued his special address on the energy crisis in which he elevated the LMFBR program to the top energy research and development priority. Notably, in the press conference that SIPI held in New

157 Speth, Interview by Author. 158 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 199.

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York to announce their lawsuit, SIPI drew a comparison between the LMFBR program and the recently cancelled SST program, a similarly high profile Nixon

Administration federal research effort.159 The implication of this comparison was clear: SIPI and the NRDC hoped to trigger a technology assessment that would galvanize enough political support to kill the LMFBR and the rest of the plutonium economy technology program.

After at first losing their case, SIPI prevailed on appeal vs. the AEC in June

1973. The presiding justice found that:

Our examination of this record leads us to conclude that the Commission [AEC] could have no rational basis for deciding that the time is not yet ripe for drafting an impact statement on the overall LMFBR program.160

By compelling the AEC to issue an EIS for the entire LMFBR program, the NRDC achieved its goal of forcing the AEC to broadly justify the economic, environmental, and societal impacts of the LMFBR component of the plutonium economy technology vision in a public forum that would be open to contending views. The

AEC began working on a Draft EIS for the LMFBR program after this verdict was handed down and published this for comment during the spring of 1974.161 The

SIPI vs AEC appeal precedent requiring a programmatic EIS similarly impacted AEC plans to permit reprocessing of plutonium from LWRs, the other major plutonium

159 John Noble Wilford, “Scientist's Group Sues A.E.C. For Data Onnew-Type Reactor,” New York Times, May 26, 1971. 160 Scientists' Institute for Public Information, Inc., Appelant V. Atomic Energy Commission et al., 481 F.482d 1079; 1156 U.S. App. D.C. 1395; 1973 U.S. App., 17 (1973). 17. 161 Environmental Statement: Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, vol. 1. WASH-1535. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 1974.

66 economy program at the AEC at this time. The AEC issued a draft Generic EIS for the proposed use of Mixed Oxide in LWRs (GESMO) in August 1974, opening this ruling to public comment as well.162 So, by early 1974, the NRDC had compelled the AEC to conduct public technology assessments for its key plutonium economy programs.

In many respects, the SIPI vs. AEC lawsuit laid the groundwork for the

NRDC’s and SIPI’s subsequent campaign against the plutonium economy. It was through SIPI that Gus Speth met Dean Abrahamson, who was one of the leaders of

SIPI and an associate of Barry Commoner.163 Commoner recommended that Speth consult with Abrahamson on technical matters in preparation for the case.

Abrahamson became a trustee of the NRDC and a stalwart ally in its subsequent interventions and congressional appearances. Abrahamson also introduced Speth to Arthur Tamplin, who would join the NRDC as a staff scientist. It was through the

SIPI vs. AEC lawsuit that Speth met Dr. Thomas Cochran, a physicist who had in

1972 been working as a fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington, DC natural resources think tank that had been founded and substantially funded by the

Ford Foundation. While at RFF, Cochran had written a critical analysis of the AEC’s

LMFBR program.164 Cochran’s and Speth’s common target led Cochran to take a

162 The Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in LWRs: GESMO, vol. 1. WASH-1327.U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 1974. Mixed oxide is LWR fuel made from a combination of enriched uranium and reprocessed plutonium. 163 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 325. Commoner lists Abrahamson first in his acknowledgements section. Abrahamson was a Board Director at SIPI at that time. 164 Thomas B. Cochran, The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor; an Environmental and Economic Critique (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future; distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore, 1974). Although this work was published in 1974, Cochran wrote much of this in late 1972.

67 staff scientist position at NRDC in April 1973 after his fellowship at RFF expired.165

So, by 1974, when the AEC began accepting comments for the LMFBR and GESMO

EISs, the core NRDC team of Speth, Abrahamson, Tamplin, and Cochran were working together in what Cochran and Speth described as a “campaign” against the plutonium economy technology program.166

NRDC Plutonium Economy Policy Analysis

Cochran’s The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and

Economic Critique developed the core of the economic critique that the NRDC would use throughout its advocacy campaign against the LMFBR. This volume, written in

1972 while Cochran was a fellow at Resources for the Future, although not officially published until 1974, was circulated in manuscript form among the community of environmental policy analysts starting in late 1972.167 Cochran, Tamplin, and Speth refined and augmented their anti-LMFBR policy analysis through a steady stream of publications between 1971 and April 1975, when they summarized the NRDC arguments against the LMFBR in Bypassing the Breeder: A Report on Misplaced

Federal Energy Priorities, a report that was intended to inform the various

Congressional hearings on the LMFBR program that were held during the first half

165 Thomas B. Cochran, Interview by Author, June 5 & 8, 2009. 166 Cochran, Interview by Author. Speth, Interview by Author. 167 Cochran, Interview by Author. I have chosen to use the date of manuscript circulation (1972) in citation analyses that include this source because several sources written before Dr. Cochran’s official publication date (1974) cite this source, so this date is important in accurately representing precedence.

68 of 1975.168 Cochran maintained a consistent policy analysis strategy throughout this period in his presentation of the economic arguments against the LMFBR program.

He concentrated on critically reanalyzing the AEC’s own cost-benefit studies of the net economic benefit of introducing LMFBRs into the U.S. power economy.169

Cochran argued that the AEC assumed unrealistic values for the inputs to their cost/benefit models in order to project positive economic benefits for the LMFBR program. Cochran focused, therefore, on demonstrating through sensitivity analyses of these input assumptions that the net economic benefit of the LMFBR program could plausibly be zero or negative and that there would be no economic penalty to delaying commercialization of the LMFBR.170

Contesting the Uranium Shortage Assumption

Cochran challenged the key economic argument that the AEC had always used to justify the urgency of transitioning from LWRs to a breeder-based infrastructure: the idea that uranium was scarce and that there was an inadequate supply to fuel expected U.S. generation requirements.171 Key inputs to the AEC model were the assumed growth rate of electricity demand and estimates of remaining reserves of uranium ore and associated forward prices. Based on trend

168 Thomas B. Cochran, James Gustave Speth, and Arthur Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder: A Report on Misplaced Federal Energy Priorities (Washington, DC: Natural Resources Defense Council, 1975); Cochran, Interview by Author. 169 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, 17. 170 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, 215; Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder, 9. 171 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 154. Seaborg, for example, describes the perceived economic urgency of adopting the LMFBR based on this assumed scarcity of uranium.

69 growth in the 1960s, the AEC projected that electrical demand would grow at an annual rate of 7%, doubling every ten years for the fifty years between 1970 and

2020.172 Using estimates of remaining uranium reserves based only on already identified deposits, the AEC projected that U.S. uranium resources were in the range of 1.8 million tons and would be essentially exhausted in a few decades if consumed in LWRs.173 Cochran argued that electricity demand growth was likely to be 25%-

50% less than the AEC projection and that potential uranium supply was many times higher than AEC estimates. Consequently, there was no looming resource crisis and no urgency to adopt breeder reactors.174

Cochran relied on the work of Milton Searl, an RFF colleague and former AEC staffer, and Hans Landsberg in challenging the orthodoxy about uranium scarcity.175

Applying a natural resource economics technique that had been pioneered by

Landsberg, Searl and Cochran reanalyzed AEC uranium reserve estimates and argued that as prices of uranium rose, so would economic incentives for mining and milling uranium ore and that this process would lead to the dramatic expansion of known uranium reserves, much as had been the historic experience with the mining of many other ores.176 Within the established framework of mineral economics, then, Cochran’s argument for a high price elasticity of supply for uranium had many

172 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, Chapter 4. 173 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, 83. 174 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, chapters 3 and 4. 175 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder, 33. 176 See for example Hans H. Landsberg, “The U.S. Resource Outlook: Quantity and Quality,” Daedalus 96, no. 4 (1967): 1034-1057. This reference presents Landsberg’s discussion of the role that technology and price signals have played in driving up known reserves for other resources.

70 antecedents. Cochran also pointed out that during the period when the U.S. operated

LWRs, most of the uranium ore (over 80%) that would be discarded as tails from the enrichment process used to make LEU fuel for LWRs would be conserved and would be available for use as fertile fuel in the future if LMFBRS were brought into service.

So even if uranium ore was scarce, there would be no need to conserve it for future use in LMFBRs.177

LMFBR Program Misallocates Federal Resources

Given Cochran’s conclusions that uranium was not scarce and that an urgent commercialization of the LMFBR carried little or no economic benefit, Cochran argued that the dominant budget priority accorded to the LMFBR program at the expense of research programs for other sources of energy and for energy conservation represented a misallocation of federal resources.178 Cochran’s presentation of the degree to which the LMFBR program distorted federal research and development priorities evolved from his more circumspect conclusions in The

Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and Economic Critique, which was written in late 1972 while he was at RFF, to a more emphatic presentation in

Bypassing the Breeder: A Report on Misplaced Federal Energy Priorities, which was published in April 1975 under the auspices of the NRDC.179 Partly, this shift in tone reflected the different missions of RFF and the NRDC. The AEC was one of the

177 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, 100. LWRs primarily consume U235, whereas LMFBRs consume the more abundant U238. 178 Cochran, An Environmental and Economic Critique, 213-214. 179 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder.

71 financial patrons of RFF at the time that Cochran was working on his study, so

Cochran’s study and his leaking of negative conclusions to the press prior to publication of his study created considerable discomfort for RFF leadership.180

Publication of his study was delayed for over a year for this reason and it was only through the intercession of Hans Landsberg, one of the leaders of RFF, that

Cochran’s study was finally approved for release. Once at the NRDC, Cochran had no need to hold back on criticism of the AEC.181

“Hot Particle” Theory of Plutonium Toxicity

In early 1974, as the AEC was preparing generic EISs for both plutonium recycle (the so called “GESMO” filing) and for the LMFBR, Tamplin and Cochran published a paper describing a “Hot Particle” theory of plutonium toxicity.182 This drew from earlier work that Donald Geesaman had done while at Lawrence

Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) to analyze the concentration of radiation dose that occurs when an insoluble alpha-emitting radionuclide such as plutonium lodges in lung tissue.183 The essence of the “Hot Particle” theory was that whereas existing AEC limits for exposure to plutonium were built on the assumption of

180 Allen L. Hammond, “The Fast Breeder Reactor: Signs of a Critical Reaction,” Science 176, no. 4033 (1972): 391-393. This was the article in which Cochran leaked his conclusion that the LMFBR program was a misallocation of federal research resources. 181 Cochran, Interview by Author. 182 Thomas B. Cochran and Arthur Tamplin, “Radiation Standards for Hot Particles: A Report on the Inadequacy of Existing Radiation Protection Standards Related to Internal Exposure of Man to Insoluble Particles of Plutonium and Other Alpha-Emiting Hot Particles,”(1974) . 183 Donald P. Geesaman, “Plutonium and the Energy Decision,” in The Energy Crisis, ed. Richard S. Lewis and Bernard I. Spinrad (Chicago: Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1972): 33-36.

72 distributed dosage over the entire body or organ system, in reality, aerosols of plutonium “hot particles” if inhaled would intensely irradiate only the immediately proximal lung tissue, thereby greatly concentrating alpha particle radiation doses and enormously increasing cancer risk. Analyzing lung cancer risk using this hot particle model, Tamplin and Cochran concluded that existing AEC plutonium exposure standards were too high by more than a factor of 100,000 and that the safe exposure limit for the general public was essentially zero.184 Throughout the remainder of their campaign against the plutonium economy, Cochran, Speth,

Tamplin, and Abrahamson would rely on this “hot particle” theory to assert the

“fiendishly toxic” nature of plutonium, claiming that it was the “most dangerous substance known.”185 The point of this policy element was evidently to argue that separated plutonium was unlike other environmental risks that could be accepted at some reasonable level and to elevate the impending adoption of plutonium economy technologies to a public health emergency.

Plutonium Diversion and Civil Liberties

A further policy element developed by the NRDC was the argument that the imperative of addressing the extraordinary public risks associated with the possibility of nuclear terrorism would threaten privacy rights and existing norms of

American civil liberties. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the fall of

184 Cochran and Tamplin, “Hot Particles.” 185 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder, 5. Seaborg was the first to call plutonium “fiendishly toxic.”

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1974, Cochran, Speth and Tamplin drew on the earlier work of Ted Taylor, in defining the risk of nuclear terrorism, and of Alvin Weinberg in questioning the feasibility of permanent social and institutional changes that a shift to a plutonium economy would require, in asserting that the likely consequence of such a policy would be a vast increase in government surveillance and intimidation of nuclear industry workers and opponents.186 It is worth remarking that Cochran, Speth, and

Tamplin were making this argument three months after President Nixon had closed the Watergate affair by resigning in disgrace, and public confidence in government was arguably at a low point. Furthermore, it had emerged during the Watergate hearings that Nixon had maintained an “enemies list” of people targeted for surveillance and harassment and that Bernard Feld, professor of Physics at MIT, member of the U.S. Pugwash delegation, and Board Director of the Bulletin of the

Atomic Scientists was on Nixon’s list.187 Given this contemporary experience with abuse of federal police powers and the targeting of a prominent critic of federal nuclear policies, such concerns would have probably seemed credible, especially so to those on the political left.188

186 Thomas B. Cochran, James Gustave Speth, and Arthur Tamplin, “Plutonium Recycle: The Fateful Step,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 30, no. 9 (1974): 20. 187 Edward Walsh and William A. McCombs, “Members of 'Enemies List' Cover Broad Political Spectrum,” Washington Post, June 28, 1973. 188 The Nixon enemies list was part of a broader pattern of disregard for civil liberties during his administration. The Watergate investigation process revealed a larger effort to use U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to monitor and harass individuals and organizations deemed sources of dissent. For details of the “Huston Plan,” see United States Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, “Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activites and the Rights of Americans,” .

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Confederates in Anti-Plutonium Economy Advocacy

It would be a mistake to leave the impression that the NRDC and SIPI were the only sources of policy analysis and advocacy critical of plutonium economy programs in this period. As the LMFBR program progressed through each subsequent stage that brought it closer to implementation, a loose network of anti- plutonium economy advocates coalesced periodically to act jointly in an effort to impede the program. One such event that provoked a reaction was the March 1972 initiation of work on agreements between the AEC and the prime contractor,

Westinghouse, and the lead sponsoring utilities, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Commonwealth Edison to form two corporations to manage the construction and subsequent operation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, the first in the AEC’s proposed series of demonstration plants that would be built in order to catalyze the commercial launch of LMFBR technology.189 The notable feature of the public/private investment partnerships that these corporations implemented was that the financial exposure of the private parties involved was capped whereas the

AEC assumed responsibility for any cost overruns.190

The month following the commencement of this activity, Environmental

Action, which was the organization founded by Denis Hayes and several other of the organizers of the first Earth Day event, organized a joint statement by thirty-one

189 In a complicated arrangement that took over a year to complete, the Project Management Corporation and the Breeder Reactor Corporation were formed, each of which was to be funded partly through the AEC and partly through private investment from the industrial participants. This unwieldy arrangement led to some of the delays and project management dysfunction that beset the project. As a consequence of this dysfunction, AEC and ERDA had reorganized management arrangements for the project several times by July of 1975. 190 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future.

75 scientists urging Congress not to proceed with the proposed agreements to fund and organize the Clinch River project. Notable signatories were: Barry Commoner and

Linus Pauling from SIPI; Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, who were close associates in espousing a particularly dire view of impending ecological problems; Thomas

Cochran, who was at RFF at the time; and Robert Rauch of Friends of the Earth.191

The same week that this statement was issued, Science published an article casting doubt on the economic justification for the LMFBR program.192 The Science article resulted from an exchange between Cochran and Allen Hammond, the article’s author, in which Cochran showed Hammond preliminary work he had done in reanalyzing the AEC cost/benefit models for the LMFBR program.193 Cochran would over the course of the summer of 1972 expand this analysis into his book-length work, The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and Economic

Critique, that would become one of the most cited sources of policy analysis used by

LMFBR opponents. The timing of these events and the background of the participants suggests that the initial motivation driving participation in the anti- plutonium interest network stemmed from a philosophical aversion to the cornucopian “technical fix” approach to energy imbalances. The detailed policy

191 Victor Cohn, “AEC Claims New Reactor Is No Hazard,” Washington Post, April 15 1972. This episode illustrated the principle that Berry describes in defining issue networks as containing “strange bedfellows” who were mostly united by a common policy goal. At the time of their collaboration on this statement, Commoner was engaged in a public argument with Ehrlich and Holdren over the scope of ecological threats. Holdren and Ehrlich thought Commoner was not sufficiently concerned with the effects of population growth and increasing affluence in addition to technology as contributors to negative ecological impacts. See Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “Critique,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28, no. 5 (1972): 16-56. 192 Hammond, “The Fast Breeder Reactor: Signs of a Critical Reaction.” 193 Cochran, Interview by Author.

76 analysis that attacked AEC program assumptions followed as the campaign developed.

Further coordinated action among anti-plutonium advocates occurred in

August 1972, when the NRDC, SIPI, Friends of the Earth, and several of Ralph

Nader’s organizations sent a letter to Senator Pastore, Chairman of the JCAE, demanding that persons from the public interest community be placed in the boards of directors of the Breeder Reactor Corporation and the Project Management

Corporation, the two entities managing the development of the Clinch River LMFBR plant. Among those that the letter proposed seating as a director was Dean

Abrahamson.194 Pastore did not comply.

The next month, David Brower of Friends of the Earth received an invitation to address the JCAE over his concerns about the LMFBR program. Brower brought

Amory Lovins, who had recently begun his career in energy policy analysis and anti- nuclear advocacy at the time, to speak on his behalf. Lovins’ statement was a full- spectrum synthesis of the currently available critiques of the LMFBR program, emphatically argued, presented to persuade the JCAE to pause the LMFBR program to allow for further technology assessment. Lovins’ JCAE statement was subsequently published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, increasing exposure for this viewpoint.195 Lovins was thus one of the earliest confederates of the NRDC in this anti-LMFBR campaign. Lovins repeated his critique of the LMFBR program in

194 “Public Voice Urged on Nuclear Reactor,” New York Times, August 2, 1972. 195 Amory B. Lovins, “The Case against the Fast Breeder Reactor: An Anti-Nuclear Establishment View,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 29, no. 3 (1973): 29-35. Lovins’ JCAE statement relied, among other sources, on Tom Cochran’s book-length critique, which was substantially complete in manuscript form although still unpublished at this point.

77 his writings throughout the period from 1973 to 1976 as a component of a broader critique of nuclear power.196 Lovins was an obscure figure outside the environmental community until nearly the end of the 1976 campaign cycle, when he published a seminal article in Foreign Affairs197 in which he advocated “soft” energy infrastructure development policy (emphasizing conservation and decentralized, renewable generation) rather than the “hard” or centralized energy technologies that the LMFBR epitomized.198

John Holdren was another important ally in anti-plutonium advocacy during this period. A physicist and research fellow at the California Institute of Technology

Environmental Quality Laboratory, Holdren and his colleagues there worked in loose collaboration with the Sierra Club to advocate for technology assessment of nuclear power and for environmentally responsible state energy legislation.199 In

January of 1974, Holdren published a study that critically examined the premise of uranium scarcity upon which the AEC justification for rapid introduction of the

LMFBR rested. Holdren concluded that even under very aggressive assumptions about electricity demand growth, there would be adequate uranium supplies in the

196 See Amory B. Lovins, “World Energy Strategies,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 30, no. 5 (1974): 14-32, and Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth Energy Papers (: Friends of the Earth International, 1975). 197 Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” 198 Amory B. Lovins, Email, September 25, 2009. Carter did not know Lovins before writing the July 1975 energy policy speech. Lovins later elaborated his concepts in his 1977 book Soft Energy Paths, and this work has formed the basis of his energy policy advocacy since that time. President Carter was so impressed with Soft Energy Paths that he invited Lovins to the White House to discuss his book. Lovins met Carter for the first time there on October 18, 1977. 199 Wellock, Critical Masses, 102.

78

U.S. to support LWR requirements for at least fifty years.200 Holdren’s study thus corroborated and strengthened Cochran’s and Searl’s earlier arguments about the adequacy of uranium supplies, and would be repeatedly cited by LMFBR opponents.201 Freeman cited Holdren’s study in A Time to Choose, but did not know

Holdren at that time.202 Holdren’s contribution as an NRDC ally is especially notable because he was a prominent witness in both the 1975 Udall hearings and the 1975

JCAE hearings on the LMFBR program. In his testimony at the Udall hearings on the

LMFBR program, Holdren argued that the AEC had vastly overstated the future demand for electricity and that consequently there was no looming crisis in uranium supply and therefore no harm in postponing the LMFBR program by several decades. In challenging the AEC electricity demand forecast, Holdren cited the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project final report, A Time to Choose, indicating that he thought the lowest demand scenario (Zero Energy Growth) projected in that report was the most likely case.203

While Cochran, Lovins, and Holdren, were known as skeptics of nuclear power when they wrote their policy analyses of the LMFBR program, and hence would have been perhaps discounted by observers unsympathetic to the anti-

200 John P. Holdren, “Environmental Quality Laboratory Memorandum 8: Uranium Availability and the Breeder Decision” (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1974), 29. 201 Holdren acknowledged Cochran as one of his sources for the article. 202 S. David Freeman, Interview by Author, December 29, 2009. 203 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment., Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Nuclear Breeder Development Program: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington, D.C. June 2, 5 and 6, 1975 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975), 702-704.

79 nuclear viewpoint, criticism of the LMFBR program was beginning to emerge from less obviously aligned sources as well. Irwin Bupp and Jean Claude Derian, researchers at Harvard and MIT who were studying the economics and market dynamics of the nuclear reactor market, published a study in late 1974 that questioned the economic rationale for maintaining such an overwhelming priority on federal support for LMFBR development on the grounds that the same funds would be better spent on improving the efficiency and safety of LWRs.204 This finding echoed and corroborated Cochran’s conclusion that there was inordinate budgetary priority on the LMFBR program, despite Bupp’s and Derian’s divergent conclusion about how to more optimally allocate federal energy reseach funds.

NRDC Intervention in LMFBR and GESMO EIS Proceedings

Beyond developing policy analysis of the LMFBR and related programs, the

NRDC took an active and leading role in opposing these programs through intervention in the contested public assessments that soon began for each and in launching further litigation. In October 1973 the AEC solicited comments for the first draft of an EIS for the LMFBR program to be prepared in conformance with the new requirement established by the SIPI vs. AEC appeal verdict. The AEC/ERDA then issued a Draft EIS in April 1974, a Proposed Final EIS in January 1975 and a

Final EIS in December 1975. Interveners submitted comments at each of the stages of this process, and in each cycle, the AEC/ERDA was compelled to consider and

204 Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, “The Breeder Reactor in the US: A New Economic Analysis,” Technology Review 76, no. 8 (1974): 26-36.

80 answer each comment submitted.205 The AEC/NRC started a parallel programmatic

EIS process for plutonium recycle by issuing a draft of the GESMO document in

August 1974 and soliciting public comment, then issuing a final version of the

GESMO document in August 1976.206

Discussing this period, Cochran recalled that it was the NRDC’s strategy to

“load up” the AEC with as many comments as possible in order to make the process as challenging as possible for the AEC and its successors.207 This “loading up” involved commenting directly and encouraging other sympathetic interveners to amplify the NRDC’s policy critique by raising similar objections. The NRDC and other interveners submitted a total of over 150 comment statements in the LMFBR

EIS process and over 340 comment statements in the GESMO EIS process.208 The

AEC included a content analysis of the negative comment statements submitted to the draft EIS for the LMFBR and summarized the main themes as follows:

1. The LMFBR will introduce unacceptable risks to public health and safety…

2. There are more acceptable (e.g., lower risk) alternatives … which could be made available, when needed, through adequately supported research and development programs.

205 Final Environmental Statement: Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Vol 1. ERDA- 1535. U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration. 1975. i. 206 Final Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in Light Water Cooled Reactors, Executive Summary. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 1976. ES-3. 207 Cochran, Interview by Author. 208 Final Environmental Statement: Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, vol 2. ERDA- 1535. U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration. 1975. v2; Final Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in Light Water Cooled Reactors. Public Comments and Nuclear Regulatory Commission Responses, vol 5. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 1976. 1-2.

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3. Projected growth in electric generating capacity and electric energy use is overstated and will not materialize. Also, practical energy conservation measures could and should be taken, which would make development of the LMFBR option unnecessary.

4. Prospective quantities of relatively high grade uranium resources in the U.S. could be sufficient to support the increased use of economically competitive nonbreeder powerplants, which could delay or eliminate the need for the LMFBR option.209

It is apparent that the main themes of the objecting comments correspond closely to the major aspects of the NRDC policy critique of the LMFBR program.

The NRC produced a similar content analysis of the comments received during public review of the GESMO document. The vast majority of these comment statements (over 200 out of 340) addressed the lack of any consideration of safeguards and plutonium diversion risk.210 The Council on Environmental Quality

(CEQ), the executive branch department that was created under NEPA to supervise the adequacy of environmental impact statements also noted this shortcoming of the draft GESMO document and in January 1975 advised the NRC that the CEQ considered GESMO incomplete without such an analysis and recommended that the

NRC not issue a final approval for the widespread use of MOX fuel until the social and environmental impacts of diversion risks and corresponding safeguards were also considered and addressed.211 In November 1975, the NRC announced that it

209 Proposed Final Environmental Statement: Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, vol 1. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 1974. 1.1-4. 210 Final Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in Light Water Cooled Reactors. Public Comments and Nuclear Regulatory Commission Responses, vol 5. 2. 211 The term “MOX” refers to Mixed Oxide fuel, which contains a blend of uranium and plutonium oxide. MOX is the format through which reprocessed plutonium is recycled as reactor fuel.

82 would comply with the CEQ directive by issuing a draft safeguards supplement to the main GESMO document.212

But the NRC also ruled that it would license MOX use on an interim basis before the safeguards supplement to the GESMO document was completed, thus bifurcating the GESMO process and essentially proceeding with the plutonium recycle policy prior to resolution of the largest topic of negative comments. This prompted the NRDC in April 1976 to sue the NRC in federal court to prevent the interim licensing of MOX use before the completion of the safeguards portion of the

GESMO process.213 The NRDC won their case in June 1976 and, as a result, the NRC was forced to postpone any licensing of MOX use until the overall completion of the

GESMO process, which Gus Speth of the NRDC at the time estimated would take

“several years.”214 Effectively, this verdict pushed any policy decision on domestic reprocessing off to the next presidential administration. In this context, President

Ford’s October 1976 statement on deferring domestic plutonium reprocessing was a very low stakes policy decision.

So, the NRDC forced the AEC and its successor organizations into programmatic EIS processes for both of the key plutonium economy programs, and in many respects set the terms for the public technology assessments that these processes became. The thematic content of the negative comments that were

212 Final Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in Light Water Cooled Reactors, Executive Summary. ES-3. 213 Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., et al., Petitioners, V. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission et al., 539 F.532d 824; 1976 U.S. App(1976). 214 Burnham, “Court Bars Plutonium's Commercial Use.”

83 submitted closely corresponded to the policy critique that the NRDC had developed, and in the process of stimulating the response of interveners, the NRDC disseminated its policy critique widely through a network of environmental and anti-nuclear groups. Beyond serving as a vehicle for transmitting the NRDC policy critique of plutonium economy technologies, the EIS processes focused political attention on both programs, and successful NRDC litigation brought the MOX program to a halt.

NRDC Role in Framing Plutonium Policy Choices in Early 1975

Arguably, one of the most significant influences that the NRDC had on

Carter’s development of his plutonium economy policy was in the policy advocacy strategy that Speth, Cochran, Tamplin and their colleagues adopted in preparing their testimony for the various congressional hearings that they participated in during early 1975. Whereas most of the other environmental organizations involved in advocacy against ERDA and the NRC had by this time endorsed the call for a nuclear power moratorium that Ralph Nader and Henry Kendall had promoted at their Critical Mass conference in the fall of 1974, the NRDC did not join in endorsing this extreme and politically infeasible policy option. In a recent interview, Speth insisted on a clear distinction between the anti-LMFBR/anti-MOX campaign that the

NRDC led and the broader campaign seeking a nuclear moratorium at the time.

Indeed, on April 28, 1975, the first day that Udall’s committee heard testimony on the broad issues underlying the , Senator Mike Gravel entered into the record a list of over 150 organizations that had endorsed a moratorium on

84 the further construction of nuclear plants of any kind. All of the major national environmental and ecology groups including Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Zero Population Growth, the Environmental Policy Center,

Environmental Action, and all of Ralph Nader’s relevant groups were on the list.

Conspicuous in their absence from this list were SIPI and the NRDC.215

Rather than advocate for a broad nuclear moratorium, the NRDC in its pamphlet Bypassing the Breeder that they published in March of 1975 and in its testimony at the Udall hearings and at the JCAE hearings argued for a ten-year delay in the overall LMFBR program and cancellation of the Clinch River project, with a shift in focus to a continuing program centered on ERDA’s Fast Flux Test Reactor, which would continue research activity on fast neutron sodium cooled breeders, but at a substantially lower funding level.216 By framing their policy aims in this limited way, the NRDC offered policy-makers an option that was politically quite distinct from a nuclear moratorium and one that could even be presented as not necessarily a blanket rejection of the LMFBR. The NRDC position was evidently intended to offer policy-makers a choice that seemed reasonable, especially in comparison with the more strident positions of both the nuclear industry and of moratorium advocates.

215 House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Overview of the Major Issues: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington D.C. April 28, 29; May 1 and 2, 1975, 1975, 94. 216 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Nuclear Breeder Development Program: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington, D.C. June 2, 5 and 6, 1975, 22; Review of National Breeder Reactor Program. 121.

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NRDC Involvement in the Carter Campaign

Beyond indirectly influencing plutonium economy positions in the Carter campaign through the various policy development and advocacy efforts already detailed, the NRDC had a direct influence that became more pronounced as the

Carter campaign progressed. Stuart Eizenstat, who in early 1975 was assisting the

Carter campaign with issues development on a part-time basis, recalls that the

NRDC initiated contact with the campaign and started sending policy analysis material to the Carter team. Eizenstat recalls that this was in the period the

Congressional hearings on the LMFBR program and that the Carter campaign was aware of these hearings.217 A further indirect influence on the Carter campaign was through a public relations effort that the NRDC developed through the National

Council of Churches during the period of the campaign to further promote advocacy against ERDA plutonium economy programs. Appendix III presents an overview of this effort.

Later in the campaign, during 1976, the NRDC became more directly involved in attempting to influence the Carter issues platform. Gus Speth was the main point of contact between the NRDC and the Carter campaign. After Eizenstat joined the

Carter campaign as the full-time issues director in April 1976, he hired several deputies, among whom was David Rubenstein.218 Rubenstein became Speth’s main contact at the Carter campaign, and it was through this channel that NRDC policy

217 Stuart Eizenstat, Interview by Author, October 9, 2009. 218 Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-Presidency (New York: Scribner, 1997), 276.

86 analysis flowed to the campaign during the balance of 1976.219 Further evidence of

Speth’s close involvement during the campaign and the esteem that he and the

NRDC enjoyed with the Carter domestic policy team was Speth’s subsequent appointment to a position on the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the

Carter White House. Later during his administration, Carter appointed Speth chairman of the CEQ.220

219 Speth, Interview by Author.See, for example James Gustave Speth and Thomas B. Cochran, “Memo to David Rubenstein,” August 11, 1976, folder: Energy—CRBR [1], box: 6, collection: DPS Ward/Schirmer, Jimmy Carter Library. 220 Speth, Red Sky at Morning, 2.

Chapter IV.

Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project 1972-1974

While the early 1970s saw the development of a mounting controversy over the risks of nuclear energy, public and government concern over other aspects of the U.S. energy economy were also building during this same period. Rising energy consumption and a substitution of oil for coal in legacy power generation facilities had produced a rapid increase in U.S. oil demand during the late 1960s. By 1970, domestic U.S. oil production peaked and for the first time, the U.S. ran out of spare pumping capacity. Oil imports as a portion of total U.S. consumption increased from

19 percent in 1967 to 36 percent in 1973.221 The sense of looming supply vulnerabilities, together with a growing concern over the environmental impacts of energy use prompted some pioneering energy studies from private policy-making groups even before the 1973 OPEC supply shock. From 1974 on, the area of energy policy analysis exploded, yielding a plethora of studies by the end of the decade.

Greenberger et al., in their analysis of fourteen such studies from the 1970s, argue that the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project (EPP), which started in 1972, marked the beginning of this trend.222 This was the first of three such studies that the Ford Foundation would sponsor during the 1970s, making it the most active

221 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 549-550. 222 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, chapter 4.

88 and, by Greenberger’s reckoning, the most influential non-governmental patron of energy studies during this period.223

Origins of the Ford Foundation EPP Study

The genesis of the EPP was in an initiative that the board of the Ford

Foundation took in 1970 to form an environmental institute to conduct analyses of policy options arising from the establishment of the new Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) and Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation board wanted to secure complimentary funding from the

National Science Foundation for this effort, but the Nixon White House vetoed such funding on partisan grounds and the plan as initially envisioned fell through. In this same period, as concerns over electrical brownouts were mounting, David

Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Chairman of the AEC, approached Bundy and encouraged him to apply foundation resources to analyzing the underlying problems. Thus, was born an interest at the Ford

Foundation to study energy problems within a larger context of environmental constraints and impacts.224 The immediate problem then became selecting leadership for the study and defining aims and ground rules.

In this same period, SIPI and the Committee on Environmental Alterations

(CEA) of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) decided

223 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 77. Greenberger et al. in 1983 conducted a survey of 150 energy policy-makers to assess among other factors, the influence of the fourteen energy studies they analyzed. Only four of the fourteen studies were judged as rating a grade of “A” on the influence dimension, and two of these four were the Ford Foundation EPP and the Ford/MITRE study. 224 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 90-91.

89 to collaborate on a study of the environmental effects of electrical power production. Barry Commoner of SIPI was the instigator of the study and also served as the chairman of the Committee on Environmental Alterations of the AAAS. Dean

Abrahamson served as the chairman of the study, and Robert Williams, a physicist from the University of Michigan served on the working group that guided the work of the study. In the summer of 1970, Abrahamson applied to the Ford Foundation for financial support for the SIPI/AAAS study and in January of 1971, the Ford

Foundation provided $63,350.225 While this was a modest sum compared to the

$4M that the Ford Foundation would later lavish on the EPP, it was nonetheless an expression of the Ford Foundation’s interest in the topic as it was contemplating its own study.

Abrahamson, as chairman of the SIPI/AAAS study, organized a two-day seminar at the December 1971 annual meeting of the AAAS to present the work of the study group. Among the presenters were: Abrahamson; Authur Tamplin; Donald

Geesaman; Barry Commoner; Ted Taylor; and David Freeman. In thematic emphasis, the AAAS seminar previewed core findings that the EPP would go on to develop.

Freeman, for example, presented a paper titled “Reducing the Need for Power,” arguing that energy demand reduction was a part of the solution to the looming supply/demand imbalance. This theme would form the organizing principle of

225 Barry Commoner, “Electric Power Consumption and Human Welfare: The Social Consequences of the Environmental Effects of Electric Power Use—Working Papers of the Electric Power Task Force of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information and the Power Study Group of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Committee on Environemntal Alterations,” ed. Dean E. Abrahamson, et al. (St. Louis: Committee on Environmental Alterations, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1972), v. “Ford Foundation Annual Report 1971” (New York: Ford Foundation, 1971) < http://www.fordfound.org/archives/item/1971>.

90

Freeman’s final report for the EPP. Ted Taylor presented a paper titled “The Need for National and International Systems to Provide Physical Security for Fissionable

Materials.” 226 Taylor reprised this topic under the auspices of the EPP. So, the

SIPI/AAAS study on the environmental effects of electrical power production previewed, on a smaller scale, the later work of the EPP and also served to introduce several of the principals to each other and to the Ford Foundation.227

EPP Staffing and Mandate

The Ford Foundation trustees voted in December 1971 to formally authorize the funds to support the EPP. The immediate focus shifted to selecting a leader and structuring the mandate of the study. In the controversy that followed the conclusion of the EPP, much scrutiny focused on Bundy’s decision to select David

Freeman as the Director of the EPP and to allow Freeman as much latitude as was granted in defining the analytical framework of the study.228 Freeman, an engineer and lawyer, had worked for the TVA, then subsequently at the Federal Power

Commission (FPC) under the Johnson Administration and in the White House Office of Science and Technology (OST) in the Nixon Administration, serving as the policy expert on energy. He left the Nixon Administration in August of 1971, shortly after writing the energy speech in which Nixon declared the LMFBR to be the “best hope”

226 Dean E. Abrahamson, “The Energy Crisis: Some Implications and Alternatives” (AAAS Committee on Environmental Alterations, 1971). This was the program for the seminar held at the annual meeting of the AAAS from December 28-29, 1971 227 This association between the SIPI/AAAS study and the Ford Foundation EPP has not been reported in any of the sources examined: Greenberger et al. and Lapham are silent on this. 228 See, for example, Lewis Lapham, “The Energy Debacle,” Harper's 255 (1977): 58-74.

91 for meeting future U.S. power needs. At some point during his time in the White

House, Freeman developed the conviction that energy conservation could address conflicts over energy supply and environmental impacts. In a 2003 interview,

Freeman explained the origins of his conversion:

I was pretty conventional about nuclear power and the whole power business until one day, two women from New Hampshire came to visit me when I was in the White House …. They explained to me that somebody wanted to build a nuclear power plant near their house. They did a lot of research, and they told me that you could save enough energy and so you didn't need to build a plant. I listened to them, and I checked it out, and they were right, and all of a sudden it was like a light bulb went off [sic] in my head that we were just wasting a tremendous amount of electricity, and we didn’t need to build as many plants as we thought we needed to build, because it's cheaper to conserve. That didn’t mean we didn’t need to build anything, but we just didn’t need to build that many. And they didn’t necessarily have to be nuclear. 229

After leaving his White House post, Freeman started working on a book on U.S. energy policy, and began actively promoting his views about energy conservation.230 An October 1971 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists presents an example of his public advocacy from this period:

Our response to the shortage of energy and abundance of pollution that now confront us should be to begin actively to practice conservation in the use of energy. The new era we are entering will witness a continuation of growth in energy consumption, but rapid growth should no longer be an end in itself.231

229 S. David Freeman, Interview of David Freeman at UC Berkeley, September 29, 2003 . 230 Ultimately published as, S. David Freeman, Energy: The New Era (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 231 S. David Freeman, “Toward a Policy of Energy Conservation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 27, no. 8 (1971): 8-12, 9.

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So, by the time he took on the leadership of the EPP, Freeman had already formed a conclusion that existing projections of the growth of energy demand were too high and that through energy conservation measures, many of the negative environmental, economic, and national security consequences of energy production could be ameliorated. Notably, he saw conservation as a solution to the contest over the expansion of nuclear power. This view challenged the conventional wisdom at the time that economic growth was closely correlated with increasing energy use.

In selecting him to lead the EPP, the Ford Foundation arguably understood or should have understood that Freeman brought this pro-conservation, somewhat anti-nuclear analytical framework.

To balance Freeman’s viewpoint and to add to the credibility of the study, the Ford Foundation trustees mandated that Freeman work with an Advisory Board composed of academics, environmentalists, government officials, and representatives of industry. Although Freeman would have responsibility for managing the study and have editorial control, the Advisory Board members were promised that their comments, if any, would be appended to the final report.232 The

Advisory Board consisted of twenty-one members, of whom several were environmentalists, notably Dean Abrahamson, and Michael McCloskey of the Sierra

Club. There was, however, a greater representation on the Advisory Board of members affiliated with the energy industry: nine of the total fell into this category, including representatives of Westinghouse Electric and Consolidated Edison, both of

232 Freeman, A Time to Choose, x.

93 which were financial backers of the Clinch River LMFBR project. Most prominent among the energy industry representatives on the Advisory Board was William

Tavoulareas, President of the Mobil Oil Corporation. Freeman’s focus on reducing energy demand and his evident hostility towards the energy industry guaranteed tensions with Tavoulareas and the other industry representatives.233

Once Freeman was hired, he established offices in Washington, DC for the

EPP and began work. He took guidance from the Advisory Board selectively, at best.

Freeman later explained to Lewis Lapham, of Harpers’ that he could ignore the

Advisory Board because “[he] had the power, and it didn’t matter what any of them said.”234 Lapham’s article was principally inspired by the complaints of Tavoulareas, so presumably, Freeman was referring to the Mobile Oil CEO and other energy industry figures on the Advisory Board in making this assertion of his prerogative.

In contrast, Freeman seemed much more positively disposed towards individuals who had environmentalist associations. In addition to Abrahamson, several others who had been associated with the prior SIPI/AAAS study were involved in the EPP.

Freeman hired Robert Williams as one of two physicists on the project staff.

Williams did much of the analysis of inefficiencies in existing energy systems that supported Freeman’s contention that economic growth could be decoupled from energy demand growth through greater attention to conservation principles.

Williams had a prior association with SIPI before he worked on the SIPI/AAAS

233 Lapham, “The Energy Debacle,” presents a detailed account of the conflict between Freeman and Tavoulareas. 234 Lapham, “The Energy Debacle,” 64.

94 study.235 Barry Commoner was a consultant to the project. Ted Taylor and Mason

Willrich co-authored a study of the risks that theft or diversion of plutonium and other strategic nuclear materials (SNM) presented.

Although Freeman had hired a project staff to work on the EPP studies, he also made grants to outside organizations to assist in the work of the EPP. The first two such grants that Freeman made were to the NRDC, to analyze the structure of executive branch and congressional decision-making on energy policy, and to RFF, to provide data about energy use as input to EPP analyses.236 The choice of RFF to supply energy use data to a Ford Foundation study was not surprising: RFF had been analyzing energy and natural resource issues for twenty years under the patronage of the Ford Foundation.237 The choice of the NRDC in early 1972 for the task of analyzing the political structure of federal energy decision-making is more notable. The NRDC had only been in existence since 1970, and was therefore a newcomer in the energy analysis area. Freeman developed a close relationship with

Tom Cochran over the course of the study as did Bob Williams. Freeman cited

Cochran’s policy analysis on the LMFBR program, so it is evident that the NRDC was an influence on Freeman’s and Williams’ thinking on the subject. But Freeman remembers the interchange with Cochran and the other NRDC team members as a

235 Abrahamson, Interview by Author. Williams’ prior association with SIPI was indirect via the Colorado Committee for Environmental Information, which was loosely affiliated with SIPI. 236 “Ford Foundation Annual Report 1972” (New York: Ford Foundation, 1972), . 237 See Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 40. for an overview of the origins of RFF.

95 collaboration, stating, “I wasn’t taking it [LMFBR policy analysis] as a baked dish—I was in the kitchen with them.”238

In October 1974, Freeman released his final report, A Time to Choose:

America’s Energy Future.239 Greenberger describes the release of this volume as, “a major media event…. The report was presented at simultaneous press conferences in New York and Washington. Over 6,000 copies were distributed free-of-charge to members of Congress, the governors of the fifty states (including Georgia’s Governor

Jimmy Carter)… tens of thousands more copies were sold.”240 In total, 70,000 copies of A Time to Choose were printed.241 To go beyond assessing the influence of various energy studies from the 1970s by simply measuring the number of copies distributed, Greenberger et al. conducted a survey of 150 “elite” policy-makers in

1978-1979, consisting of persons who had participated in one or more of the fourteen most significant such studies, government officials prominent in energy policy-making, and academics.242 This sample of knowledgeable energy policy- makers scored A Time to Choose in the highest category among the energy studies considered on the dimensions of: politicization and controversy; attention; and influence.243 As detailed in Appendix IV, A Time to Choose was among the most

238 Freeman, Interview by Author. 239 Freeman, A Time to Choose. 240 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 86. 241 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 80. 242 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 318. 243 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 68-77.

96 prominently cited sources of energy policy analysis by the Jackson and Udall campaigns, and Carter read it as well.

Analytic Framework Emphasized Conservation

Mr. Freeman structured the analysis in A Time to Choose around a comparison of three possible scenarios in the future rate of growth in U.S. energy consumption from 1975 to 2000. The first of these, labeled “Historical Growth” assumed that energy use in the U.S. would continue to grow at roughly the same rate that had been observed from 1950 to 1970, or about 3.4% annually. This Historical

Growth scenario reflected existing AEC and industry demand projections and was the baseline from which Freeman measured efficiency improvements in his other two scenarios. Freeman described the historical growth scenario as embodying

“lavish” use of energy, with policy action focused primarily on increasing sources of supply.244 The second scenario considered, labeled “Technical Fix” assumed that the growth rate of energy use could be cut to 1.9% annually by investing in technology aimed at improving the efficiency of energy use and by structuring government policies to encourage greater economy in the use of energy. Freeman argued that the “Technical Fix” scenario would provide the same improvement in the U.S. standard of living by the end of the century as under the “Historical Growth”

244 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 45.

97 scenario, but with less environmental impact.245 The third scenario, “Zero Energy

Growth” (ZEG) reflected the “limits to growth” school of thought that permeated much environmental writing in the early 1970s.246 The goal of Freeman’s Zero

Energy Growth scenario was to model the consequences of leveling off the growth in energy consumption before the end of the century at some steady state level that could be sustained indefinitely with tolerable social, economic, and environmental effects.247

Freeman was far from neutral in his assessment of the three scenarios. He presented the Zero Energy Growth scenario (ZEG) as the ideal towards which the

U.S. could approach if the public and policy-makers would be willing to accept some changes in life-styles and consumption patterns. He described the terminus of such a policy if successfully adopted:

some time in the 21st century, zero population growth can be achieved, and it may be that society will be ready to return to the normal state over the centuries—one of stability rather than growth.248

245 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 46. It is worth commenting that Freeman’s notion of a “technical fix” was quite different from Alvin Weinberg’s. Freeman notion of the benefit of technology was in optimizing the efficiency of energy demand, whereas Weinberg’s was in eliminating limits to supply. 246 D.L. Meadow et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972). The main idea here was that growth trends in population, resource intensity per capita, and the corresponding depletion of finite natural resources were unsustainable. Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren were active in promoting similar concepts. Holdren, in his testimony at the 1975 Udall hearings on nuclear power cited the FFEPP Zero Energy Growth scenario as the demand model goal that the U.S. should shape policy towards. United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Nuclear Breeder Development Program: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington, D.C. June 2, 5 and 6, 1975, 704. 247 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 81. 248 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 94.

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Freeman knew that the ZEG scenario was too far of a departure from the status quo to be politically feasible in the near term. One purpose in including the

ZEG scenario, was to provide a bottom bracket beyond the technical fix scenario, so that the policy actions associated with implementing the technical fix scenario would seem more balanced and reasonable. Indeed, Mr. Freeman’s conclusion section advocated the urgency of adopting the Technical Fix scenario:

The major finding from our work is that it is desirable, technically feasible, and economical to reduce the rate of energy growth in the years ahead … as set forth in our Technical Fix scenario. Such a conservation oriented energy policy provides benefits in every major area of concern—avoiding shortages, protecting the environment, avoiding problems with other nations, and keeping real social costs as low as possible.249

It is worth pointing out, however, that the Technical Fix and ZEG scenarios yielded virtually identical energy consumption savings versus the Historical Growth scenario for the first ten years of the forecast period, so Freeman’s Technical Fix scenario was in reality advocating what he considered to be a maxim policy response in the near term. Figure 4 summarizes the projected energy consumption trajectories represented by Freeman’s three scenarios. For comparison, a plot of the actual U.S. energy consumption is overlaid. As the actual consumption data illustrates, even the ZEG scenario underestimated the efficiency improvements and demand shifts that were possible.250

249 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 325. 250 It is worth noting that Freeman based his year 2000 projections on an assumption that U.S. population would be 265M (Freeman, A Time to Choose, 14), whereas the actual figure was 281M, so actual energy consumption per capita in 2000 was approximately 7% below even the ZEG estimate.

99

Total U.S. Primary Energy Use (Quadrillion Btu) 200

180

160

140 Historical Growth Technical Fix 120 Zero Energy Growth Actual 100

80

60 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Figure 4. Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project Scenario Projections and Actual Energy Use, 1975–2000251

Nuclear Supply Scenarios

Despite his role in authoring President Nixon’s June 1971 speech in which he portrayed the LMFBR as a long-range panacea to energy problems, in A Time to

Choose, Freeman presented a decidedly more negative attitude towards nuclear power and plutonium economy technologies. Freeman argued that one of the

251 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 498, 502, 508. For actual consumption data, see “Forecasts and Analyses,” Energy Information Administration .

100 significant disadvantages associated with the historical growth scenario was its reliance on nuclear energy:

Rapid growth of nuclear power is essential to the Historical Growth scenario. For energy growth to take place at historical rates, the public must be persuaded that nuclear power is safe enough to use on a large scale.252

Indeed, the Historical Growth scenario, consistent with contemporary AEC projections, envisioned growing nuclear generation capacity by an annual rate of over 16%, yielding a fifty times expansion over the forecast period.

Figure 5 contrasts the amount of primary energy derived from nuclear fission for Mr. Freeman’s three projected demand growth scenarios and overlays the actual data realized for the same period. For the Technical Fix demand growth scenario, Freeman modeled two supply strategies, one called “Self-Sufficiency,” and a second called “Environmental Protection.” The difference between these two variants of the Technical Fix scenario was how much emphasis was placed on replacing fossil fuel imports: The “Self Sufficiency” option sought a more rapid shift away from fuel imports and consequently required a higher level of nuclear power generation, whereas the “Environmental Protection” strategy placed more emphasis on reducing dependence on environmentally hazardous supply sources such as nuclear fission. The nuclear power projection in Freeman’s Technical

Fix/Environmental Protection scenario is identical to the corresponding projection

252 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 38.

101 in his Zero Energy Growth scenario. In both cases, Freeman assumed that no new nuclear plants would have to be added beyond those already under construction.253

U.S. Primary Energy from Nuclear Fission(Quadrillion Btu)

50 Historical Growth - High 40 Nuclear (AEC Projection) Technical Fix - 30 Self Suficiency

20 Technical Fix - Environmental Protection & ZEG 10 Actual

0 1973 1978 1983 1988 1993 1998

Figure 5. Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project Scenario Projections and Actual Data for Primary Energy Derived from Nuclear Fission, 1973–2000.254

Notably, under the ZEG policy prescription, the amount of primary energy derived from nuclear fission was projected to peak in the mid-1980s and then would decline as plants aged out and were decommissioned.255

253 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 109. 254 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 28, 76, 111. Energy Information Administration, “Table 2.1f Electric Power Sector Energy Consumption, Selected Years, 1949-2008” .

102

Freeman argued that lower reliance on nuclear energy would be one of the principal advantages of the Technical Fix and ZEG scenarios because this reduced reliance would mitigate the associated problems:

In the future, a society powered by nuclear reactors could be endangered by a reactor accident that would release large quantities of radioactive material. Other major dangers associated with the large scale application of fission … are the possibility that nuclear materials might be stolen for purposes of blackmail or destruction, and the possibility of accidental release of nuclear material either in transit or as nuclear wastes are stored. Safe operation of extensive nuclear fission facilities will require the creation of institutions with longevity and reliability unparalleled in human history. A ZEG future provides the option of minimizing and even avoiding these risks.256

While Freeman stopped short of endorsing the sort of moratorium on nuclear power that Ralph Nader was calling for at this time, which may have involved shutting down already operating nuclear plants, this notion developed in Freeman’s favored Technical Fix/Environmental Protection and ZEG scenarios of capping nuclear capacity at the level defined by existing and under construction plants represented the next most restrictive policy option.257

The Technical Fix/Self-Sufficiency case, by comparison, did not envision capping nuclear capacity at the level represented by existing and under construction plants, but instead projected continuing capacity growth at a substantially lower

255 As is apparent from figure 5, the actual experience has been intermediate between the Technical Fix/Self-Sufficiency and ZEG scenarios, reflecting the circumstances that the existing fleet of operating reactors were all either already running or already scheduled for construction when Freeman made this forecast and the subsequent defacto moratorium on net new capacity that was in place though 2000. The slow uptrend in nuclear energy production mostly reflects steady improvements in the capacity factor of operating reactors over this period. 256 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 84. 257 Nader had filed a suit seeking a shut down of operating reactors as early as 1973. See “Judge Rejects Nader Suit to Shut 20 Nuclear Plants,” New York Times, June 29, 1973.

103 rate than for the Historic Growth scenario. This was the case that Mr. Freeman relied on in his chapter containing final conclusions and policy recommendations, where he argued:

Nuclear power is currently growing at a tremendous rate. But the current projections are based on the historical rate of growth in energy, which is high. Our studies show that a much slower rate for nuclear power is adequate to meet energy needs, if the conservation oriented policy we recommend is implemented. We do not advocate an absolute ban on new nuclear plants because the problems posed by using fossil fuels instead are also serious. But a conservation oriented growth policy will provide breathing room so that we can gain a better understanding of nuclear power problems, and reach some better judgments before major new expansions of nuclear power are made. 258

So, Freeman developed two reduced nuclear supply scenarios, one of which

(ZEG) was as close to advocating a moratorium as Freeman could feasibly go within the range of what was permissible under the imprimatur of the Ford Foundation and the divided EPP Advisory Board. He ultimately based his policy recommendation on the less restrictive Technical Fix/Self Sufficiency case, but even this scenario projected a five times reduction in reliance on nuclear energy by 2000 compared with AEC projections. In his remark above that such a policy would provide “breathing room” before any “major new expansions” of nuclear capacity were built, Freeman was echoing the call for a technology assessment of nuclear electricity generation that environmentalist groups such as the NRDC, UCS, and the

Critical Mass Project were advocating.

258 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 338.

104

Plutonium Economy Recommendations

Given Freeman’s overall de-emphasis on nuclear power capacity growth and his clear preference for the Technical Fix and ZEG scenarios, it is not surprising that he was skeptical of the plutonium economy technology program. Indeed as already discussed, the AEC’s economic rationale for the plutonium economy program derived from the premises that electricity demand growth would continue at high historic rates, as per Freeman’s Historic Growth scenario, and that uranium reserves would be inadequate to support a high demand scenario using only inefficient LWR technology. Refuting either of these AEC premises would undermine the purely economic case for proceeding with the LMFBR. While Freeman focused primarily on challenging the high demand growth premise, he also challenged AEC estimates of uranium reserves. Freeman made this criticism of AEC uranium resource estimates almost incidentally, because even using the most conservative AEC figures for uranium reserves, Freeman’s Technical Fix/Self-Sufficiency nuclear supply case, if implemented entirely with LWRs, would present no danger of exhausting domestic uranium supplies during the forecast period.259 Freeman’s investigation of uranium supplies, therefore, suggested no rationale for adopting the LMFBR in order to address a shortage of uranium ore.

259 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 26. Freeman’s Table 2 shows a figure of 310 quadrillion BTU’s worth of uranium oxide in domestic proven reserves (the most conservative, surest forecast category) if such uranium were used in LWRs. This figure is derived from the AEC estimates that he refers to in his table on page 484. Under the Technical Fix/ Self Sufficiency supply case, the year 2000 annual nuclear primary energy demand would be only 11 quadrillion Btu’s, so even relying only on already-identified deposits, there would be no difficulty in domestic uranium supply well past the end of the forecast period.

105

Freeman devoted significant attention to the public health, diversion, and proliferation risks associated with plutonium economy technologies. He referred to the work of Taylor and Willrich, and to the “hot particle” theory developed by Don

Geesaman and advanced by Arthur Tamplin and Tom Cochran at NRDC in arguing that the danger posed to public health from any releases of plutonium might be far worse than the existing AEC standards supposed, and that such risks were inherent in plutonium economy fuel cycle activities.260 Freeman surveyed the potential problems of nuclear terrorism resulting from diversion or theft of fissile materials, and weapons proliferation at a national level, again relying on the Taylor and

Willrich “special report” as his primary source.261 Freeman argued that the health, diversion, and proliferation risks associated with deploying LMFBRs were more

“intense” than in the case of a nuclear infrastructure based on LWRs, at the very least because each LMFBR would generate seven to eight times as much plutonium as would a corresponding LWR.262

Given the heightened risks associated with the LMFBR that he had identified and the lack of an urgent economic rationale for deployment of this technology, especially in the case of successful adoption of either of the Technical Fix or Zero

Energy Growth conservation-oriented policy paradigms, it is not surprising that

Freeman thought the AEC’s LMFBR program should be demoted among federal energy research and development budget priorities. While stopping short of calling

260 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 210-211. 261 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 212-214. Mason Willrich and Theodore B. Taylor, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1974). 262 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 215.

106 for the termination of federal support for research and development expenditure on the LMFBR or the other breeder reactor programs, Freeman argued that under all scenarios except Historical Growth, spending priorities should be readjusted towards energy conservation and renewable energy sources such as solar and geothermal generation.263 Freeman argued that there was an over-allocation of federal R&D resources towards the development of the LMFBR:

The breeder reactor program, to which we have committed a major portion of the federal R&D funds, is an outstanding example of the neglect of public participation as well as independent assessment, and of failure to protect the public treasury. We recommend that the present open-ended government funding commitment to the LMFBR demonstration project be terminated immediately. In addition, an independent assessment of the state of reactor technology and its associated health, safety, and environmental problems should be undertaken by the National Academy of Sciences on an urgent basis, so that the public may have the opportunity of debating the desirability of proceeding with the demonstration plant. When that desirability is established, the demonstration project should be funded along the lines discussed above.264

Whereas the Nixon and Ford Administrations had emphasized achieving energy independence in the wake of the 1973 oil price shock by shifting the mix of energy supplies away from imported oil, partly by placing high priority on the growth of nuclear energy, and the rapid introduction of breeder reactors, Freeman

263 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 313. 264 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 343. By April 1975, such a study was under way. , President of the National Academy of Sciences, and an advisor to the Carter campaign, asked Harvey Brooks, who was a Harvard Professor and one of the FFEPP Advisory Board members to lead what was called the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Sources (CONAES) study. Although the CONAES study had an initial mandate to narrowly focus on nuclear energy, it evolved into a highly contentious study of all aspects of U.S. energy policy and was not completed until December 1979, so it had little influence on the 1976 election cycle. John Holdren was a notable participant. See Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 186-197.

107 had arrived at an almost exactly opposite policy recommendation. Demand reduction through energy conservation measures was the highest priority action, and nuclear energy supply growth was consigned to the lowest priority among the alternatives to imported oil. Indeed, while Freeman recommended adoption of the

Technical Fix scenario in his conclusions, and this formed the summary that contemporary press accounts communicated, it was clear that Freeman thought that the U.S. should strive to approach the more ideal ZEG benchmarks. In either the

Technical Fix or ZEG cases, there was no economic rationale for adopting the

LMFBR, and by implication therefore, no justification for incurring the associated environmental and political risks.

Controversy and Industry Reaction

Freeman’s advocacy of the Technical Fix and ZEG scenarios drew controversy for several reasons. As already mentioned, Freeman’s assertion that energy consumption growth could be decoupled from GNP growth challenged a prevailing orthodoxy promoted by the energy industry and the AEC. Freeman anticipated this critique in his discussion of the ZEG scenario, arguing:

Merely to discuss “zero energy growth” is to unleash a torrent of indignant advertising paid for by major industrial interests which benefit from growth in energy consumption. A typical utility company ad shows a bellbottomed, well-heeled protester carrying a sign: “Generate Less Energy.” “Sure,” the ad replies. “And generate galloping unemployment.”… …Is there any truth to this scare advertising intended to perpetuate the seemingly inexorable growth in U.S. energy consumption? The answer is no…

108

… insulating homes and buildings and making cars that get better mileage are no threat to anyone—except perhaps to the energy company salesmen.265

A second and related reason that A Time to Choose ignited controversy was

Freeman’s evident hostility towards the energy industry. In the concluding chapter, among the more technocratic recommendations for ways to implement energy conservation policies, Freeman included a section titled “Private Enterprise and the

Public Interest,” in which he argued that the U.S. energy industry unduly manipulated the political process in order to ensure that federal policy suits its needs rather than the larger societal needs. To remedy this situation, Freeman advocated sweeping restrictions on campaign contributions from energy companies, greater antitrust enforcement against energy companies, and the possibility of government “taking a more active role in the organization of energy supply.” He further argued that citizens should develop “countervailing power” presumably to oppose the policies that energy companies lobby for.266

Freeman’s commentary on the need for reform of political institutions in order to combat the menace of energy companies and his suggestion of heavy- handed government intervention drew criticisms ranging from expressions of discomfort to outrage from industry representatives on the Advisory Board. Per the

265 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 87. 266 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 339-340. Freeman’s proposal that citizens develop “countervailing power” to oppose the energy establishment reflects a series of similar contemporary proposals from environmentalists making the point that there is a social need for “adversary science” to arm the public in such contests. See Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973), 270. and Abrahamson and Geesaman, “Forensic Science—a Proposal,” for examples.

109 terms under which the members of the Advisory Board had agreed to participate in the EPP study, they were offered an opportunity to append comments to Freeman’s final report. All of the Advisory Board members exercised this right. William

Tavoulareas, CEO of Mobil Oil, went to the greatest lengths among industry representatives to dispute Freeman’s findings. In the comments he appended to the report, Tavoulareas complained:

Despite my consistent comments to the Project and the Foundation that the results were largely preordained by the Director's public statements and by the sources of the advice being received, efforts to obtain research in areas the other side of these controversial issues were almost totally absent. In those few cases where such advice was received, it has been largely ignored. It is therefore no surprise that a lack of balance is evident in the final report. The basic thesis of the Project becomes: “The search for energy and the use of energy is bad while energy conservation is good.” On this base all else rests.267

Tavoulareas’ discomfort with the results, then, did not only stem from a disagreement with Freeman’s analysis: He thought the process employed in the study was fundamentally flawed due to Freeman’s evident bias towards advice from environmentalists rather than from industry representatives.

Although Tavoulareas was perhaps the most vehement and vocal among

Advisory Board members in objecting to Freeman’s tone and conclusions, he was not alone. Freeman also drew the ire of Donald Burnham, Chairman of

Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and of J. Harris Ward, Director of

Commonwealth Edison Company. Both Westinghouse and Commonwealth Edison were deeply involved in the Clinch River LMFBR project: Westinghouse was

267 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 401.

110 contracted to build the reactor and Commonwealth Edison was a partner with TVA in the Breeder Reactor Corporation. Ward and Burnham voiced their doubts that energy conservation could be achieved to the levels proposed under the Technical

Fix and ZEG scenarios without harming economic growth, but both took special exception to the anti-nuclear tone and substance of the report.268 Both Burnham and

Ward argued that environmentalists had overstated the safety risks, diversion risks, and environmental problems potentially deriving from nuclear power, emphasizing that the alternatives to nuclear power carried different, but ultimately more negative societal consequences. Both expressed frustration at the actions of environmentalists, as in this passage from Ward’s comment:

social activists and a small minority of scientists, representing what they consider to be the public interest, have succeeded in extending the construction time of most recent nuclear units on the basis of environmental and safety concerns. This report considers and almost suggests a moratorium on nuclear power development until disagreements among scientists have been settled. The cost of avoiding decision until scientists are unanimous will, in my judgment, place too great a burden on the American people.269

While the goal of establishing a diverse and balanced Advisory Board for the

Energy Policy Project may have been to bolster the credibility of the final report, the controversy resulting from the very public and unresolved polarization of this group undermined this goal and embarrassed the Ford Foundation. Given that the ostensible purpose of the Energy Policy Project was to sort through and resolve the

268 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 362-371, 409-410. Although Ward died before the final publication of A Time to Choose, he wrote a dissenting comment for a preliminary summary of the report and this was published with the final report. 269 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 409.

111 competing claims represented by the divergent final comments of the Advisory

Board members, this very public discord suggested that the mandate of the study was unattained. Bundy, in his forward to A Time to Choose, though diplomatic and politely grateful to Freeman and the members of the Advisory Board presented the overall findings of the report as far from definitive, writing in his foreward to A Time to Choose that the EPP’s concluding report was a beginning rather than an end to the debate over energy matters. 270 Bundy distanced himself and the Ford Foundation from Freeman’s policy recommendations, antagonistic tone, and the embarrassing conflict that Freeman had provoked with and among his Advisory Board.

Compounding this embarrassment were the unprecedented and very public efforts that two members of the Advisory Board mounted to discredit Mr. Freeman’s final report. Tavoulareas and John Harper, president of ALCOA and another member of the Advisory Board, each embarked on such a campaign. Mobil Oil took out large advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and 115 other publications during the week that the Ford Foundation report was released.271

The Mobil advertisement was titled “A Time to Choose: Energy Growth or Economic

Stagnation,” and explicitly disparaged the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project and its final report.272 Tavoulareas continued his conspicuous and embarrassing campaign until early 1977, when the Ford Foundation, under duress, published a longer version of Tavoulareas’ critique of A Time to Choose, together with what was

270 Freeman, A Time to Choose, xi-xii. 271 Lapham, “The Energy Debacle,” 59. 272 ““A Time to Choose” Energy Growth or Economic Stagnation (Advertisement),” New York Times, October 18 1974.

112 essentially a rebuttal by Carl Kaysen, who had been another member of the Advisory

Board.273 Harper funded and organized the publication in March 1975 of a collection of essays titled No Time to Confuse, that sought to deconstruct and refute Freeman’s analysis.274 Beyond embarrassment, the consequence of the chaotic controversy that accompanied the EPP was that Mr. Bundy would take considerable care in organizing the Ford/MITRE study to avoid a recurrence of such discord.

Freeman’s Involvement with the Carter Campaign and Administration

After publishing the final report for the Energy Policy Project in October

1974, Freeman plunged directly into political advocacy. He was featured as one of eight prominent signers of a statement calling for a Congressional committee to consider a moratorium on nuclear reactor construction delivered at Ralph Nader’s

November 1974 Critical Mass conference.275 Freeman then went to work for Senator

Warren Magnuson, Democrat of Washington, who was the chairman of the Senate

Commerce and Appropriations committees. Freeman recalls that his purpose in doing so was to push for implementation of the policy recommendations that he had

273 William Tavoulareas and Carl Kaysen, A Debate on a Time to Choose (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1977). Bob Williams collaborated in Kaysen’s rebuttal (Dean Abrahamson email October 21, 2009). 274 Morris Albert Adelman, No Time to Confuse: A Critique of the Final Report of the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, a Time to Choose America's Energy Future (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1975). 275 David Burnham, “Inquiry on Impact of a-Power Urged,” New York Times, November 17, 1974. The other signatories were: Dean Abrahamson; Hannes Alfven, Nobel Laureate in Physics; Barry Commoner; Donald Geesaman; ; Henry Kendall, founder of the UCS; and George Wald, Nobel Laureate and Harvard Professor. Most of these persons were in some way involved in advocacy against plutonium economy programs.

113 made in the Energy Policy Project final report.276 During this period, Freeman worked to include mandates for higher automotive fuel efficiency in the energy bill that was passed in December of 1975.277 He also worked to continue price controls on oil and natural gas.278

Freeman joined the Carter campaign in the summer of 1976, after the primary contest was over and had no direct contact with Carter or the campaign before that point.279 Freeman was a friend, however, of Joe Browder, who was

Director of the Environmental Policy Center and of the League of Conservation

Voters, and an early advisor to Carter on environmental matters. Indeed, Browder was the person who brought Freeman into the Carter campaign.280 The anti- corporate and conservationist themes in A Time to Choose had made Freeman somewhat of a pariah in energy industry circles and this caused some controversy during August of 1975 when Carter held a campaign briefing session on energy issues. Campaign donors linked to the energy industry threatened to withhold support for Carter if Freeman was involved in the briefing, so Freeman did not participate.281

276 Freeman, Winning Our Energy Independence, 74. 277 Edward Cowan, “'Compromise' Energy Bill Is Sent out by Conferees,” New York Times, December 10, 1975. 278 Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Part 2 Energy Conservation and Oil Policy, March 10-May 7, 1975, 1268-1272. 279 Freeman, Interview by Author. 280 Joe Browder, Interview by Author, October 30, 2009. 281 Browder, Interview by Author; Freeman, Interview by Author.

114

After Carter won the general election, he appointed James Schlesinger as his special advisor on energy and presumptive Secretary of Energy and appointed

Freeman to work on Schlesinger’s Energy Policy Planning Group, the team that developed Carter’s National Energy Policy (NEP) that was announced in April 1977.

In early 1977, Carter appointed Freeman as Chairman of the Tennessee Valley

Authority (TVA), the largest U.S. electric utility, and at the time the utility with the largest quantity of nuclear reactors operating and under construction.282 TVA was in the midst of a large capacity expansion plan and was also on of the major entities involved in the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project, so Freeman’s appointment served, among other purposes, to bolster Carter’s efforts to fight the ongoing

Congressional opposition to killing the Clinch River Plant that persisted throughout his administration.283

So Freeman had a direct role in shaping and implementing Carter’s energy and plutonium economy policies after Carter won the presidency. Freeman’s influence on Carter in July 1975, when Carter first stated his policy on the LMFBR program, though indirect, was perhaps equally significant.284

282 Rosco C. Born, “TVA's Future: It Will Differ Significantly from the Past,” Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, June 26, 1978. 283 Browder, Interview by Author. 284 See Appendix IV.

Chapter V.

The Nonproliferation Issue Network

The possibility that high purity fissile material might be diverted to a national weapons program had been a concern since the beginning of the nuclear weapons era.285 One of the purposes of the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was to address the risks of such national level diversion. Under Article III of the

NPT, all non-nuclear-weapons state signatories agreed to implement International

Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards procedures at any peaceful nuclear facilities to account for all fissile materials, thus making it more difficult to divert such material without detection.286 The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

(ACDA) led the U.S. government effort to negotiate and implement the NPT, with the most intense phase of this effort occurring in the period from 1964 to 1965.287 So, there was both recognition of and response from within the U.S. government to the potential danger of the diversion of fissile material well before the antinuclear movement began to cite proliferation risks as one of the arguments against nuclear power development.

285 As early as 1946, the notion that preventing weapons proliferation would depend on controlling access to fissile material was established. This idea formed the core premise of both the Acheson-Lilenthal report and Baruch plan. See for example Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995), 239-240. 286 “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” International Atomic Energy Agency Information Circular (1970), . 287 Clarke, The Politics of Arms Control, 72.

116

Nixon Administration Conflicts with the Arms Control Community

After 1969, when the Nixon Administration took office, support for the mission and mandate of ACDA eroded, and with this decline, U.S. policy development in support of NPT objectives became more fragmented and less coherent. There were several reasons for this shift. Nixon and Kissinger were skeptical of the essential feasibility of limiting weapons proliferation in the long run and more preoccupied with the immediate priority of negotiating bilateral arms control arrangements with the Soviet Union.288 Beyond this philosophical skepticism about nonproliferation goals, Nixon was also viscerally wary of the extended community of persons involved with arms control, including the extensive network of scientific advisors who had influenced U.S. policy since the Eisenhower

Administration.

Although Nixon appointed Gerard Smith as Director of ACDA with an explicit mandate to lead the SALT I negotiations with the Soviet Union, Nixon and Kissinger undermined this nominal order via a series of “back channel” dialogs that Kissinger conducted without Smith’s knowledge while Smith conducted the official SALT process.289 Smith argues that Nixon and Kissinger distrusted ACDA and thought

Smith was too liberal and potentially likely to yield too much to the Soviets in his eagerness to reach an agreement.290 This distrust of Smith was partially a reflection

288 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 17. 289 Smith, Doubletalk. This is the classic account of Kissinger’s end-run from Smith’s perspective. 290 Gerard C. Smith, Disarming Diplomat: The Memoirs of Gerard C. Smith, Arms Control Negotiator (Lanham, Md: Madison Books, 1996), 158.

117 of Nixon’s paranoid view of the Eastern Establishment foreign policy community, of which Smith was arguably a member, and of Nixon’s subscription to doubts about the essence and purpose of ACDA that had been in circulation since its founding in

1961 under the Kennedy Administration. As Smith notes, ACDA had been characterized at the time as an agency composed of arms controllers who were

“screwballs” and “do-gooders.”291

ACDA was composed of an amalgam of scientific staff and advisors, military personnel on temporary assignment from their respective branches of the service, and Foreign Service veterans, and was an agency that had since inception been miniscule in resources and direct authority compared with its bureaucratic rivals— the State Department, the Pentagon, and the AEC. Consequently, the influence and effectiveness of ACDA depended critically on the relationship of its Director with the

President and senior White House staff and on the corresponding credibility and profile of the scientists affiliated with it.292 Under the Kennedy and Johnson

Administrations, the influence of the scientists affiliated with ACDA, many of whom were also involved with the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC), was pervasive and this association accrued to ACDA’s benefit.

During his first term, Nixon soon encountered opposition to some of his key policy initiatives from among the ranks of the network of scientific advisors affiliated with PSAC and ACDA. High-profile scientific reviews of the Safeguard

291 Smith, Disarming Diplomat, 148. 292 Clarke, The Politics of Arms Control. Clarke offers the most complete account of the bureaucratic politics of ACDA during this period.

118 antiballistic missile (ABM) and the supersonic transport (SST) scuttled these programs, both of which Nixon considered important projects.293 Both of these reviews were cited by advocates of “adversary science” as examples of successful technology assessments, perhaps inadvertently suggesting an association between the community of scientists associated with ACDA and PSAC and interests broadly opposed to Nixon technology policy efforts.294 Notably, several of the people later involved with the Ford/MITRE study had been involved with either or both of the

SST and ABM reviews.295

By May of 1972, Nixon signed the SALT I accords and a treaty limiting ABM systems. Soon after, Gerard Smith resigned from his compromised role leading

ACDA and soon after the second Nixon inauguration, Kissinger and Nixon initiated a purge of most of the remaining senior staff at ACDA, including Philip Farley and

Spurgeon Keeny, both of whom would go on to involvement in the Ford/MITRE study.296 ACDA’s already small budget was cut by over 30%, further neutering the agency. Nixon and Kissinger were not alone in the distrust that triggered these changes. Senator Scoop Jackson had been opposed to the ABM treaty and thought

ACDA had negotiated weapons limits in SALT I that were too much in the Soviet’s favor, and consequently concurred in supporting the purge of ACDA. This was

293 Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 88. 294 See for example J. R. Primack and Frank von Hippel, “Scientists, Politics and the SST: A Critical Review,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28, no. 4 (1972): 24-30. 295 See Appendix VII for details. 296 Smith, Disarming Diplomat, 176-177.

119 despite the fact that it was Kissinger who had negotiated the particulars of SALT I.297

A further manifestation of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s irritation with the extended community of scientists associated with ACDA and PSAC was Nixon’s decision in

January of 1973 to dissolve PSAC. Kissinger had been advocating this action since

1970 when Lee DuBridge, Nixon’s science advisor, recommended terminating the

Safeguard ABM system.298 Thus, while ACDA nominally championed nonproliferation policy during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, the dysfunctional relationship with Nixon and Kissinger led to a bureaucratic marginalization beyond even what ACDA’s small size and budget would ordinarily imply.299

The Shift to Extra-Governmental Nonproliferation Advocacy

As Nixon Administration attention on the topic waned, the focus of nonproliferation policy analysis and advocacy shifted to extra-governmental venues.

This activity took on an increasing tone of urgency as the Nixon Administration elevated the priority of the LMFBR project. A scattering of such policy analysis directed to the impending expansion of the plutonium economy program had already been developing even before the ACDA purge and PSAC dissolution. Victor

Gilinsky, a RAND Corporation analyst who later worked at the AEC and then became one of the first Commissioners of the NRC had been raising the alarm over national

297 Smith, Disarming Diplomat, 177. 298 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 88. According to Kaplan, Kissinger wrote on the margin of DuBridge’s memo, “We must get PSAC out of strategy.” 299 Clarke, The Politics of Arms Control, 72-75.

120 level diversion risks associated with breeder reactors in elite policy analysis circles since 1966.300

The Ford Foundation, under Bundy’s leadership, set a priority of supporting arms control research and under this mandate was also instrumental in cultivating extra-governmental nonproliferation policy analysis. In 1969, former State

Department official William Bader joined the Ford Foundation to lead the foundation’s projects in academic research into arms control. One of the academic centers that Bader directed Ford Foundation support to was the University of

Virginia Center for Science, Technology, and Public Policy, which Law School professor Mason Willrich had formed in 1968. Willrich had worked in ACDA during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. With support from the Ford Foundation and other sponsors, Willrich led a series of academic conferences on nuclear power and proliferation that drew the participation of many of the leading analysts of proliferation issues and these efforts led to the publication of several books and articles on this topic during the period before 1974.301

300 Victor Gilinsky, “Breeder Reactors and the Spread of Plutonium” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1966). 301 Mason Willrich, Adventures between History's Pages (Self-Published, 2007), 174-184. Notable among Willrich’s collaborators were: Ryukichi Imai; Myron Kratzer; Ash O’Donnell; Harry Smythe; Victor Gilinsky; Bernhard Bechhoefer; Robert Bowie; George Bunn; John Conway; Sam Farmer; Franklin Long; John Michel; John Palfrey; Jaroslav Polach; George Rathjens; Leonard Rodberg; Matthew Sands; Lawrence Scheinman; Louis Sohn; Paul Szasz; Ted Taylor; Alvin Weinberg; and Christopher Wright. For a review of Willrich’s work during this period, see: Mason Willrich, Non- Proliferation Treaty; Framework for Nuclear Arms Control, Virginia Legal Studies (Charlottesville, VA: Michie, 1969); Bernard G. Bechhoefer, Bennett Boskey, and Mason Willrich, eds., Nuclear Prolifereration: Prospects for Control, University Press of Cambridge Series in the Social Sciences (New York: Dunellen,1970); Mason Willrich, ed. Civil Nuclear Power and International Security, Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Public Affairs (New York: Praeger, 1971); Mason Willrich, Global Politics of Nuclear Energy, Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Public Affairs (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971); Mason Willrich and Henry De Wolf Smyth, International Safeguards and Nuclear Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

121

Another venue from which alarm regarding the proliferation risks associated with the plutonium economy program emerged was the Pugwash Conferences, an organization of prominent scientists who sought to play a behind-the-scenes role in nuclear arms control. Pugwash had advocated for test bans, arms limitation and disarmament agreements, and attention to nonproliferation concerns.302

Responding to the impulse for nuclear energy autarky that the 1973 oil shock stimulated, and the increased priority that OECD nuclear programs were attaching to implementing the plutonium fuel cycle, Pugwash recommended in 1973 that large-scale deployment of LMFBRs would be unnecessary for 30 to 50 years and that plutonium diversion would be a risk if LMFBRs were developed.303

The New Concern over Nuclear Terrorism

The lack of a strong U.S. government commitment to safeguards as the Nixon

Administration was escalating commitment to the plutonium economy roadmap alarmed Ted Taylor, a physicist and former top AEC weapons designer. Taylor had developed both the largest and smallest pure fission bombs that the AEC had, and was well versed in the uses and dangers of plutonium.304 By 1968, Taylor was leading International Research and Technology (IRT), a consulting firm supported

302 Richard L. Garwin, “Pugwash at 50: Much to Do and How to Do It,” in 14th Annual Meeting Student Pugwash USA and 50th Pugwash Anniversary Commemoration, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC, 2007). 303 “The Aulanko Pugwash Conference and the World-Wide Energy Problem,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 27, no. 3 (1973): 8. A significant portion of the Ford/MITRE study team were involved with Pugwash. See Appendix VII for details. 304 John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 90-95, 110.

122 by grants from the AEC, General Atomics, and Stanford Research Institute.305

Taylor’s work at IRT focused on deficiencies in safeguards systems intended to prevent the diversion of fissile material, and by 1971, Taylor was speaking to atomic industry audiences about the increasing threat that a black market would develop in diverted plutonium if a commercial reprocessing industry developed.306 Taylor was most concerned with the attendant risk of nuclear terrorism, as he believed that a wide range of people using publicly available information could build crude nuclear bombs if only they had access to appropriate fissile material.

Taylor was not alone in voicing concerns of this nuclear terrorism risk. Dean

Abrahamson was raising the alarm within the scientific community as early as

1971.307 Taylor, however, was especially notable in his criticism of safeguards in the

U.S. nuclear industry because his background as a weapons designer lent a special credibility to his contention that a crude terrorist weapon would be easy for a wide range of people to build, and because he cultivated attention for the issue across a wide range of audiences.

The Taylor/Willrich/McPhee Collaboration

When David Freeman began organizing the Ford Foundation Energy Policy

Project in late 1971 and early 1972, he approached Willrich, who he had known

305 McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 196. 306 Lowell Ponte, “The Danger of Terrorists Getting Illicit A-Bombs,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1973. 307 John Dreyfuss, “A-Thefts Feared More Than Accidental Blasts,” Los Angeles Times, , 1971.

123 since 1965 when they both worked in the Johnson White House, to join the FFEPP as a staff member. Willrich declined and Freeman then suggested that Willrich collaborate with Taylor in writing a special study that would be sponsored by the

FFEPP on the issues related to diversion of fissile material and the consequent proliferation risks. Willrich and Taylor agreed to collaborate on the study and they began meeting in early 1972 to organize the analysis and writing tasks that they would need to complete for their study. In recounting their respective aims as they began their collaboration, Willrich implies that he and Taylor were seeking to produce somewhat different reactions among their readers:

Taylor’s concern was whether we could describe how to design and make a nuclear explosive device without revealing any classified information, in a way that would convince the reader that it was not beyond the capabilities of criminals or terrorists. Mine was whether we could write an objective assessment of safeguards against diversion or theft of nuclear weapons material from civilian nuclear fuel cycles without convincing the reader that no practical system of safeguards could be effective.308

It was mostly the realization of Taylor’s goal that destined their study, which was titled Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards, to produce a sense of urgent alarm when it was released.309

Through what began as a chance encounter, Taylor’s and Willrich’s project reached a much broader audience than it would have otherwise. During the summer of 1972 through a doubles tennis match, Willrich met John McPhee, the widely known feature-writer for the New Yorker. McPhee had recently published a book

308 Willrich, Adventures between History's Pages, 185. 309 Willrich and Taylor, Nuclear Theft, 185.

124 that resulted from a year-long observation of David Brower,310 the founder of

Friends of the Earth. Through several conversations with Willrich, McPhee became interested in taking on a writing project broadly similar to Taylor’s and Willrich’s, but aimed at a wider audience.311 McPhee became fascinated by the alarming proposition that Taylor was espousing and the unique credibility that Taylor brought to his task by dint of his background as a virtuoso nuclear bomb designer, and decided to structure his project as mostly a profile of Taylor. He and Taylor took a series of trips to visit various facilities around the U.S. where fissile material was stored or processed.312 As rendered by McPhee in his The Curve of Binding Energy, these facilities had uniformly inadequate safeguards to cope with the awesome risks that Taylor was elaborating.313

Taylor, Willrich, and McPhee agreed among themselves that McPhee’s book, first serialized in the New Yorker, should be published before the Taylor/Willrich

FFEPP report in order to build public interest.314 Consequently, the first of the three installments of the McPhee article appeared in the New Yorker in December 1973 to wide notice. Taylor and Willrich’s Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards was published in April 1974 as the first report released by the FFEPP. On May 18, 1974, the Indian test occurred, highlighting the immediacy of diversion and proliferation risks. As

Willrich notes, the NRDC soon began to frequently cite Nuclear Theft: Risks and

310 McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid. 311 Willrich and Taylor, Nuclear Theft, 186. 312 Willrich, Adventures between History's Pages, 187. 313 McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy. 314 Willrich, Adventures between History's Pages, 189.

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Safeguards in the course of their policy advocacy against the plutonium economy.315

As the analysis in Appendix IV demonstrates, the NRDC was not alone in citing the work of the Taylor/Willrich/McPhee collaboration: Carter’s main Democratic primary rivals all cited it too, as did many parties across the spectrum of nuclear power opponents.

Nexus to Carter

Carter was among those on whom the Taylor/Willrich/McPhee collaboration made an impression. While Mr. Carter was writing Why Not the Best?, his campaign autobiography, which he wrote over the period of late 1974 to early 1975, he was attempting to emulate the writing style of John McPhee, and had read most of

McPhee’s work to that point.316 Carter had met McPhee in late 1972 or early 1973 through their mutual friend Sam Candler, who was the great-grandson of the pharmacist who developed Coca-Cola, and a naturalist who lived part-time on

Cumberland Island, Georgia, which was Carter’s favorite wilderness retreat. McPhee had written a profile that appeared in the New Yorker about Candler and another naturalist who worked for the Georgia Natural Area Council. In the profile McPhee

315 Willrich, Adventures between History's Pages, 190. Willrich had known Speth and some of his co-founders at the NRDC since 1968 when Willrich published an article on the NPT in the Yale Law Review, of which Speth was an editor. Mason Willrich, Interview by Author, January 20, 2010. 316 James Earl Carter, Why Not the Best? The First Fifty Years (Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), xiv.

126 wrote that he, Candler, and Carter canoed together down a stretch of the

Chattahoochee River that was threatened by an impending development project.317

It does not appear as if Carter met McPhee through mere happenstance. After

Carter had decided to run for the presidency in 1972, Hamilton Jordan wrote a detailed strategy memo that laid out the plan that Carter followed over the next four years as he prepared for the 1976 contest. Under a section titled “Establishing a

National Image,” Jordan recommended that Carter:

should begin immediately to 1) generate favorable stories in the national press on the accomplishments of your administration. 2) develop and/or maintain a close personal relationship with the principle [sic] national columnists and reporters, and 3) take full advantage of every ligitimate [sic] opportunity for national exposure as long as it is couched in terms of what you have accomplished in Georgia….

We should compile a listing of regional and national political editors and columnists who you know or need to know. You can find ample excuse for contacting them.318

Immediately following this paragraph was the list of the columnists that Carter would attempt to meet, and John McPhee was one of the people listed as targets for such attention.

Willrich also interacted with Carter during his campaign, writing a detailed statement for Carter on the issue of domestic and IAEA safeguards. Willrich recalls

317 John McPhee, “Profiles: Travels in Georgia,” New Yorker, April 28, 1973. Cumberland Island was Carter’s favortite vacation spot and during his tenure as Governor, Carter assisted in preventing Cumberland Island from being developed in the image of Hilton Head Island, as was the plan of a developer at the time. The elaboration of this interconnection appears in McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid. 318 Hamilton Jordan, “Carter Strategy Memo 11/4/72,” C-Span, .

127 that this contact occurred at some point near the time of the May 1976 speech to the

U.N. but was not directly related to the development of that speech.319 So Carter knew McPhee by the time The Curve of Binding Energy came out and considered him one of the opinion makers whom he should cultivate in order to bolster his image in national and presumably elite policy circles and later met Willrich, who further informed him on detailed aspects of safeguards .

Rise of Nonproliferation Discourse within Foreign Policy Fora

After the Indian test, private policy analysis stressing the risks of plutonium diversion became far more common. Nonproliferation became a high priority topic within the discourse of elite private foreign policy fora such as the Council on

Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and similar groups.320

Nonproliferation discourse was closely related to the themes of world order and multilateral institutional support for stability in relations between the developed and developing world. Indeed, the formation of the Trilateral Commission was in some respects a reaction against what Ullman described as the “belligerent and

319 Willrich, Interview by Author. 320 In Foreign Affairs, there were numerous articles in this period on the topic. See for example: Adlai E. Stevenson, “Nuclear Reactors: America Must Act,” Foreign Affairs 53, no. 1 (1974): 64-76; Max Lerner, “America Agonistes,” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 2 (1974): 287-300; George H. Quester, “Can Proliferation Now Be Stopped?” Foreign Affairs 53, no. 1 (1974): 77-97; Lincoln P. Bloomfield, “Nuclear Spread and World Order,” Foreign Affairs 53, no. 4 (1975): 743-755; William O. Doub and Joseph M. Dukert, “Making Nuclear Energy Safe and Secure,” Foreign Affairs 53, no. 4 (1975): 756-772. Extra-governmental nonproliferation analysis influenced ACDA as well towards the end of the Ford Administration. See for example Wohlstetter, “Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd?”

128 defensive unilateralism” of the Nixon Administration.321 After the 1973 oil crisis, the Trilateral Commission devoted considerable focus to:

the construction of a common approach to the needs and demands of the poorer nations, and the coordination of defense policies and of policies toward such highly politicized issues as nuclear proliferation, terrorism…. Once again this means abstention from measures conducive to one- sided advantage, such as the sale of nuclear-fuel reprocessing plants, or departures from common fronts in negotiating with producers of oil or other raw materials.322

It is worth noting that in the period after Nixon dissolved PSAC and neutered ACDA, many persons formerly associated with these agencies shifted their focus to participation in these extra-governmental foreign policy fora. Gerard Smith became the Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, signaling the importance of arms control and nonproliferation to the policy interests of the organization as it was established.

Other members who had been closely involved with arms control were Harold

Brown, who had participated in technology assessments that were critical of the

ABM, and Henry Owen, who had led Policy Planning under the Johnson

Administration while the NPT was negotiated. There were many other such associations.323

Carter saw his involvement with the Trilateral Commission as an opportunity to both learn about foreign policy and to develop his credibility with the community of elite foreign policy leaders and opinion makers who were involved with it and

321 Richard H. Ulman, “Trilateralism: ‘Partnership’ For What?,” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (1976): 3-4. 322 Ulman, “Trilateralism,” 5. 323 Appendix VII outlines some of these associations that had relevance for Carter.

129 related organizations.324 Carter’s exposure to the nonproliferation discourse within the Trilateral Commission, therefore would have signaled to Carter the importance of addressing this issue as part of his campaign platform. His exposure to

Commission members Smith and others who had been involved in the first Nixon

Administration presumably gave him a sense of the inner dynamics and deficiencies of nonproliferation policy-making in the Ford Administration as he was preparing his campaign, and this insight most likely helped him in targeting his attack on this issue.

Tone of Urgency

Much of the policy analysis written within the arms control community after the Indian test took on a more urgent tone, as the risks of proliferation seemed less hypothetical and more manifest. Indeed, the level of alarm among leading members of the academic arms control community that followed from projecting forward a proliferation trend that the Indian test seemed to portend would be difficult to overstate. For example, at a Cambridge Forum panel discussion held in 1975 in which five members of the Harvard-MIT Arms Control Seminar participated, four of whom were shortly after to join the Ford/MITRE study team, the consensus projections for the consequences of weapons proliferation were apocalyptic.325 The group consensus was that:

324 Peter G. Bourne, Interview by Author, November 6, 2009. 325 “Nuclear War by 1999?” Harvard Magazine 78, no. 2 (1975): 19-25. The four participant in this seminar who would soon thereafter participate in the Ford/MITRE study were: ; George Rathjens; Paul Doty; and Thomas Schelling.

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– Nuclear war in some form is likely before the end of this century [i.e., by 2000].

– It will probably occur as the direct result a proliferation of nuclear powers and, weaponry. The more people who have such weapons, the more probable their use.

– Existing political systems and the policies they generate fail to provide curbs on, or alternatives to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Nations continue to increase their armories in the name of self-protection.326

The discussion participants were especially alarmed by the same trends that alarmed Taylor, Willrich and McPhee, particularly the proliferation and diversion prospects attendant on the anticipated growth in the amount of plutonium that would be produced in power reactors and presumably in circulation as part of the plutonium economy. Rathjens made a typical comment in this regard:

Whatever the number of nuclear powers within the next ten years, the number will be greater by the end of the century. Nuclear materials will be available in enormous quantities. Each large reactor is now producing enough material to build a weapon a week, and predictions are that by the end of the century there will be several thousand reactors around the world.327

The public disclosure in June 1975 of the proposed deals for French and

German export of full plutonium fuel cycle facilities to Pakistan, South Korea,

Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil made projections like Rathjens’ seem more credible.

So, regardless of the economic benefits that might derive from nuclear power infrastructure development, there was an offsetting concern within the extra-

326 “Nuclear War by 1999?” 19. 327 “Nuclear War by 1999?” 22.

131 governmental foreign policy and arms control analysis communities about the threat to world order that might arise from associated proliferation risks.

The Ford/MITRE Study

The Ford/MITRE study sought to weigh the commercial and social merits of nuclear power against these concerns, and strike the appropriate balance.328 The

Ford/MITRE study began against a backdrop of public and elite concern about more than just the proliferation risks of nuclear power. The interest network that Ralph

Nader had helped assemble to advocate for a moratorium on nuclear power was enjoying an attentive reception in Congress at Mo Udall’s wide-ranging hearings on nuclear power, and grass roots efforts were under way in several states to campaign for moratorium ballot initiatives in the upcoming 1976 election cycle. Nuclear power in the U.S. seemed under threat. To Bundy’s discomfort, the findings of the

FFEPP final report, A Time to Choose, had evidently seemed unbalanced and unduly hostile to ERDA, to the energy industry, and to establishment interests. Freeman had courted controversy during the study, then had joined with Nader in calling for a technology assessment of nuclear power, presumably confident that such an assessment would support the notion of a moratorium.

Hans Bethe, who was a close Bundy associate, perceived the threat that nuclear power faced in the U.S. and took the initiative to push back against the interests seeking a moratorium through several actions. In early 1975, Bethe was

328 See Appendix VII for further background material on the Ford/MITRE study.

132 one of three former Presidents of the American Physical Society (APS) who reviewed the work of an APS study group that investigated the AEC’s reactor safety study (commonly known as the Rasmussen Report).329 Bethe publicly espoused the view that the APS findings supported the conclusion that LWRs were adequately safe, refuting the principal argument that moratorium advocates advanced.330

Bethe’s view conflicted with some of the APS panel members, notably Frank von

Hippel, who presented the contrasting view that emphasized the APS finding that the Rasmussen Report underestimated potential accident fatalities.331

Bethe was also the organizer of the January 1975 open letter to President

Ford advocating continued progress on nuclear power and increased use of coal.

Bethe garnered the signatures of thirty-one other prominent scientists, of whom eleven were Nobel laureates, to counteract the public notice that moratorium advocates had generated.332 It was in this context that Bethe and Bundy discussed a new study on nuclear power that the Ford Foundation might sponsor. Presumably,

Bethe knew that technology assessments of nuclear power that opponents were calling for would occur, as Udall’s hearings demonstrated. In the contemporary environment, pronuclear assessments mostly arose from ERDA’s own studies, the

329 H. W. Lewis, et al., “Report to the American Physical Society by the Study Group on Light- Water Reactor Safety,” Reviews of Modern Physics 47, no. S1 (1975): S1-S126. 330 , “No Fundamental Change in the Situation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 31, no. 7 (1975): 40-41. 331 Frank von Hippel, “A Perspective on the Debate,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 31, no. 7 (1975): 37-41. 332 “Nuclear Power Speed-up Draws Comment,” Physics Today 28, no. 3 (1975): 69-70. See Appendix III for a full account of the conflict for public opinion waged by pronuclear and antinuclear scientists during this period.

133 credibility of which were contested due to a widely perceived lack of candor and objectivity. An assessment carried out under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, however, might be viewed as credible if properly organized and if the participants had the proper status and credentials. Bundy had a corresponding interest in redressing the controversy that Freeman had produced.

As Bundy describes in the foreword to the Ford/MITRE report, the Ford

Foundation Trustees required as part of the mandate for the study that:

1. The participants in the study must be recognized as highly qualified in their own fields of investigation and analysis.

2. As a group, they must be—and must be recognized as being— essentially open-minded on the general debate raging around nuclear power.

3. The participants themselves, as a group, must have sole and complete responsibility for their findings.333

A further unwritten aspect of the study mandate was to avoid any public disagreements among study members that would undermine the ultimate credibility of the resulting report. As a practical matter, the only way to satisfy the difficult staffing mandate was to assemble the team mostly from individuals who had worked together previously and to avoid anyone who was a known opponent of nuclear power.334 Given the backgrounds of Bundy, Bethe, and Keeny, the most suitable pool of nuclear experts to draw from was their network of close colleagues

333 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, xii. 334 Known proponents would be acceptable if not too high profile. Harold Brown, for example, had been one of the signers of Bethe’s open letter to President Ford in support of nuclear power and in opposition to the call for a moratorium. Alvin Weinberg or Glenn Seaborg would have been too obvious as nuclear power partisans. Keeny remembers that Bundy told him to avoid anyone who had a difficult personality.

134 who had been involved with nuclear arms control. As a result, the study group members selected had many past associations, predisposing the group dynamics towards decorum and an implicit expectation of seeking consensus.335 This harmonious group dynamic stood in contrast to efforts covering the same territory but composed of a more diverse membership, the most notable example of which was the National Academy of Sciences’ CONAES study that was ongoing in the same period.336

Two observations are worth making about the composition of the

Ford/MITRE study team and predispositions. Given the impetus for the study and the immediate prior context in which it was launched, it would have been surprising if the group reached a position broadly opposed to progressing further with nuclear power (i.e., supporting a nuclear moratorium). Bethe, Garwin, Keeny, and Panofsky had all participated in the APS reactor safety evaluation. Keeny remembers that the

Ford/MITRE team was “not impressed with Amory Lovins and Ralph Nader” and thought the NRDC experts were “extreme emotional advocates.”337 Carnesale remembers that the study team was pro-nuclear, but “pragmatic” in this attitude, presumably willing to consider each component of the ERDA program on its merits.338 The disadvantage of this subtle but apparent pro-nuclear orientation would be that people in the nuclear power moratorium interest network would be

335 See Appendix VII for a detailed analysis of the prior associations between Ford/MITRE study team members. 336 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, Chapter 7. 337 Keeny, Interview by Author. 338 Albert Carnesale, Interview by Author, May 20, 2009.

135 unlikely to consider the study’s conclusions to be objectively derived. But this was not the primary intended audience. The report was intended for policy-makers rather than the advocacy community. Among the intended audience, the mildly pro- nuclear stance of the committee would be an advantage, as it would attach special credibility to any recommendations they might make against any aspects of the

ERDA technology program.

The second important observation about team composition concerns the overrepresentation of arms control experts.339 This fact would arguably predispose the group to attach significant weight to plutonium economy proliferation risks in balancing national security considerations against commercial considerations of the nuclear fuel cycle. Given that both the rate and degree of likely proliferation and the future economics of commercial scale use of plutonium could only be gauged through speculative projections, predispositions would arguably matter in ultimate judgments about how to balance these factors. The key to resolving the qualitative ambiguity in this balance was a close review of prospects for the uranium supply/demand equation, as this was a more tractable problem than quantifying proliferation risks.340

339 Compared, for example with a panel of nuclear experts that could have been drawn from the nuclear power community. 340 The similar CED study that Schelling, Garwin, Carnesale, Nye, and Kaysen were involved with just prior to the Ford/MITRE study considered this same tradeoff but did not attempt to project forward uranium reserves and prices or plutonium prices, and therefore stated the future economic prospects of breeders and MOX use in contingent and hypothetical terms. See Committee for Economic Development, Nuclear Energy and National Security: A Statement on National Policy (Washington, DC: Committee for Economic Development, 1976), 15.

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Assessing a Delay in the Plutonium Economy

Team member provided the decisive input to the demand side of the equation for the nuclear fuel market projection and an assessment of the urgency of implementing the plutonium economy program, writing a long monograph describing his efforts to model the important parameters of the U.S. energy market over the following fifty years and to estimate the impacts that nuclear power adoption at various levels might have on national income.341 Arrow recast the discussion of whether energy supply growth drove economic growth, as nuclear proponents had historically argued, to an analysis of the likely effects of higher energy prices on energy demand and economic growth, since circumstances after the 1973 oil price shock suggested that higher real energy prices would be durable. From an analysis of the effects of a range of price elasticities of energy demand, Arrow concluded that total primary energy consumption would span a range bounded at the low end by the FFEPP “Zero Energy Growth” scenario and bounded at the high end by a projection about 20% lower than the FFEPP “Historic

Growth” scenario. The following figure presents the U.S. primary energy demand range modeled by the Ford/MITRE study overlaid on the demand scenarios from the FFEPP and the historic consumption data (figure 6).

341 Keeny, Interview by Author. Staff member Larry Brook of the Ford Foundation condensed Arrow’s monograph into the form that it took in the final study. See Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, Chapter 1.

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Total U.S. Primary Energy Use (Quadrillion Btu) 200

180

160

140 Ford/MITRE Demand Range 120

100 Historical Growth Technical Fix 80 Zero Energy Growth

Actual 60 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 Ford/MITRE High Case

Figure 6. Ford/MITRE Study, Primary Energy Demand Projection Compared with FFEPP Scenarios and Actual Historic Use Data342

It is notable that the Ford/MITRE study demand forecast encompassed a wide enough range that it did not have to rely on the realization of the efficiency improvements that had been assumed by Freeman in his “Technical Fix” scenario, thereby anticipating and avoiding the possible criticism that the results of the analysis would rely on unrealistic assumptions about implementation of energy use goals advocated by environmentalists.343

342 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 56. 343 The forecast range did not extend as high as the earlier “Historical Growth” levels, which approximated AEC projections made in 1972 because energy prices had risen quite substantially since that time and even under very benign price elasticity assumptions, demand could not approach the previous AEC projection.

138

Using this range of energy requirements, Arrow modeled a variety of scenarios in which he included, delayed, or excluded the various plutonium economy program elements and quantified the resulting economic impacts. He concluded that:

most of the economic value of nuclear power can be obtained from LWRs alone, with the breeder postponed until 2020 or so, by which time an alternative to plutonium-based systems may be available.344

Plutonium recycle can be delayed indefinitely, at essentially no economic cost. Breeders can be postponed several decades into the next century at costs that are small (less than 1 percent of GNP) under the worst conditions and very small (on the order of 0.1 percent of GNP) under more likely assumptions about costs, elasticities, fossil fuel supplies, and enrichment technologies.345

Such analysis challenged the promise implicit in the term “plutonium economy.”

Addressing the Sufficiency of Uranium Resources

The other pillar of the argument in favor of the plutonium economy had always been that uranium was too scarce to waste the more than 99 percent that consisted of the fertile U238 isotope. The World War II era origin of the “common knowledge” view within the AEC that uranium was scarce has been discussed.

Seaborg more precisely defined uranium scarcity in his 1962 report by deeming only ores that could yield uranium at less than $30/lb to be commercially relevant,

344 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 66. 345 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 68. Arrow’s conclusions arose from a national energy model that employed many simplifying assumptions, notably that it mostly evaluated the economic benefit of nuclear energy in terms of cost advantage compared to coal-fired generation. As this projected cost differential was small, and as the model did not account for most externalities, the resulting conclusions are not surprising.

139 as it was already known by then that substantially more uranium was available in dilute deposits.346 In doing so, Seaborg transformed the broad nostrum about uranium scarcity to a more focused claim about the inadequacy of commercially suitable uranium ores.

Hans Landsberg, a resource economist who directed the Energy and

Materials Division of RFF, wrote the chapter that assessed uranium reserve adequacy. Landsberg had a long background in resource economics, having co- authored a comprehensive work on the subject soon after joining RFF in 1960.347

Through his long experience studying the history of resource anxieties, Landsberg had developed a perspective that was quite different from the “Limits to Growth” school of thought. Landsberg noted that there had been many past episodes of concern over impending resource exhaustion and that in each case, price signals and technology advances had led to further ore discoveries and improved mining and processing efficiencies, in most cases leading to a long-term trend of declining real prices for mineral resources and expanding supply.348

Applying this perspective to the prospect of uranium resource adequacy in the United States, Landsberg found that:

Assuming the incentive of higher prices, more intensive and extensive exploration should produce enough uranium, both in the United

346 U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civilian Nuclear Power, 22. 347 Hans H. Landsberg, Resources in America's Future; Patterns of Requirements and Availabilities, 1960-2000 ([Baltimore]: Published for Resources for the Future by Johns Hopkins Press, 1963). 348 Landsberg, “The U.S. Resource Outlook.”

140

States and abroad, to supply the domestic and foreign requirements of light-water reactors (LWRs) well into the next century.349

Notably, Landsberg cited the work of Milton Searl a former RFF colleague, who had applied Landsberg’s concepts to estimate that U.S. uranium reserves might range from 7.7 million tons to as much as 29 million tons.350 This compared to ERDA’s then-current estimate of 3.9 million tons.351 Tom Cochran had also been a colleague at RFF when Cochran wrote his critique of the LMFBR program, and had later relied on Searl’s work as well. Freeman had cited Cochran and also Holdren’s corresponding analysis. But the critique of AEC and then ERDA uranium reserve estimates using Landsberg’s concepts would not achieve mainstream credibility until Landsberg himself made it under the auspices of the mildly presumably pro- nuclear Ford/MITRE study.352 Keeny and Nye both commented that the finding of their study that surprised them the most was Landsberg’s, suggesting the prevalence of the AEC common knowledge notion of uranium scarcity at the time.353

349 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 74. 350 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 79. 351 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 76. 352 Landsberg’s projections of expanding uranium supply and reserve adequacy proved correct. Uranium prices appreciated sharply from 1973 to 1978, then declined steadily as a result of ongoing discoveries of high-grade deposits and moderating demand as the nuclear power build-out stalled. 353 Keeny, Interview by Author; Joseph S. Nye, Interview by Author, September 14, 2009.

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Primacy of Nonproliferation Considerations

After concluding that there was neither an economic or resource scarcity justification to urgently implement the plutonium fuel cycle, the Ford/Mitre study team prioritized proliferation concerns in assessing policy recommendations:

By far the most serious danger associated with nuclear power is that it provides additional countries a path for access to equipment, materials, and technology necessary for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. We believe the consequences of the proliferation of nuclear weapons are so serious compared to the limited economic benefits of nuclear energy that we would be prepared to recommend stopping nuclear power in the United States if we thought this would prevent further proliferation. However, there are direct routes to nuclear weapons in the absence of nuclear power, and the future of nuclear power is not under the unilateral control of the United States…. With continued nuclear power development, however, the U.S. government must give greater weight to the proliferation problem in its decisions on nuclear matters and its relations with other nations.354

Given that the Ford/MITRE team had such an overrepresentation of arms control experts, it is not surprising that such a priority would emerge from their analysis, but the statement above is surprising for the extent of alarm over proliferation risk that it conveys. Whereas moratorium advocates cited reactor safety and at least several other reasons for their position, the Ford/MITRE team argued the proliferation risk alone would justify a moratorium if such a policy could be effective. The Ford/MITRE finding, therefore, was continuous with prior nonproliferation advocacy, but perhaps bolstered by the more thoroughly derived

354 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 4, 5.

142 conclusions about thin economic benefits, more emphatic in drawing conclusions about the relative balance between arms control and commercial considerations.

What ultimately became perhaps the most controversial recommendation of the Ford/MITRE study and subsequently of Carter’s plutonium economy policy was the notion that an important reason why the U.S. should forgo using MOX in LWRs and implementing the LMFBR was that such an example of U.S. forbearance might induce other countries with advanced nuclear industries to adopt a comparable policy of weighing proliferation risks above commercial aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Ford/MITRE team made this recommendation in the context of a proposal for what ultimately was implemented under the Carter Administration as the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) project:

Any U.S. proposal for international reexamination of the fuel cycle could hardly be credible if the United States were forging ahead with its own plans for reprocessing fuel for LWRs and with its program for early commercialization of the breeder reactor. The recommendations in this study for deferral and slowdown of these programs take on added significance in the context of export policy. Other countries may not follow the U.S. lead but most would at least reassess their own plans in the face of U.S. restraint.

In the context of clear U.S. restraint, we believe the proposed evaluation could lead to a broad consensus, including many developing countries, on the dangers that are inherent in widespread diffusion of national plutonium reprocessing and enrichment facilities. In such an environment a more formal agreement embargoing exports to those countries—hopefully few—that did not voluntarily renounce national reprocessing and enrichment could be pursued with some prospects for success.355

355 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 381.

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The prior experience of many on the Ford/MITRE team with arms control matters and particularly with the various evaluations of ABM systems was arguably a factor in shaping this view. An important rationale for U.S. ABM forbearance was to avoid provoking vertical proliferation of Soviet offensive forces. By a similar logic, the Ford/MITRE proposal of U.S. plutonium economy forbearance sought to avoid provoking further commercially triggered horizontal proliferation. In both cases, the goal was to reinforce the stability of the status quo to avoid setting off a spiral of proliferation.356

Nonproliferation Issue Advocacy Context of the Campaign

As Carter was beginning his campaign, there was a great deal of activity in what can described as an extra-governmental issue network drawn mainly from the milieu of academics and elite policy-makers that was focused on concerns over the potential for weapons proliferation and terrorism that might attend the rise of the plutonium economy and Carter had many points of contact with this network. It is not surprising, therefore, that Carter elevated nonproliferation to one of the priority issues in his foreign policy platform as he began and sustained his campaign. Indeed, he mentioned the issue prominently in the speech he gave in December 1974 to announce his presidential campaign. Carter recognized the concerns of this issue network when he stated, “The biggest waste and danger of all is the unnecessary

356 Kaplan, Daydream Believers. Kaplan overviews the long history of the contest between ABM advocates and critics. Garwin, Bethe, and Brown were prominent ABM critics.

144 proliferation of atomic weapons throughout the world.”357 Later in the campaign after Carter came into contact with its findings, the emphatic conclusions that the

Ford/MITRE team reached about the primacy of nonproliferation risks reinforced

Carter’s commitment to this policy goal.358

357 United States Congress House Committee on House Administration, The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 5 vols., vol. 1, part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1978), 9. 358 See Appendix VII for details of the nexus between Carter and the Ford/MITRE study team.

Chapter VI.

Technology Alternatives to the LMFBR

In early 1975, as Carter was developing his position on plutonium economy policy, there were at least two technology alternatives to the LMFBR that seemed plausible as solutions to the potential future problem of shortages of low cost LEU fuel. The first of these was the CANDU reactor that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited

(AECL) was promoting as an alternative to both LWRs and LMFBRs. The second was the Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR) that Rickover’s Naval Reactors organization was developing, ostensibly as a back-up option in case the LMFBR technology did not work as well as expected. While there was no meaningful collaboration between proponents of the CANDU reactor and the LWBR in opposing the LMFBR program, it is nonetheless useful to analyze these two efforts together, as it is evident that Carter was aware of both, and they held similar significance to

Carter as potential justification for opposing the LMFBR program.

The CANDU Reactor

As early as 1963, and in response to the publication of the AEC’s 1962

Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President, Bennett Lewis, Director of R&D at

AECL published a rebuttal of the AEC’s case for the breeder, arguing that the AECL’s heavy water moderated reactor design would be much simpler, with a once-through natural (i.e., unenriched) uranium fuel cycle that would produce a higher energy

146 yield at a lower cost from an equivalent quantity of uranium ore when compared with a LWR, and that this efficiency improvement would be adequate to obviate the need for the more complex LMFBR approach.359 Lewis argued that there were various inherent points of government subsidy in the linked LWR/LMFBR fuel cycle that Seaborg was proposing, particularly embodied in the enrichment costs of LEU fuel and in the costs of reprocessing spent fuel to extract the plutonium needed to fuel the LMFBRs, and that the economic advantage of the Canadian design would be more apparent when these subsidies were properly accounted for in calculating operating costs.360

By 1975, after a remarkably successful campaign by U.S. LWR manufacturers and their foreign licensees, the only commercially viable technology contending for international business was the AECL CANDU design.361 Despite the overwhelming market dominance of LWR technology, the CANDU design had demonstrated some of the commercial advantages that Lewis had earlier projected. The domestic

Canadian electrical utility industry had embraced the CANDU design and Ontario

Hydro had recently commissioned their Pickering plant near Toronto, which contained four CANDU reactors. The Pickering plant was the largest and most advanced CANDU faculty in the world and had several unique features, of which

Carter was aware. One of these was a vacuum containment structure, which

359 Wilfrid Bennett Lewis, “Breeders Are Not Necessary: A Competing Other Way for Nuclear Electric Power DM-69” (Chalk River, ON: Atomic Energy of Canada, 1963), 1-8. 360 Lewis, “Breeders Are Not Necessary,” 2. 361 Bupp and Derian, Light Water, 8.

147 provided an addition level of safety protection in the event of an accident.362

Although the Pickering plant had only recently started up and presumably was still optimizing operations, it had already achieved a capacity factor of nearly 80%, which was significantly better than any achieved with LWRs, and demonstrated fuel costs that were half of those for the best operating LWRs in the U.S.363 The comparative disadvantage of the CANDU design versus LWRs was a higher initial construction cost, and this disadvantage had proven to be an obstacle in competing for export business against the LWR manufacturers.364

As 1975 began, presumably in order to more advantageously position the

CANDU technology, the AECL was conducting a campaign to draw a favorable contrast between the CANDU and LMFBR programs.365 At the April 1975 meeting of the American Physical Society, AECL delivered a presentation arguing that the

CANDU was a better alternative to the LMFBR, after which Hans Bethe, who was a strong proponent of the LMFBR program, publicly commented, “I wish we were doing both.”366

362 J. A. L. Robertson, “The CANDU Reactor System: An Appropriate Technology,” Science 199, no. 4329 (1978): 659. See Appendix V for a detailed analysis of Carter’s July 1975 energy policy speech in which he mentions vacuum containment as a safety feature that should be implemented in U.S. reactors, indicating his familiarity with the details of the CANDU design and of the Pickering plant. 363 Robertson, “CANDU Reactor System,” 659. Capacity factor is a ratio of actual to potential power production. U.S. LWRs now routinely achieve capacity factors of over 90%. 364 Ronald Koven, “Boom in Canadian Reactors,” Washington Post, July 15, 1974. 365 Koven, “Boom in Canadian Reactors.” 366 Walter Sullivan, “Physicists Are Told of Canadian Reactor That Could Be Fueled Indefinitely by Nonfissionable Material,” New York Times, April 30, 1975.

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Carter’s contact with the Canadian program extended back to 1952 when he had been dispatched at Rickover’s order to assist in the decontamination of the NRX reactor after it experienced an overpower excursion accident. Collaboration between Rickover’s Naval Reactors organization and the AECL Chalk River

Laboratory extended back to 1947 and had been essential to the success of the initial submarine powerplant development program.367 So, Carter had a long familiarity with the Canadian nuclear program and was aware of the details of the latest CANDU technology. In his July 1975 speech in which he disavowed the LMFBR program, it is conspicuous that Carter immediately followed this disavowal with an endorsement of the CANDU alternative, suggesting that he had recently been exposed to the AECL CANDU versus LMFBR promotional campaign. Another advantage of the CANDU technology that Carter referred to was that its natural uranium fuel cycle could take pressure off the perceived shortage in uranium enrichment capacity.368 Carter, therefore, evidently considered the CANDU technology as a credible alternative to the ERDA plutonium economy technology program.

Rickover’s Light Water Breeder Reactor

The CANDU technology was compelling but could not offer the potential of solving mankind’s asymptotic energy supply problem. The power reactor program

367 Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference, 2nd, 2002 ed. (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Inc., 1992), 138-139. 368 See Appendix V for a detailed source analysis of this speech.

149 that Rickover’s Naval Reactors organization was developing in 1975, however, still held the promise of achieving Weinberg’s utopian aim. Rickover had early experience with liquid metal-cooled reactors and had developed a strong skepticism about the engineering feasibility of fundamental aspects of these systems. In 1949, as the design approach for the first nuclear submarines was still in question, Naval

Reactors evaluated three design concepts: a LWR; a gas-cooled reactor; and a liquid metal-cooled design that General Electric was advocating.369 Naval Reactors soon selected the LWR approach for the design of the powerplant in the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. But Naval Reactors maintained an open-minded approach and yielded to General Electric’s interest in attempting to build a liquid sodium-cooled reactor for Sea Wolf, the second nuclear submarine and the one that Carter was assigned to as part of the precommissioning detail in this period. In this duty, Carter spent part of his time at GE’s Knolls Laboratory familiarizing himself with the reactor system that GE was developing for the Sea Wolf.370

The Sea Wolf reactor design was called the Submarine Intermediate Reactor

(SIR), and GE initially promoted it for its thermal efficiency advantages over the

LWR design that Westinghouse was building for the Nautilus. But the SIR design had some inherently challenging safety aspects, including the potential for fires or explosions if any of the liquid sodium coolant came into contact with either air or water and the use of mercury in ancillary piping, adding the risk of toxic mercury leaks in a confined environment. Despite these risks, the Sea Wolf was

369 Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, 91. 370 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 74.

150 commissioned in 1957 with a liquid metal SIR reactor on board. After two years of nervous and careful operation, Sea Wolf was overhauled and the SIR was replaced with a LWR reactor similar to one that powered the Nautilus.371 Rickover wrote at the time that “sodium-cooled reactors, “are expensive to build, complex to operate, and susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.”372 The question of the superiority of water as a coolant compared with liquid sodium was thereby settled for Rickover. Even though Carter had left the Navy by that point he presumably knew about the difficulties with the Sea Wolf’s sodium-cooled reactor.

Rickover shared the consensus AEC view that uranium was too scarce to support an extensive expansion of the nuclear power industry and therefore thought it was important to develop a practical breeder concept that, once proven, could be turned over to the reactor manufacturers. Shortly before Seaborg delivered Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President in 1962, Rickover realized that political support for LWR development was waning and interest shifting instead towards breeder concepts. Rickover decided to initiate and lead an effort to develop a Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR). In doing so, Rickover was bucking the majority opinion among AEC leaders, including Seaborg, that the

LMFBR offered the best potential arrangement for a commercially viable breeder.373

371 Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, 206-212. 372 Quoted in Rockwell, The Rickover Effect, 212. 373 William Beaver, Nuclear Power Goes on-Line: A History of Shippingport (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 124.

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Beaver notes that Rickover was far outside of the mainstream in his view of the ultimate feasibility and importance of the LWBR.374

The proposed LWBR would consist of an alternative core assembly that could be retrofitted into the existing reactor vessel of a pressurized LWR of the type that

Westinghouse built. The new core assembly would use U233 as fissile material and thorium as fertile material, and the goal would be to produce more U233 through neutron capture by the thorium than was consumed as the U233 fissioned to produce power. One of the mainstream arguments against the LWBR concept was that it would not have a particularly high breeding ratio, which would potentially affect the ultimate fueling cost, due to a more questionable “neutron economy” than would theoretically exist in a LMFBR. Rickover sought to maximize the breeding ratio of the LWBR by building the largest possible demonstration core, as calculations suggested that the breeding ratio would be better for a larger core.

Consequently, Rickover initially planned to build a LWBR core for the proposed

Bodega Head reactor.375 When the Bodega reactor was cancelled, Rickover needed an alternative location for the first experimental LWBR. The existing Shippingport

LWR, although far smaller, and thus much less ideal in terms of demonstrating breeding results that might confound his critics, was the only feasible option.

Consequently, Rickover decided in 1965 to design the first LWBR core for installation in the existing Shippingport reactor vessel.376

374 Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 125. 375 Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 124-126. 376 Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 125.

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By 1975, construction of the Shippingport LWBR core was nearing completion after ten years of effort. In his annual testimony to the JCAE and the

Senate Subcommittee on Public Works and Power Development in March and April, respectively, of 1975, Rickover reviewed the progress of the LWBR program. At the time of his testimony, the Comptroller General Office of the GAO had just released a report on the LMFBR program that estimated that the total program cost of the

LMFBR would be $10B, which was five times higher than the amount that Seaborg had estimated the cost to be when he had pitched the project to Nixon in 1971.377

Rickover faced repeated questions from his congressional patrons about the cost of his LWBR program. His estimated total project cost through the planned start-up of the Shippingport plant was $270M.378

Resisting the attempts at the JCAE hearing to induce him to publicly state the obvious conclusion that the LWBR project, at less than 3% of the cost, was a superior alternative to the LMFBR, Rickover all but did so for any who cared to read between the lines:

Admiral Rickover: Ultimately, in the long run, the LWBR and the liquid metal breeder will make about the same amount of energy available for power generation because this all results from breeding. However, the liquid metal breeder, in theory, will make extra fuel faster than the LWBR, so it can support a faster growing utility industry and require less mining and enrichment at any point in time. I think the ERDA should continue to pursue the liquid metal breeder because if it works it will be a fine thing.

377 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future. 378 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, ERDA Fiscal Year 1976 Authorization for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, 94-1, March 5, 1975, 22.

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Senator Montoya: What about plutonium, Admiral?

Admiral Rickover: The liquid metal breeder will make plutonium, which is fissionable material. The light water breeder, on the other hand, will make U233, which is radioactive like all recycled fuel; but U233 is much less toxic than plutonium and is safe to handle.379

Always politically astute, Rickover knew not to directly advocate killing the

LMFBR, a program that was a special priority for some members of the JCAE, but he unmistakably implied that he considered the technical feasibility of the LMFBR still in doubt and the dramatically lower development cost and the fact that the LWBR would not produce plutonium to be salient advantages.

In his testimony at the Public Works and Power Subcommittee hearing, which had appropriation authority for his budget, Rickover made clear that the

LWBR program was ready to begin the next phase along the path to commercializing the benefits of breeding, which he described as a “25- to 50-fold increase in the value of our nuclear fuel resources.”380 He went on to describe a program that would fund the development of larger LWBR cores that could be installed in existing commercial pressurized water reactors:

we are working on designs of large prebreeders and large breeder cores which industry could assume responsibility for and use to start up large light water breeders for themselves. This type of breeder reactor can be installed in the existing water-reactor powerplants all

379 ERDA Fiscal Year 1976 Authorization for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, 22. 380 Subcom on Public Works Appropriations, Public Works for Water and Power Development and Energy Research Appropriation Bill, 1976: Energy Research and Devlopment Administration, 94-1, April 8, 9, 14-17, 1975, 1035.

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over the United States. The utilities won’t have to build new plants. They will be able to install large prebreeder cores and breeder cores in place of their existing cores … without having to build new plants. I thought you would like to know what we are doing with the funds you have appropriated for us….381

So just as Carter was forming his nuclear energy policy, Rickover was promoting an alternative to the LMFBR that seemed to offer the same benefits in fuel efficiency, at a much lower development cost, in a format that could be installed without requiring utilities to build new reactors, and which did not produce plutonium.

Rickover’s project would appear, to anyone who had confidence in Rickover, as an elegant technical bypass around all of the problems of the LMFBR program.

It is evident that Carter had such confidence in Rickover and that he was aware of Rickover’s activities at this time. According to Peter Bourne, Carter met with Rickover shortly before he announced his campaign in December 1974.382

Carter was writing Why Not the Best? in this period and featured Rickover in his stump speech. Carter’s inclusion in his July 1975 energy policy speech of a specific recommendation that a federal employee be in all commercial reactor control rooms

381 Public Works for Water and Power Development and Energy Research Appropriation Bill, 1976: Energy Research and Devlopment Administration, 1035. A prebreeder was envisioned as a reactor that would produce the first fueling of U233 from thorium. After there was enough U233 to fuel a LWBR, there would be no need for further addition of fissile material to the reactor. This requirement for prebreeding the first batch of U233 needed to commission a LWBR core was the major drawback to the program. 382 Bourne, Interview by Author.

155 to ensure safety was a suggestion that Rickover made in the same April 1975 Senate hearing in which he espoused the prospects for the LWBR.383

Carter’s subsequent actions support the view that he believed the LWBR and its thorium fuel cycle to be a compelling alternative to the LMFBR. During the period when Carter and Schlesinger’s team were developing the National Energy Policy

(January to April 1977), Carter discussed thorium fuel cycles with Schlesinger, asking him to compare the LMFBR and LWBR programs.384 When Carter met with the Ford/MITRE study team in the Oval Office on March 21, 1977, to accept their report, the first question that Carter asked was, “I understand that the LWBR at

Shippingport uses thorium as a fertile material and may have a breeding ratio greater than one. What do you guys think about that?” Carnesale remembers being surprised by the question, given the circumstances of the meeting, commenting that only Rickover cared about the LWBR at that time.385 Carter evidently cared about the project and became a patron of it when he came into office. On May 2, 1977, just a few weeks after Carter announcing his nonproliferation policy and his decisions to cancel the Clinch River project, Bert Lance of OMB sent Carter a memo recommending that Carter cut the LWBR budget in order to conform to the new nonproliferation policy. Carter rejected Lance’s recommendation and approved

383 Public Works for Water and Power Development and Energy Research Appropriation Bill, 1976: Energy Research and Devlopment Administration, 1025. Please see Appendix V for a detailed analysis of the provenance of the policy elements in Carter’s July 1975 speech. 384 James Schlesinger, “Memo: Your Inquiry Regarding the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor and Thorium Breeders,” February 17, 1977, folder: Energy CRBR[2], box: 6, collection: DPS Ward/Schirmer, Jimmy Carter Library. 385 Carnesale, Interview by Author.

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Rickover’s full request.386 A further measure of Carter’s regard for Rickover was that

Carter met with Rickover at the White House five times in the first month that

Carter was in office and frequently thereafter. When the Shippingport LWBR went critical for the first time in December 1977, Carter invited Rickover to the Oval

Office and symbolically threw the switch to start the reactor.

So, it is evident that Carter was well aware of Rickover’s LWBR project at the time he was forming his nuclear policy and that he saw it as a potential technical fix for the proliferation problems inherent in the plutonium fuel cycle. Indeed, Carter’s proposal for an international fuel cycle technology evaluation, which became known as INFCE, and which several former members of the Ford/MITRE study participated in, can be interpreted without too much speculation as partly a manifestation of

Carter’s confidence that Rickover might be technically vindicated over ERDA orthodoxy in such a review.387

The broader significance of Carter’s confidence in the possibility of

Rickover’s LWBR as a technical solution to fuel adequacy and proliferation concerns was to further orient Carter towards opposing the LMFBR program. Rickover’s program seemed to Carter to offer the same benefits of fuel efficiency but at a

386 Bert Lance, “Memorandum for the President—Subject: ERDA Funding for the Water Cooled Breeder Reactor Program,” May 2, 1977, folder: Breeder Reactor (General)[3], box: 151, collection: DPS—Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter Library. 387 After the Shippingport LWBR operated for almost five years, it was shut down and the fuel core was analyzed to determine if it had been successful in achieving a breeding ratio of greater than one despite the small size of the system. It took until 1987 to complete the evaluation, but the LWBR had bred more fissile material than had even been projected, proving the concept a technical success and vindicating Rickover’s early confidence. Westinghouse designed a larger (900 MW) version of the LWBR core that could be retrofitted into existing pressurized LWRs. See Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 134-135.

157 dramatically lower cost and under a more credible manager than the LMFBR program. Further, one of the arguments at the time advanced by some LMFBR opponents was that the thorium fuel cycle used by the LWBR would be safer than the plutonium cycle of the LMFBR. There is evidence that Carter was aware of this advocacy, and this presumably bolstered his interest in further investigation of thorium fuel cycles as a technical solution to the plutonium economy quandary.388

Ultimately, the INFCE study did not produce a consensus to shift to alternative fuel cycles, so any hope Carter may have had for such a technical solution was not fulfilled.389

388 Karl Z. Morgan and R. A. Karam, “Exchange of Letters: To Jimmy Carter with Responses from Carter and Stuart Eizenstat,” April 6, 1976, folder: Correspondence 3/76 - 5/76, box: 4, collection: Pre-presidential 1976 Presidential Campaign Issues Office—Stuart Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter Library. In an exchange of letters during the campaign with R.A Karam and Karl Morgan, both professors at Georgia Tech, Carter asked Karam and Morgan to prepare a brief on thorium breeders as an alternative to the LMFBR after they wrote to him on this subject. 389 The thorium breeding cycle produces U233, which can be used as a nuclear explosive. Irradiating U233 denatured with U238 results in the production of plutonium, so there are still problems with the thorium cycle although arguably different in degree from those of the uranium/plutonium cycle. The declining price of uranium after 1978 presumably further reduced incentives to continue investigation of the thorium cycle.

Chapter VII

Plutonium Economy Policy Development in the Carter Campaign

It is a commonplace in histories of his campaign to argue that Carter constructed a message that was long on promoting his own suitability to address the integrity and competence problems in Washington, but short on specific policy promises.390 As Glad notes, for example, especially during the early period of

Carter’s campaign, he made stands on issues that were “not stands at all, but abstract statements of principles to which few could object.”391 Witcover cites as a notable example of this tactic Mr. Carter’s ambiguous stance on abortion rights, which contemporary observers considered instrumental in his victory in the Iowa caucus.392 While Mr. Carter was not the first or last candidate to adopt this pragmatic campaign strategy, his critics seized on this pattern of promoting principles without supplying the specifics of policies.393 In the area of nuclear energy, however, Carter notably diverged from this broader pattern and articulated a detailed set of prescriptions rather early in his campaign. This relative specificity on nuclear policy reflected the prominence that Carter attached to his description of himself as a scientist and nuclear physicist, the confidence that he felt in his own

390 Morris, American Moralist, 202. 391 Glad, Jimmy Carter, 305. 392 Jules Witcover, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 (New York: Viking, 1977), 207; Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 279-280. 393 Gregory Paul Domin, Jimmy Carter, Public Opinion, and the Search for Values, 1977-1981 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 14.

159 ability to analyze nuclear matters, the importance of energy, environmental, and weapons proliferation issues within the competitive dynamics of the political contest with his Democratic rivals early in the campaign, and the relative vulnerability of President Ford on these issues. The resulting policy position on nuclear power that Carter developed and communicated as the campaign unfolded was complex and politically sophisticated, reflecting a synthesis of his own attitudes and direct experience with contemporary policy analysis and advocacy.

Political Context of the Campaign

When he announced his presidential campaign in December, 1974, Carter faced the difficult prospect of setting himself ahead of what would evidently be a crowded field of Democratic contenders, most of whom were already better known as national political figures. Carter, by comparison, was obscure and consequently, few outside his inner circle rated him a likely winner as he began his campaign. As

Bourne notes, a month before he announced his campaign, Carter was not even among the thirty-five potential presidential candidates that the Harris Poll listed in a survey of likely voter favorites.394 Carter and his advisors, nonetheless thought that if Carter won the Democratic nomination, he would easily beat President Ford in the general election. So throughout 1975, the political imperative under which Carter was developing policy positions was the necessity of winning the early primaries

394 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 249. Over a dozen Democratic candidates eventually contested at least some of the primaries.

160 against a crowded and challenging field of better-known Democratic rivals.395

Recognizing the handicap of Carter’s obscurity, his campaign strategy hinged on winning the Iowa Caucus, doing well in the other early caucus states, and winning the New Hampshire primary, which would make him an early front runner and thereby boost his national name recognition. The next critical test would then be to beat Wallace in the Florida primary, scheduled for March 9, 1976. Carter thought that if he accomplished these early goals, he could narrow the field to just three serious candidates after the Florida primary.396

While Carter was determined to run in all fifty states, his strategy placed a heavy focus on campaign efforts in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Florida. Steven Stark, who worked on the campaign issues staff, remembers that in early 1975, Carter was spending much of his time in these three states and in Washington D.C., in order to lay the groundwork for wins in these key contest and in order to build his profile with the Washington political establishment.397 Both the early primary focus and his efforts to build contacts with party and media elites were intended to address his obscurity and build Carter’s credibility as a serious contender.

Carter’s key early primary rivals were: Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who had a national profile as a conservative, pro-defense figure; George Wallace, a conservative who had polled strongly in the south during the 1972 primaries;

Representative Morris “Mo” Udall, who was a liberal Democrat and the candidate

395 Bourne, Interview by Author. 396 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 271. 397 Steven Stark, Interview by Author, October 20, 2009.

161 that national environmental groups initially supported; Senator Birch Bayh, a traditional New Deal Democrat; Fred Harris, a populist former Senator from

Oklahoma; and Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of the Kennedys. Other rivals would later enter the primary contest, most notably Jerry Brown, a liberal from California.

The competitive equation in each of the early primaries and caucuses was somewhat different because not all candidates chose to contest each caucus and primary. Udall did not organize a serious effort in Iowa and did not campaign there until just before the caucus, when he launched a last minute bus tour of the state.398

Udall did not contest any of the other caucuses between the one in Iowa and the

New Hampshire primary, as he did not want to lose any and thereby harm his perceived momentum.399 Udall instead put his early focus into his campaign for the

New Hampshire primary, and as of April 1975 was polling as the front runner in that state.400 Bayh, Harris, and Shriver also ran in New Hampshire, whereas neither

Jackson nor Wallace did. Jackson mounted a strong challenge in neighboring

Massachusetts, capitalizing on skepticism there about Carter’s southern origins.401

In Florida, which was more conservative than New Hampshire, Wallace and Jackson, the two conservative Democrats were Carter’s key rivals.402

Carter’s strategy in positioning himself within the large field of Democratic primary competitors reflected the difficult balance that the conflicting politics in the

398 Witcover, Marathon, 203. 399 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 289. 400 Carson and Johnson, Mo, 154. 401 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 293. 402 Witcover, Marathon, 256-257.

162 early primary states and among national Democratic voters required. Carter was a moderate, a Southerner, and an advocate of fiscal discipline, all of which positioned him as somewhat conservative compared to the center of gravity in the Democratic

Party as the campaign began. It was therefore politically important for Carter to broaden his appeal in the primaries and position himself successfully against more liberal rivals, particularly Udall. Carter’s stance on civil rights, his outreach to environmentalists, and his cautious statements about nuclear power all carried the political benefit of broadening Carter’s appeal to the more liberal end of the

Democratic electorate.403 This was particularly important in the New Hampshire primary.

Carter’s View of Nuclear Power

Carter entered the campaign with a deep background in nuclear technology that extended back to his service in the Navy under Rickover. Carter maintained an ongoing interest in the subject since leaving the service and had kept in touch with

Rickover during the time that he was Governor of Georgia, and indeed considered

Rickover a father figure of sorts.404 In his campaign autobiography, Carter describes his role in the Canadian NRX reactor decontamination and notes the precautions that were involved in this hazardous assignment, but overall conveys an attitude of confidence in the safety of reactors that are properly designed and operated, as in

403 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 404 Bourne, Interview by Author.

163 the Naval Reactors program.405 Presumably, Carter cited his service in Rickover’s program to highlight his competence, since Rickover’s program was notoriously selective, and to present himself as someone committed to Rickover’s principles of excellence and diligence.406 Bourne argues that the decontamination experience bred in Carter a deep appreciation of the potential dangers of nuclear power.407 But

Carter believed these hazards were manageable if prudently handled. Eizenstat remembers that Carter considered himself a strong advocate of nuclear energy, but that he held equally strong views of the importance of managing the proliferation potential and environmental hazards of plutonium.408 So Carter was fundamentally a nuclear power supporter, but was not intoxicated with the utopian possibilities, and well informed about the details and potential problems, which he considered manageable. Carter did not believe a moratorium on nuclear power was warranted and did not consider Ralph Nader a credible authority on nuclear matters.409

While Carter was Governor of Georgia he was exposed to some local manifestations of the growing national policy debate over nuclear power. As early as 1970, newspaper accounts of radiation releases and “thermal pollution” from the

AEC’s Savannah River plutonium production facility just across the border in Aiken,

South Carolina were appearing. The Savannah River Plant (SRP) had since the early days of the Cold War operated graphite-moderated reactors that were dedicated to

405 Carter, Why Not the Best? 58-60. 406 Carter, Why Not the Best? 407 Bourne, Interview by Author. 408 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 409 Eizenstat, Interview by Author.

164 producing plutonium and tritium to supply the AEC nuclear weapons program. The

SRP released over 100 curies worth of tritium per day in normal operation, and there was evidence from preliminary studies at the time that wildlife around the plant was contaminated.410 In May 1973 a series of three articles in the Washington

Post further highlighted the risks of radiation releases at the SRP.411 A year later, on

May 2, 1974, a large accidental release of tritium gas prompted an alert extending to a radius of sixty miles around the SRP to assess contamination levels in water, milk, and vegetation.412 There was also ongoing environmental controversy related to

AEC plans to dispose of highly radioactive reprocessing waste from the SRP by injecting the material under bedrock formations below the Georgia-South Carolina border in an area that might allow the waste to leak into the Savannah River and contaminate the water supply over a large area.413 So, Carter’s experiences in the

410 Thomas O'Toole, “Burgeoning Atomic Plants Run into Pollution Awareness,” Washington Post, August 25, 1970. Opponents also cited thermal pollution concerns. Thermal pollution is the term that describes the rise in temperature in the body of water used as a sink for the waste heat generated in a nuclear plant. The related environmentalist concern was that this phenomenon would adversely change the ecology of the affected waterway. To put in context the amount of tritium that the SRP was releasing, the recent Vermont Senate vote to not reauthorize the Vermont Yankee reactor was over a tritium leak of a total of 0.35 curies over a one-year period. Rod Adams, “How Much Tritium Leaked from Vermont Yankee before the Leak Was Stopped?” Blogspot, . 411 Hal Willard, “Power to Help or Destroy,” Washington Post, May 10, 1973; Hal Willard, “Speechwriters Misrepresented Some Facts in Chairman Ray's Talk on AEC Activities,” Washington Post, May 17, 1973; Hal Willard, “We Know the Claws the Tiger Has, Says AEC,” Washington Post, May 24, 1973. 412 “U.S., S. Carolina Probe Radioactive Leak,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1974. The accident released 479,000 curies worth of tritium in a matter of hours, an amount nearly equivalent to the total released over the entire previous year. See National Research Council Panel on Savannah River Wastes, Management at the Savannah River Plant: A Technical Review (Washington, DC: National Academies, 1981), 21, for a history of tritium releases at the Savannah River Plant. 413 Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: the Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1974), 306.

165 nuclear submarine program and as Governor of Georgia provided him with both an unusually deep understanding of the technical aspects of nuclear power and an appreciation for the political effects of the rising concerns that environmentalists were expressing about associated radiation hazards.

Carter as an Environmentalist

Carter’s attention to the environmental hazards of nuclear technology during his term as governor evolved within the larger context of his growing self- promotion as an environmentalist. Bourne states that Carter saw the environmental movement as an issue network to be cultivated for political support.414 The main approach that Carter pursued to position himself as an environmentalist was through his involvement with river conservation efforts during his tenure as

Governor. In one prominent episode, a group of Georgia conservationists asked him to use his power as governor to cancel plans that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had in place to build a dam across the Flint River at Sprewell Bluffs, an area south of

Atlanta that was popular with canoeists and anglers. Carter took several canoe trips on the Flint River through the area of the proposed dam in 1972 and personally analyzed the Corps’ case for the dam. During this process, Carter’s office received over 6,000 letters opposing the dam. In October 1973, he decided to veto the

414 Bourne, Interview by Author.

166 construction of the dam and proposed instead that the area be preserved as a state park.415

Carter featured this episode prominently in Why Not the Best? in his chapter titled “Government and the Outdoors” in order to substantiate his credentials as an environmentalist.416 Bourne comments that Carter’s veto of the Sprewell dam project was unprecedented and resulted in raising his profile with environmental activists “as far away as California.”417 This effort to present himself as an environmentalist reflected not only Mr. Carter’s personal interest in the outdoors but also conformed with the broad outlines of the campaign strategy that his inner circle of advisors had developed in late 1972 when Carter decided to run for president.418 When Carter would later repeatedly refer to himself in his campaign stump speech as a “canoeist,” he meant by this that he was an environmentalist.

It is notable that Carter chose river preservation efforts to justify his presentation of himself as an environmentalist. In his profile of David Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth, John McPhee recounts as one of three significant environmental campaigns the sustained and only partially successful efforts of

Brower while he was Director of the Sierra Club to prevent the U.S. Bureau of

415 Tim Palmer, Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement, 2004 ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), 102-104. 416 Carter, Why Not the Best? 135-138. 417 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 251. The most prominent California-based organization at that time involved in river preservation was the Sierra Club. 418 Witcover, Marathon, 107-108. Witcover describes a memo that Peter Bourne wrote to Carter in the late summer of 1972 in which he encouraged Carter to run for the presidency. In this memo, according to Witcover, Bourne advised Carter to build his credentials in areas such as environmentalism.

167

Reclamation from building dams.419 In the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. Bureau of

Reclamation embarked on an ambitious program to build dams throughout the

West, citing many of the same arguments to justify these projects that the Army

Corps of Engineers had invoked in support of the proposed Sprewell dam. Brower and the Sierra Club had been successful in opposing a proposed dam that would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument, but had been unable to prevent the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam that created Lake Powell. In 1964, when

Stuart Udall was Secretary of the Interior, Brower began a campaign to oppose dams proposed at Bridge Canyon and Marble Canyon that would have partially flooded the Grand Canyon. In 1966 Brower decided to take out full-page advertisements in and Washington Post to directly advocate for citizen opposition to the plan.420 This action led the IRS to attack the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status and launched a feud between Brower and Mo Udall, who Brower believed had triggered the IRS action.421 Mo Udall and Scoop Jackson both voted for the Grand

Canyon Dams.422 This support for the Grand Canyon dams stood in contrast to many other pro-environmental legislative accomplishments that both Jackson and

Udall had sponsored. Whether by accident or design, Carter had chosen to promote his environmentalist credentials in precisely the policy area where both Udall and

419 McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 151-245. 420 “Now Only You Can Save the Grand Canyon from Being Flooded ... for Profit,” New York Times, June 9, 1966. 421 Carson and Johnson, Mo, 123. 422 Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 165; Carson and Johnson, Mo, 123.

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Jackson were most vulnerable in their relationships with the national environmental organizations.423

Carter’s involvement with river conservation introduced him to a number of individuals who would later advise his presidential campaign on environmental matters. Among these were Jane Yarn, who had worked to preserve the

Chattahoochee River in Georgia, and who would go on to lead Conservationists for

Carter, the environmentalist outreach effort during Carter’s presidential campaign.424 In the fall of 1973, Yarn helped arrange for Carter to meet some national environmental leaders at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. At the meeting, Carter told the attendees that he was planning to run for president. This was the first time Carter told anyone outside of his inner circle that he was planning to run, signifying the importance Carter placed on securing support from this interest network.425 Bourne, who attended the meeting, remembers that most of those present were “cordially supportive,” but did not take Carter seriously. Until

Carter was the front-runner, most of the national environmental organizations supported Udall as their preferred candidate.426

Two attendees of the meeting, Joe Browder and his future wife Louise

Dunlap, decided to immediately commit to Carter’s proposed campaign. Browder was the Director of the Environmental Policy Center (EPC) and also a leader of the

423 Carter was aware of Brower’s history with the Grand Canyon dams through at least the portrayal in McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). 424 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 251. 425 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 251. 426 Browder, Interview by Author.

169

League of Conservation Voters (LCV). The introduction to Browder came through

Landon Butler, who had known Browder through their mutual involvement with the

Audubon Society. The Environmental Policy Center was formed in early 1972, when

Joe Browder and Louise Dunlap, who led the Washington office of Friends of the

Earth, decided along with the rest of their colleagues to secede from their parent organization over differences with David Brower, the founder of FOE.427 Browder and Dunlap had substantive prior experience in environmental advocacy by the time that they formed the EPC. Dunlap, for example, had previously been the coordinator of the Coalition against the SST, an advocacy organization that had formed to oppose federal funding of the supersonic transport (SST).428 The LCV developed a grading system to rank congresspersons on their environmental voting record and began publishing periodic “Dirty Dozen” lists of the lowest ranked members facing reelection.429

The EPC and LCV collaborated widely with other environmental advocacy organizations. The staff of the EPC collectively had prior associations with the Sierra

Club, Environmental Action, the Audubon Society, and the NRDC and consequently

EPC maintained a close working relationship with these groups.430 Browder and his staff also formed a relationship with David Freeman while Freeman was managing

427 Browder, Interview by Author. 428 “The EPC: Environmental Lobby.” The SST legislation was defeated in Congress in 1971, one of the notable and often cited early successes of the technology assessment movement. 429 “Past National Environmental Scorecards,” League of Conservation Voters . 430 “The EPC: Environmental Lobby.” As an example of the symbiotic relationships among these organizations, the Sierra Club paid the rent for the EPC’s Washington offices.

170 the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project.431 So the EPC functioned as both a source of environmental policy analysis and advocacy and equally importantly, as a link in a network of many other such organizations. Given the close ties between the

LCV and the EPC, it is not surprising that the EPC developed a distinctive competence in closely monitoring the progress of key environmental legislation in

Congress. Browder soon began feeding Carter summaries and policy analysis related to Congressional environmental and energy legislation and related environmental advocacy efforts. Thus, Carter’s relationship with Browder substantially strengthened his nexus early in the campaign to the leadership of the environmental interest community and to the NRDC and the FFEPP.

Context of Carter’s July 1975 Energy Policy Speech

Given that Carter’s broader strategy in the early period of his campaign was to stay mostly soft-focus on specific issues and to instead stress his competence and integrity, the first question that emerges in analyzing Carter’s July 1975 energy speech concerns his motivation for delivering such a detailed speech on this topic at this point in the campaign. It appears that several triggers may have prompted this decision. On June 30, ERDA head Robert Seamans announced a National Plan for

Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration that outlined the Ford

Administration’s priorities among future energy sources. Although the plan boosted research spending in the areas of solar energy and conservation, it maintained the

431 Browder, Interview by Author; Freeman, Interview by Author.

171 dominant allocation for the LMFBR program.432 Criticizing the ERDA plan would allow Carter to draw contrasts with President Ford and Senator Jackson on an area of policy in which Carter considered himself an expert.433

But rather than a single event as a trigger, it is more likely that Carter’s motivation derived from a progression of events that had occurred since he announced his campaign that had focused public attention on energy policy and nuclear power issues. Nader’s nuclear moratorium campaign was at a high ebb, with efforts beginning to organize ballot initiatives for the upcoming election cycle.

The March 22 fire at the Browns Ferry TVA nuclear plant seemed to validate the argument about reactor safety that supported the moratorium campaign. Just a month later, Udall announced and convened the first of an extensive series of hearings on all aspects of the ERDA nuclear program, bringing further focus to the issue and positioning himself as the policy-maker and candidate at the forefront of this high profile issue. By July, Udall had already held seven days of hearings. By inviting all the prominent nuclear opponents to his hearings, Udall was courting the national environmental interests and ensuring their continued attention to his candidacy. The nuclear issues had special relevance in New Hampshire because in

June the NRC convened hearings to consider approval of the construction permit for the proposed Seabrook nuclear plant, and Udall was the front-runner among

Democrats in New Hampshire at that point. Therefore, had he not acted in entering

432 Edward Cowan, “Energy Development Plan Offers Priorities for U.S.,” New York Times, July 1, 1975. 433 Bourne, Interview by Author. Bourne remembers that early in the campaign, Carter was insecure about his expertise in other policy areas but considered himself an expert on energy and particularly nuclear energy issues.

172 the energy policy debate in July 1975, Carter would have risked complete eclipse by

Udall on an issue area that was a priority for both an important primary audience and among policy elites whom Carter hoped to cultivate.

Constructing a Pragmatic Stance on Nuclear Energy

In considering his nuclear energy policy stance as he wrote his July 1975 energy policy speech, Carter had to carefully consider public opinion, issue network policy goals, and positioning advantage against Udall, Jackson, the other Democratic candidates, and President Ford. As Appendix VI details, there was potential danger in going too far in satisfying the wishes of environmentalists, most of whom had in

Udall’s hearings endorsed the call for a nuclear power moratorium. The national electorate was in favor of nuclear energy by a two to one margin. This was true for

Democrats as well, though by a slightly smaller proportion. Carter’s own attitude toward nuclear power therefore was much closer to the public’s than was the position of the leadership of the environmental advocacy community. Attitudes among political leaders about nuclear energy were more nearly divided, the effect of which was to rule out the possibility of forthrightly stating support for the existing

ERDA nuclear power program, as these attitudes reflected the controversy attached to the issue. Both President Ford and Senator Jackson were supporters of the existing ERDA technology program. In Jackson’s case, it would have been difficult for him to repudiate the status quo because he was a member of the JCAE and had approved the plutonium economy program as it developed. Carter therefore had both a need to present a contrast with Ford and Jackson and the freedom to do so

173 because he did not have a prior policy record on nuclear energy or plutonium economy programs.

Thus, Carter’s first choice in defining his nuclear policy was determined by public opinion and the competitive dynamics with Udall and Jackson. Carter had to straddle the nuclear moratorium issue to optimally position himself for the early primaries without unduly limiting his subsequent options. Indeed Eizenstat remembers that Carter developed the formula of describing nuclear power as a last resort in order to “address the concern about nuclear power that was an issue in the primaries.”434 Hearing this formulation, moratorium advocates might interpret

Carter’s position as sympathetic. However, Carter’s elaboration of reactor safety features and procedures would balance this impression and to a pro-nuclear audience might sound as if Carter was a nuclear power supporter, albeit a very cautious one.435

In this larger context of his need to present a nuanced nuclear policy, Carter addressed the plutonium economy aspect of his speech. As detailed elsewhere in this study, there were at least three issue networks that Carter had contact with that advocated policy positions hostile to the ERDA plutonium economy technology program: the anti-plutonium campaign that arose from the environmental movement and which was by 1975 led by the NRDC and SIPI; the nonproliferation issue network that consisted of academics and arms control experts who after 1974

434 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 435 See Appendix V for a detailed analysis of the nuclear policy elements in the July 1975 speech.

174 increasingly influenced the discourse about nuclear power within elite private foreign policy fora such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign

Relations; and advocates of technical alternative to the LMFBR, notably Rickover, who seemed to offer the possibility of bypassing some or all of the problems envisioned for the plutonium economy. The policy advocacy of all three issue networks was presumably plausible to Carter and any one of the justifications would have arguably been enough in combination with the recently released GAO report that detailed the dramatic cost overruns in the LMFBR program to lead

Carter to conclude that the LMFBR program was ill-advised.436 That the policy goals of all three issue networks could be satisfied by eschewing the ERDA plutonium economy program presumably made this an easy decision for Carter.

It is notable that even though he clearly was signaling an intention to terminate the LMFBR program, Carter phrased this policy element in nuanced terms, recommending that “our excessive emphasis on this project should be severely reduced and converted to a long-term, possibly multinational effort.”437

Thus, Carter’s recommendation followed the more moderate formula of the NRDC call for delay and de-emphasis of the program rather than killing it outright, an ambiguity that further signaled Carter’s intent to strike a moderate sounding position that would be acceptable to the broadest spectrum of the policy elites that he was courting. Despite this moderate phrasing, it is evident that the main intended political benefit of Carter’s statement of opposition to the LMFBR was to

436 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future. 437 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol 1, part 1, 74.

175 further appeal to nuclear moratorium advocates among policy elites and primary voters, as the LMFBR was the highest priority for ERDA and the Ford Administration and in this context would be interpreted by many as a proxy for Carter’s position on nuclear power generally. Carter arguably encouraged the ambiguity that permitted this interpretation of his anti-plutonium position as a broader anti-nuclear one.

Carter’s approach to nuclear moratorium advocates in his New Hampshire primary campaign illustrates the purposeful straddle outlined above. Bourne recalls that Carter was careful not to alienate more conservative Democrats, for whom he was the default candidate because Jackson did not run in the primary, while still attempting to attract more liberal voters away from Udall.438 Chris Brown, Carter’s campaign manager for the New Hampshire primary recalls that Udall’s political strength in New Hampshire was concentrated in the southeastern part of the state that was most affected by and concerned with the controversy over the Seabrook nuclear plant.439 There was a history of organized opposition to the Seabrook plant in this part of the state that dated back to 1969, when the Seacoast Anti-Pollution

League (SAPL) was formed to contest the original plan to release waste heat from the proposed reactor into the salt marshes adjacent to the Seabrook plant site. As a result of the ongoing legal contest between the SAPL and Public Service of New

Hampshire, the utility that proposed to build the Seabrook plant, by 1975 there was

438 Bourne, Interview by Author. 439 Chris Brown, Interview by Author, October 28, 2009.

176 a well-developed anti-Seabrook faction in the New Hampshire Democratic Party.440

So well-developed that Meldrim Thompson, New Hampshire’s combative conservative Republican governor frequently referred to the issue in expressing his contempt for local Democrats.441 Bourne recalls that “there was a discussion about whether to meet with [a group of anti-Seabrook Democratic activists], and he

[Carter] was very happy to have input from them in writing, but he did not want to meet with them because they were too controversial.”442 Both Glad and Martinez also note the ambiguity in Carter’s position on nuclear energy policy in the New

Hampshire primary and argue that it was calculated to appeal to Seabrook opponents.443 Carter’s finesse in this regard was purposeful and an effective tactic for a largely unknown candidate to employ in a crowded primary field.

So Carter’s nuanced position on nuclear policy in general and on plutonium economy programs particularly was arguably the politically optimal stance given his circumstances, the issue advocacy environment and the competitive dynamics of the early primaries. But it would be a mistake to suggest that Carter crafted his nuclear power position purely to solve this complex political equation. He evidently developed this position carefully through an independent review of the policy analysis material outlined in Appendix IV and sincerely believed that the plutonium

440 Henry F. Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 31-68. 441 Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power, 72. 442 Bourne, Interview by Author. 443 Glad, Jimmy Carter, 310; J. Michael Martinez, “The Carter Administration and the of American Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy, 1977-1981,” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 3 (2002): 283.

177 economy program and particularly the LMFBR were unnecessary and ill considered.

Eizenstat, while acknowledging that particularly the formulation of nuclear power

“as a last resort” was politically inspired, nonetheless emphasized that Carter did not think about these issues in just political terms and that Carter felt strongly about the substantive basis of his nuclear policy position.444

While the policy analysis material that he reviewed may have informed the substance of his plutonium economy position, Carter did not always share the rationale and motivations of the corresponding advocates. For example, while the

NRDC was perhaps the most active in developing the policy advocacy critique of the plutonium economy program, Carter did not subscribe to the NRDC arguments that plutonium economy diversion risks would lead to an erosion in civil liberties or the more alarmist views of the intractability of nuclear waste disposal problems.445 But there was a corpus of credible policy analysis by July of 1975 that supported

Carter’s misapprehension about the LMFBR program. Notable among this was material in some way connected to the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project, which as Appendix IV details was well within the mainstream of energy policy analysis that Congressional Democrats and Carter’s rivals considered at the time.

Through a detailed analysis of the technical, economic, and political aspects of nuclear power and plutonium economy programs, Carter crafted a policy position that he considered both responsible and politically viable. The fact that once in office, Carter held remarkably closely to the plutonium economy policy position he

444 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 445 Eizenstat, Interview by Author.

178 crafted at this early point in the campaign suggests that Carter’s conclusions on this matter were derived from careful consideration and subsequently therefore firmly held.

Elaborating Plutonium Economy Policy

At approximately the time that Carter first stated his plutonium economy policy, Spurgeon Keeny was organizing the team and agenda for the Ford/MITRE study. At this time, although one of the intentions of the study was to inform policy for the next president, Keeny and probably most of the other participants did not expect that Carter would be the ultimate target for their policy recommendations.446

The situation had changed by the point in early 1976 when the Ford/MITRE team had begun to form conclusions about policy recommendations. In late October of

1975 a story by R.W. Apple in the New York Times about Carter, asserting that he had a strong lead going into the Iowa Caucuses boosted him into the position of presumptive front-runner and drew national attention to his campaign.447

This new prominence convinced two of Carter’s colleagues from the

Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Gardner, to commit to his candidacy in January 1976.448 From that point forward, Brzezinski and Gardner assisted Carter with foreign policy issue development during his campaign.

Brzezinski and Gardner had become well acquainted with Carter during a May 1975

446 Keeny, Interview by Author. 447 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 278. 448 Richard N. Gardner, Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 14.

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Trilateral Commission conference in Japan that they had attended together.

Gardner writes that Carter had made a positive impression as a centrist with an intriguing background, appealing humility, and an evident commitment to ethical government.449 Gardner had served in the Kennedy and Johnson State Department involved in UN affairs before returning to an academic career at Columbia Law

School and had maintained a close interest and involvement in UN affairs since that time.

One aspect of Gardner’s ongoing involvement with the UN was through an annual conference that he organized that addressed issues pertinent to the UN. For the conference that Gardner had scheduled for May 13, 1976, the topic was “Nuclear

Energy and World Order,” which Gardner chose before he invited Carter to attend as the keynote speaker. The fact that Carter was a nuclear engineer was a fortunate coincidence.450 Carter asked Gardner to prepare a draft of the speech. Gardner remembers that although he led the drafting of the speech text, Carter had well developed views of the content to be included before the drafting began. Carter asked Gardner to address two major concerns: that the spread of nuclear reactors could lead to nuclear proliferation because every reactor if not properly supervised could be a bomb factory; and nuclear waste disposal, which Carter considered an environmental policy issue. Gardner remembers that Carter was not concerned with reactor safety, as he was confident that there were technical solutions for such

449 Gardner, Mission Italy, 13. 450 Gardner, Mission Italy, 17.

180 concerns. Of the two stated concerns, proliferation was the priority issue for

Carter.451

Gardner then contacted several nuclear subject matter experts for assistance in preparing the speech. Gardner remembers that he consulted Albert Carnesale and

George Rathjens for help with the speech and that of the two, Carnesale was more extensively involved, drafting the section on nonproliferation. Gardner characterized Carnesale’s contribution as “providing the right technical language for what Carter had in mind.”452 Carnesale remembers that Gardner asked him to write something on nonproliferation and then after submitting his contribution and reading Carter’s final speech, Carnesale noted that Gardner had included Carnesale’s draft text almost unmodified.453 After Gardner finished drafting the speech, he flew to Atlanta, where he joined Carter on the campaign plane to review the text. Gardner was struck by Carter’s extraordinary attention to details in his review of the speech.454 Eizenstat recalls also reviewing the text.455

The main purpose of the speech was to give Carter an opportunity to demonstrate his credibility on foreign policy issues. Presumably, important target audiences for this demonstration were the community of senior policy-makers who might assume positions in a new Democratic administration and the national news

451 Gardner, Interview by Author. 452 Gardner, Interview by Author. 453 Carnesale, Interview by Author. Gardner credited Carnesale as a collaborator in preparing the speech and this fact was reported in the New York Times, which alarmed Carnesale, because he had not met Carter and was not officially aligned with the Democratic party or Carter’s campaign. 454 Gardner, Mission Italy, 17. 455 Eizenstat, Interview by Author.

181 media, who might challenge the plausibility of Carter’s candidacy if he did not seem credible and competent on foreign policy matters. With the goal of yielding the proper impression among the national news media from the event, Gardner organized press briefings before the event and then afterwards in Washington and the coverage was indeed positive. Gardner was pleased with an article in the New

York Times by Leslie Gelb that praised Carter’s speech for its comprehensiveness.456

The Gelb article noted Carter’s emphasis on the U.S. adopting a more multilateral approach that would seek to induce more international cooperation in restraining weapons proliferation through greater U.S. forbearance in a number of aspects of nuclear policy and noted that “this is not how international business has been conducted, … his ideas have been considered impractical by this and previous administrations.”457 Although undoubtedly positive in overall tone, the Gelb article in this passage touched on what was to ultimately become one of the most controversial aspects of Carter’s nonproliferation policy—the diplomatic feasibility of inducing reciprocal restraint in commercializing plutonium economy technologies through the U.S. setting an example of forbearance in its own domestic fuel cycle policy. The passage in Carter’s U.N. speech that foreshadows Carter’s later argument for such U.S. restraint argues:

There is considerable doubt in the United States about the necessity of reprocessing now for plutonium recycle…. And there is the further question to be asked: If the United States does not want the

456 Gardner, Mission Italy. 457 Leslie H. Gelb, “Carter's Nuclear Plan: A Blend of Old and New,” New York Times, May 14, 1976.

182

developing countries to have commercial plutonium, why should we be permitted to have it under our sovereign control?458

As discussed in Chapter V, the Ford/MITRE team elaborated on this concept in their final report and justified such forbearance as a necessary foundation under any multilateral effort to restrain exports of dangerous fuel cycle technologies.459 An obvious inference is that this interaction between two members of the Ford/MITRE study team and Carter through the mediating involvement of Gardner is significant in the development of this important element of Carter’s overall plutonium economy policy. In the context of the venue for the speech and for a candidate who wished to differentiate himself from the relative unilateralism of the previous administration, it would have been logical to make such an argument at least as an aspirational statement. But it is notable that this concept from the U.N. speech found later expression in Carter’s April 1977 nonproliferation policy.

Arguably, the influence of the Ford/MITRE study on subsequent Carter

Administration fuel cycle policy began through this interaction or perhaps earlier.

Eizenstat remembers that he and Carter knew the conclusions of the Ford/MITRE study well before it was published and that Carter knew the underlying issues in the study very well.460 Evidently, given the careful review that Carter conducted with

Gardner of the speech before delivering it, this notion of U.S. forbearance and an

458 Carter, “Three Steps,” 13. This aspect of the speech was stated in the context of advocating multinational rather than national fuel cycle facilities, but given the political infeasibility of such multinational arrangements, the clear implication for the U.S. was forbearance of closing its own fuel cycle. 459 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, 381. 460 Eizenstat, Interview by Author.

183 international collaboration inducing mutual restraint in fuel cycle policies was a view that Carter held at this point.

The main influence of the Ford/MITRE study on Carter plutonium economy policy therefore appears to have been as a credible validation of the policy view that

Carter had already developed earlier in the campaign before the Ford/MITRE study commenced. It appears that Carter may have derived some confidence in the feasibility of influencing foreign fuel cycle policy through a demonstration of U.S. forbearance from the Ford/MITRE study recommendation on this topic, but it is also possible that in both the U.N. speech and in the Ford/MITRE report, this effect was presented as more of an aspiration than critical objective. Fundamentally, Carter in his July 1975 energy policy speech and the Ford/MITRE study team rejected the plutonium economy program on both economic and proliferation grounds, so the overall validity of this policy position did not depend on the feasibility of producing reciprocal restrain among other advanced nuclear countries in their use of plutonium economy policies, and indeed, the U.S. example of fuel cycle policy restraint did not produce this desired effect.461

461 See Joseph S. Nye, “Maintaining a Nonproliferation Regime,” in Nuclear Proliferation: Breaking the Chain, ed. George H. Quester (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Bertrand Goldschmidt, The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy (La Grange Park, IL: American Nuclear Society, 1982); Imai and Rowen, Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Proliferation. These sources present U.S., French, and Japanese views of the reasons why U.S. policy was unsuccessful in this respect.

Chapter VIII.

Conclusions

The seductive vision of a plutonium-fueled technology that could banish energy scarcity was compelling, first to a generation of scientists and then later to a series of politicians who proved susceptible to promotional scientific advocacy.

Launched in part to strengthen the AEC in its contest for prominence and appropriations against the more glamorous space program, and sold to Nixon as a way to partially overshadow the negative legacy of the Vietnam War, the LMFBR program and the associated AEC promotional campaign for a plutonium economy proved difficult to justify on a variety of measures once it was subjected to critical analysis. The initial motivation for such analysis arose from an environmental movement that viewed the prospect of an unlimited fission energy source as dystopian, and consequently the critique was not broadly credible at first. But as parties who were more presumably disinterested joined the critique, the fundamental weakness in the economic justification for the plutonium economy became more widely accepted.

Tom Cochran, Gus Speth, and their colleagues in an issue network that centered on the NRDC pioneered the economic critique of the plutonium economy that propagated first within the broader environmental advocacy community, and later into energy policy analysis. The NRDC advocacy campaign was also innovative compared with the broader antinuclear movement in framing policy goals that were

185 more politically shrewd, advocating the position of delaying plutonium economy programs, rather than joining the call for the broader nuclear moratorium that

Nader and others were promoting. In doing so, the NRDC created a seemingly more moderate option that policy-makers could support to satisfy antinuclear sentiment.

Indeed, the policy formulation that the NRDC pioneered of postponing the adoption of breeders rather than completely eschewing the technology avoided the political hazards of directly confronting utopian arguments about energy abundance. This shift in the political discourse opposing breeder reactors to one of “when” not “if” to implement them substantially broadened the political spectrum of persons who could oppose the argument proponents were making about the economic urgency of developing this technology.

Perhaps the most influential early energy policy study that this economic critique of the LMFBR program found root in was the Ford Foundation Energy

Policy Project (FFEPP). The fact that David Freeman had written the speech in which Nixon elevated the LMFBR program to “moonshot” status just prior to assuming leadership of the FFEPP underlines the rapidity and degree to which the critical policy analysis that emerged from the environmental community began to penetrate the emerging independent energy policy analysis community. Prior to the launch of the FFEPP, there had been very little broadly credible energy policy analysis conducted outside the parochial confines of federal agencies or the energy industry and consequently there had been little incentive to question fundamental assumptions about the broader social and economic utility in promoting energy supply growth. The LMFBR program, with its utopian argument about eliminating

186 supply limits hastened the broader examination of both the feasibility and desirability of this goal. Freeman’s study in combination with NRDC policy analysis formed a broad and compelling critique of the LMFBR program by substantiating the NRDC claim that energy demand would not likely grow at the rate that the AEC had projected to justify the urgent need for the LMFBR program. The FFEPP was the first arguably disinterested and credible policy analysis to make the argument that the LMFBR program should be demoted from its status as the highest priority energy research project.

The FFEPP also served as a notable stimulus in publicizing an important but hard-to-value impact of the LMFBR program—the attendant weapons proliferation risk that would accompany the development of an international commercial trade in plutonium. The Taylor/Willrich effort in this respect together with the unanticipated involvement of McPhee and then the subsequent circumstance of the

Indian test spread the discourse of proliferation risk from the narrow confines of

ACDA and academia to a broader stratum of policy-makers and the public and challenged the prior ambivalence on this issue. Because proliferation risk is inherently difficult to quantify and therefore balance against economic arguments about benefits that might justify incurring some level of such risk, it matters as much who makes the argument about proliferation risks as the details of such a discourse about trade-offs. The auspices of the FFEPP therefore added to the force of the proliferation risk argument and from the analysis presented here it is apparent that the NRDC/FFEPP arguments about both the dubious economic value of the LMFBR and the attendant proliferation risks were widely cited by Democratic

187 policy-makers and notably by Carter’s key rivals Jackson and Udall in early 1975 as the presidential primary campaign was under way.

But the credibility of the FFEPP policy critique of the LMFBR program suffered from what appeared as a broader bias by Freeman against the energy industry, his apparent embrace of the Nader faction among anti-nuclear advocates, and a conspicuous sense that Freeman had sought to deliberately provoke the controversy that followed the publication of his study. Taylor’s portrayal of nuclear terrorism risk seemed similarly compromised to many observers.462 Indeed, this air of overall controversy and the corresponding contest over the credibility of the study’s conclusions about nuclear energy was part of Bundy’s motivation to launch the Ford/MITRE study and shaped how he organized and staffed this subsequent effort.

The credibility of the individual participants, their higher standing in the arms control community, and via the known links to Hans Bethe, the presumed neutrality or mildly pro-nuclear stance of the Ford/MITRE study team attached even greater credibility to the negative findings of this group about the advisability of proceeding with plutonium economy programs. It is notable that the essence of the economic and proliferation risk arguments against the plutonium economy programs was essentially the same in the NRDC advocacy, in the FFEPP, and in the

Ford/MITRE study. While these reviews differed in the details of the ways that they

462 When asked why Ted Taylor was not considered as one of the people to include on the Ford/MITRE study team, Keeny remembered that he thought Taylor was too much of an alarmist about nuclear terrorism and that he thought Taylor underestimated the difficulties that someone without Taylor’s own detailed knowledge of bomb design would encounter in attempting to build such a device. Keeny, Interview by Author.

188 evaluated the economic prospects of plutonium programs, they all reached the same conclusion about the lack of justification for the urgency of federal efforts to commercialize the LMFBR and permit the use of MOX fuels. Similarly, all three reviews argued that the proliferation risks of the plutonium economy programs were unacceptable or at the very least, required strong and restrictive policy action.

What was fundamentally significant about the Ford/MITRE study was the mainstream credibility that it brought to these views. Indeed, after the Ford/MITRE team released their report and Carter announced his April 1977 plutonium economy policy that had been implemented with the assistance of several members of the Ford/MITRE study team, Hans Bethe publicly announced that he supported

Carter’s decision on the grounds of weapons proliferation risk, saying, “I believe we can afford a delay of the breeder as long as we keep in mind that it ought to come

(into use eventually).”463

The Ford/MITRE team and subsequently President Carter heavily weighed the potential for proliferation risk against commercial considerations in forming plutonium fuel cycle policy. From the progression of evaluations that culminated in the Ford/MITRE study, it appeared that there was almost no commercial benefit to be gained in closing the plutonium fuel cycle to balance against what they considered a high and escalating proliferation risk. The comments of some of the

Ford/MITRE study group members at the 1975 Cambridge Forum in which they predicted a nuclear war by the year 2000 that would be more likely to arise from

463 “Bethe Endorses Delaying Atomic Breeder Reactors,” New York Times, April 26, 1977, 22.

189 proliferation than from the U.S./Soviet contest gives a sense of the perceived magnitude of this proliferation risk. Since the establishment of this policy consensus in the Carter Administration, those advancing commercial arguments in favor of closing the plutonium fuel cycle have faced a high burden of proof that as a practical matter has been difficult to overcome.

Many existing accounts of the development of the breeder reactor or fuel cycle policy in the Carter Administration therefore frame this matter in the context of nonproliferation policy and draw the link between Carter and the Ford/MITRE study due the suggestive timing and correspondence of its recommendations to

Carter Administration policy. A related set of inferences leads some to conclude that because Carter was so strongly opposed to the LMFBR and the plutonium fuel cycle, he was broadly opposed to nuclear power and an opponent of the utopian vision embodied in the technical fix possible through the physics of breeder reactors.

These views of the origins of Carter’s nuclear fuel cycle policy and of his attitudes towards nuclear technology misinterpret the chronology, the circumstances of his policy development, and Carter’s own experience and role in crafting this policy.

In tracing the origins of Carter fuel cycle policy, this study focuses instead on

Carter’s experience and context in the first half of 1975 during the early period of his campaign before he was the front-runner and examines the influences and constraints that Carter faced in that period as he crafted his first statements on plutonium economy policies. The context for his decision-making in this period was quite different from later in the campaign after he became the front-runner and later still as president. Despite his rapidly evolving political circumstances, Carter

190 held remarkably consistently to the plutonium fuel cycle policy views that he developed in the early period of his campaign. Rather than serving as the source of

Carter’s views, the Ford/MITRE study served to elaborate and add credibility to the fundamental position that Carter developed on his own. In particular, the

Ford/MITRE study added weight to the emphasis placed on proliferation risks over the commercial aspects of plutonium fuel cycles. In the context of Carter’s existing views, this was a matter of emphasis rather than substance.

Influences on Carter in this early period included exposure to the anti- plutonium issue network as mediated through the FFEPP, Carter’s engagement with the arms control community through his involvement with the Trilateral

Commission, and developments within nuclear research programs that were competing with the LMFBR. Carter’s belief in the argument for the economic feasibility of substantial improvement in energy efficiency that was developed in the

FFEPP undermined much of the previous economic rationale for plutonium economy technologies. Carter was a receptive and early adopter of this argument about energy efficiency, as it resonated with his fiscal conservatism and distaste for inefficiency and mismanagement. While at first the argument that GNP growth could be progressively decoupled from a corresponding growth in energy consumption was highly controversial, this view rapidly gained credibility as confirming evidence accumulated.

Carter’s conscious efforts to burnish his credentials in the area of foreign policy and his corresponding attention to his involvement with the Trilateral

Commission brought Carter into close contact with an emerging nonproliferation

191 issue network that arose from the extra-governmental arms control community. In the period of Carter’s campaign, there was a particularly dense interconnection of associations between persons involved in elite private policy-making organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings

Institution, Pugwash and other organizations. Many of the individuals involved in these fora had prior government experience with arms control at the State

Department or the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). In many respects, the Ford/MITRE team embodied this experience and perspective. This community was largely repelled by an apparent deficit of concern from Kissinger’s

State Department over the weapons proliferation potential inherent in plutonium fuel cycle technologies. From this milieu, Carter drew a further impetus for weighing the proliferative risks of the plutonium economy program and confidence

(ultimately unrealistic) in the diplomatic feasibility of a more restrictive international stance towards plutonium fuel cycle elements.

Carter’s rather unique experience as a former member of Rickover’s staff and his ongoing interest in the esoteric details of nuclear developments outside of the mainstream of ERDA programs gave him ample additional reason to reject the

LMFBR program on its technical merits compared to these other programs. Whereas other policy-makers were dependent on ERDA’s expert view on the technical superiority of the LMFBR over other approaches to solving the potential problem of uranium fuel inadequacy, Carter had direct experience from his duty with Sea Wolf with the profound technical problems inherent with sodium-cooled reactors and evidently believed that better technical solutions were imminent. Carter’s

192 confidence in Rickover’s LWBR as a superior alternative to the LMFBR was likely an important factor in shaping his view, as at the time this project seemed to offer the same benefits as the LMFBR at much lower cost and without as much proliferation risk. Carter therefore viewed the implications of rejecting the LMFBR differently from most other policy-makers at the time. Whereas rejecting the ERDA Clinch River

LMFBR for most represented a turn away from supporting further progress in the

U.S. nuclear program, for Carter such a move would potentially redirect U.S. progress in a more feasible technical direction. Rejecting the Clinch River LMFBR project did not represent a turn away from breeders in general for Carter. Indeed, in addressing criticism from Representative John Brademas over the April 1977 plutonium policy statements, Carter wrote:

Some I think have misunderstood the debate on the Clinch River Breeder Reactor—thinking that a vote for Clinch River is a vote for the breeder generally, and a vote against it means one is “anti-breeder.” Those who make such an argument have overlooked the real issues….

A light water breeder reactor using thorium has already begun operational tests at Shippingport under the direction of Admiral Rickover.464

464 Jimmy Carter, “Brademas Letter,” September 13, 1977, folder: Energy CRBR [3], box: 6, collection: Domestic Policy Staff- Energy and Natural Resources (Ward/Schirmer), Jimmy Carter Library. Notably, in the first draft of this letter, Carter’s staff did not mention the Shippingport reactor and Carter handwrote the text that mentioned Rickover’s project and insisted that this be included in the final draft of the letter that was sent to Brademas to explain that he was neither anti- breeder nor against further development of nuclear technology.

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Carter’s unusual views in this respect arose from his unique background and were poorly understood at the time. Most accounts of the history of Carter’s fuel cycle policy seem to overlook the importance this view held for Carter.

It is important to recognize that when Carter first developed his plutonium economy policy, his macroscopic preoccupation was overcoming the handicap of his relative political obscurity and developing a formula for success against a large field of Democratic primary rivals. Consequently, it is important to understand the influence that Carter’s primary rivals had on his decision to state a plutonium economy policy so early in his campaign and on how he designed the content of his policy. Despite Carter’s own confidence in the feasibility of safe operation of nuclear reactors from his experience in the Navy, and his confidence in the fundamental tractability of the technical problems often cited by nuclear opponents, and his enthusiasm for the prospects of the LWBR that Rickover was developing, political considerations precluded Carter from making any statements that on balance sounded too positive towards nuclear energy. By opposing plutonium economy technologies, recommending specific safety improvements for reactors as an implicit alternative to a moratorium and stating that nuclear energy should be a lowest priority, Carter was able to present his expertise on the subject while finessing the challenge of appealing to the more anti-nuclear primary voters without alienating the broader electorate or constraining his subsequent policy options.

By signaling his intention to proceed with conventional nuclear power after coming to power, Carter exercised the flexibility that was implicit in his nuanced campaign statements to the surprise and chagrin of nuclear power opponents who

194 supported him in the election in the mistaken belief that his statements opposing the LMFBR signaled a broader antinuclear stance. A good illustration of how profoundly antinuclear advocates misunderstood the nuances in Carter’s campaign position was Nader’s vehement reaction of dissatisfaction as Carter announced his nonproliferation and energy policy in April 1977. Significantly, Nader ascribed what he viewed as the pro-nuclear aspects of Carter’s policy to Schlesinger and

Schlesinger’s advisors, rather than to Carter.465 Such confusion about Carter’s support for nuclear energy persists to the present. It is now clear, however, that

Carter was privately enthusiastic about nuclear energy within what he viewed as the proper context. In light of this realization, his April 1977 proposal to streamline the LWR siting and licensing is not surprising.

Further comment is warranted on Carter’s unique background. The period of

Carter’s campaign and administration was marked by the publication of many technology assessments of various aspects of nuclear power and other energy technologies. Unlike most politicians, who would have to rely on the conclusions of such studies, Carter demonstrated an ability to selectively draw on details in such material and synthesize policy and proposed solutions of his own.466 His ongoing interest in eclectic aspects of nuclear technology illustrates both the breadth of influences on Carter in this policy area and the active manner of his engagement with such material. Therefore, while the purpose of this study is to examine

465 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Nader's Nuclear No,” Washington Post, April 14, 1977. 466 Stark, Interview by Author. Carter was more qualified in this area of policy analysis than anyone else on his campaign and consequently, handled this subject matter himself before the primaries.

195 influences and origins of Carter’s plutonium economy policy, Carter’s own agency in crafting his positions on these issues must be stressed.

Carter was uniquely well qualified among candidates to analyze the plutonium economy policy question and form his own conclusions. To his credit,

Carter arrived at prescient conclusions about all of the important technical and economic aspects of the LMFBR program. That there was no Congressional support for the LMFBR when the program finally died in 1983 even after Reagan’s attempts to revive it illustrates that the economic rationale for the program was profoundly misguided. The precipitous decline in uranium prices after 1978, the even more successful adoption of energy efficiency measures than anyone anticipated, and the difficult financing environment for nuclear plants in the late 1970s all validated

Carter’s skepticism of the economic justification for the program. He was right about the technical challenges in reducing to practice sodium-cooled reactors. Both

France and Japan built LMFBRs and experienced difficulties.467 Neither has since broadly commercialized LMFBRs. Carter was also justified in his belief that

Rickover’s LWBR would achieve a breeding ratio greater than one and thus offer a technical alternative to the sodium-based LMFBR should the U.S. at some point in the future need a breeder cycle, albeit one with its own imperfections. In forming many of these conclusions, Carter was ahead of the mainstream consensus. Where

Carter notably miscalculated was in estimating the reciprocal effect of a show of U.S. restraint in closing the fuel cycle, and in forming this opinion, Carter arguably relied

467 Garwin and Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons, 133.

196 more on expert policy advice than he did in analyzing the technical and economic aspects of this policy.

Appendix I.

Spectrum of Relevant Issue Networks—Summary as of July 1975

Political scientist Jeffrey Berry describes the rise of citizen groups such as the environmental advocacy organizations in the 1970s and the resulting challenge that these groups posed to many of the “iron triangles” or closed subgovernment policy- making communities.468 Berry argues that this challenge resulted in a transition to a more open and contested policy-making environment in which “issue networks” composed of ad hoc alliances among diverse agents form to advocate for a commonly sought policy objective, at times in conflict with the relevant subgovernment. Berry describes the structure of such networks:

The coalitions within networks, often involving scores of groups, define the divisions over issues and drive the policymaking process forward. Alliances are composed of both old friends and strange bedfellows; relationships are built on immediate need as well as on familiarity and trust. Organizations that do not normally work in a particular issue network can easily move into a policymaking community to work on a single issue. The only thing constant in issue networks is the changing nature of the coalitions.469

While from a distance, it might have appeared that there were only two dichotomous positions on nuclear power, that of the government/industry coalition in favor of forging ahead with the plutonium economy roadmap and the opposing coalition of environmental and consumer advocates seeking a moratorium on

468 Berry, “Citizen Groups.” 469 Berry, “Citizen Groups,” 34.

198 further nuclear power development, a careful review of policy goals and of all of the interests and parties involved at the time reveals that there were also three narrower interest networks interposed between these extremes. While there was overlap between these interest networks, the goals sought by each were distinct.

The first of these intermediate issue networks was broadly skeptical of nuclear power but adopted the more narrow and politically feasible policy goals of defeating the LMFBR and reprocessing, harnessing a diverse range of arguments that were at root motivated by a deep concern over the anticipated social and environmental consequences of plutonium technology. Thomas Cochran of the

NRDC, one of the most active participants in this anti-plutonium issue network, described the activities of the NRDC regarding the LMFBR program as a “campaign against the breeder.”470 The organizations within this anti-plutonium issue network closely collaborated and coordinated their efforts. There certainly was overlap between this network and the broader network seeking a nuclear moratorium, but the NRDC in particular was careful to focus on the anti-plutonium policy goal.

A second distinct interest network that developed policy goals related to plutonium economy programs in 1975 came from the arms control community, particularly after the May 1974 Indian nuclear test. Prior to this point, concerns about potential diversion of plutonium produced in power reactors animated the work of a small group of mostly obscure specialists who had prior experience with either the AEC or ACDA. After the U.N. Non Proliferation Treaty of 1968 (NPT68)

470 Cochran, Interview by Author.

199 came into effect on 1970, most policy-makers and certainly most within the Nixon

Administration apparently considered that the matter was well enough under control. One of these formerly obscure experts, Ted Taylor, became suddenly prominent in December 1973 when John McPhee profiled him in the Curve of

Binding Energy, which was also published in the New Yorker.471 After the May 1974

Indian test, Congress became interested in further restricting sensitive fuel cycle technology exports, but only started to propose legislation for this purpose after the

94th Congress came into session early in 1975.472 While there was some crossover between the arms control issue network and the other interest networks, particularly via Taylor’s efforts, such overlap largely consisted of persons affiliated with either the moratorium or anti-plutonium networks citing the work of Taylor,

Willrich, Gilinsky, or their colleagues as additional justification for their respective policy aims. After independently confirming the electric demand growth projections and finding of uranium adequacy that the earlier FFEPP had asserted, the Ford/MITRE study group further legitimized the prioritization of nonproliferation policy aims in fuel cycle policy-making. For the nonproliferation issue network, the policy goal with respect to nuclear power broadly or plutonium economy programs was not necessarily discontinuation, but rather to raise the weight attached to proliferation or diversion risks when policy-makers considered regulation of key aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. On whether this goal was

471 McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy. 472 Beckman, “The NNPA of 1978,” 349.

200 fundamentally pro- or anti- nuclear power, there was some ambiguity and disagreement.473

Not at all associated with nuclear power opponents but nonetheless implicit opponents of the LMFBR program were the atomic energy establishments of Canada and Hyman Rickover’s Naval Reactors. Both were proposing competing technologies that were either budgetary or market competitors of the LMFBR program. Atomic

Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) mounted a sustained campaign to portray their heavy water moderated natural uranium-fueled CANDU reactor design that they were attempting to license and export as a superior alternative to the LMFBR.474

Hyman Rickover’s Naval Reactors fiefdom within the AEC was developing a thorium-based light water breeder reactor (LWBR) design that could be retrofitted into the existing fleet of LWRs.475 Although officially the AEC portrayed the LWBR as a backup option in case LMFBR technology could not be successfully developed, it is clear that Rickover thought his LWBR offered a better solution to the perceived problem of uranium scarcity at a much lower development and implementation

473 This is a point that is still contested in discussion of open vs. closed fuel cycles. Many nonproliferation advocates consider themselves pro-nuclear with the proviso that they only support an open fuel cycle. Critics of this view such as Ryukichi Imai and Bertrand Goldschmidt believe that the concern over diversion risk is overstated and an unreasonable justification to maintaining an open fuel cycle. See Goldschmidt, Atomic Complex, 395-473; Imai and Rowen, Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Proliferation. 474 Indeed, the Canadian campaign to promote the CANDU design as an alternative to breeder reactors extended back to 1963, when Bennett Lewis, director of R&D at AECL published Lewis, “Breeders Are Not Necessary,” as a response to the 1962 AEC Report to the President. 475 Rickover’s LWBR breeder core could only be retrofitted into LWR’s that used the pressurized water reactor design that Westinghouse and Naval Reactors had pioneered, but this was the dominant LWR design installed.

201 cost.476 Utilizing the thorium fuel cycle, Rickover’s project seemed to offer the benefits of the plutonium economy—without plutonium. A failure of the LMFBR program would elevate Rickover’s LWBR to the dominant design for next generation breeder reactors just as his original reactor at Shippingport had led to the dominance of LWR technology in the first wave of reactor construction. Presumably, this was an eventuality that Rickover would have welcomed.

So, by mid-1975 when Mr. Carter wrote his first campaign speech on energy policy, the array of parties broadly interested in opposing or curtailing the plutonium economy program was indeed diverse and composed of strange bedfellows. Even if a policy-maker rejected the views and goals of the nuclear power moratorium issue network, as Mr. Carter did, supporting the policy goals of any of the three intermediate advocacy positions would have provided justification for opposing the LMFBR and related programs. The table on the following page (table

3) summarizes these issue networks.

476 Public Works for Water, Pollution Control, and Power Development and Atomic Energy Commission Appropriations, Fy73, Part 3. Committee on Appropriations. Senate Subcom on Public Works Appropriations. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1972. 881.

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Issue Network Notable Advocates Organizations Key Policy Goals Nuclear Power Ralph Nader Critical Mass, Union of Nuclear power moratorium Moratorium Henry Kendall Concerned Scientists, Daniel Ford Friends of the Earth, Energy conservation Amory Lovins Sierra Club, mandates and shift to Dan Hayes Environmental Action, renewable energy and coal David Brower Environmental Policy Center, League of Conservation Voters, 150+ other organizations Anti-Plutonium Tom Cochran, NRDC, SIPI, National 10 year delay in LMFBR Economy Dean Abrahamson, Council of Churches of program John Holdren Christ, Pugwash Arthur Tamplin Ban on MOX use in LWRs Amory Lovins Gus Speth Higher federal budget Paul Ehrlich priority for research on Barry Commoner alternatives, fusion, Margaret Mead renewables, and coal Linus Pauling Don Geesaman Proliferation and Ted Taylor ACDA, Council on Tighter control of nuclear Diversion Risk Mason Willrich Foreign Relations, fuel cycle, particularly on Mitigation Victor Gilinsky, Trilateral Commission, aspects exposing potential Ford/MITRE team Brookings, RAND, weapons material to Pugwash diversion. Pro-Nuclear: Hyman Rickover Naval Reactors Promotion of Light Water Promoting Bennett Lewis Breeder Reactor (LWBR) Technical Atomic Energy of Alternatives to Canada Limited Promotion of CANDU the LMFBR Reactor Pro-Nuclear: Hans Bethe, Luis ERDA, French, Preventing a moratorium on Support for ERDA Alvarez, Felix Bloch German, Japanese, nuclear power Technology Norris Bradbury British atomic energy Roadmap Harold Brown, Ralph establishments, Continuation of ERDA Lapp, Edward Purcell Atomic Industrial reactor development I.I Rabi, Norman Forum, Atlantic program, including closing Rasmussen, Roger Council the fuel cycle and Revelle, Glenn Seaborg commercializing the LMFBR. , , Alvin Weinberg, , , Richard Wilson

Table 3. Summary of Advocacy Positions Relevant to Nuclear Power Policy, 1975

Appendix II.

Analysis of the Anti-Plutonium Issue Network in 1975

To better quantify the characteristics of the anti-plutonium issue network in the period leading up to Carter’s July 1975 speech, this appendix presents an analysis of participation and citation patterns among those opposed to the plutonium economy program. To identify the most active individuals and organizations during the period from early 1971 to the end of 1975, I have chronologically listed a representative sequence of events in the anti-plutonium activism during this period and then analyzed this set of events to identify the most active participants and organizations based on participation and citation as a relevant authority by other members of the anti-plutonium interest network.

While there is an inevitable selection bias in the choice of events analyzed, I have attempted to include the events most relevant to the policy context that Carter faced in July 1975 as he was composing his energy policy speech and believe that including additional relevant events, such as activities related to interventions in the

AEC’s programmatic environmental impact statements for the LMFBR and MOX recycle programs would reinforce the conclusions presented here. Table 4 presents the results of the frequency analysis described above. This analysis together with a close inspection of the underlying advocacy chronology suggests that the most active organizations in the advocacy campaign were the Scientists’ Institute for

Public Information (SIPI), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and

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Friends of the Earth (FOE). The second tier of organizations involved in the anti-

LMFBR interest network as scored by activity included Environmental Action, which was very active during the first two years of the period studied and then less active afterwards, and the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project, which appears here because the Willrich and Taylor report, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards was frequently cited by participants in the anti-plutonium interest network during the last two years of the period examined.

The individuals most active in anti-plutonium advocacy were Thomas

Cochran, Dean Abrahamson, John Holdren, Arthur Tamplin, and Theodore Taylor.477

Generally, those at the next lower level of participation in these efforts were associates of these most active participants. For purposes of simplification, table 4 does not present individuals or groups that only appear once in the chronology of anti-plutonium advocacy events, but a perusal of table 5 suggests that diffuse support for the anti-plutonium position was widespread across the ranks of the broader anti-nuclear interest community in this period as well.

477 Abrahamson was also involved in anti-plutonium advocacy in Sweden from 1978 to 1980, during which time he served as an advisor to the Energy Ministry. During this period, Sweden reversed an earlier plan to reprocess spent fuel and enacted a once-through fuel cycle policy.

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Activity Rank (Occurrences) Activists/Authorities Organizations

Most active: 5 or more Thomas Cochran (9) NRDC (10)

Dean Abrahamson (8) SIPI (9)

John Holdren (7) Friends of the Earth (5)

Arthur Tamplin (5)

Theodore Taylor (5)

2 to 4 Mason Willrich Ford Foundation Energy Policy

Barry Commoner Project

Amory Lovins Environmental Action

Gus Speth Union of Concerned Scientists

Henry Kendall

Alvin Weinberg

Don Geesaman

Alan McGowan

Milton Searl

Daniel Ford

Paul Ehrlich

Linus Pauling

Harold Urey

Hannes Alfven

George Kistiakowsky

Table 4. Relative Participation Frequency in Anti-Plutonium Advocacy 1971-1975

The activity ranks presented in table 4 above are derived from the following table of events (table 5):

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Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1971 May 25 SIPI vs. AEC lawsuit Dean Abrahamson, SIPI, NRDC filed to require PEIS for Barry Commoner, LMFBR program. Margaret Mead, Gus Speth 1972 April 25 Joint statement by 31 George Weil, Thomas NRDC, Environmental scientists opposing Cochran, Robert Rauch, Action, SIPI, Friends of Congressional funding Linus Pauling, Harold the Earth, Zero for Clinch River LMFBR Urey, Barry Commoner, Population Growth plant.479 Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, William Nicholson, Glenn Paulson 1972 August 1 Seven environmental Director candidates Environmental Action, groups send a letter to proposed were: NRDC, SIPI, Friends of Sen Pastore, Chair of the Dean Abrahamson, the Earth, Union of JCAE proposing Ian Forbes, Concerned Scientists, environmentalists and Harold Green, Seymour Project on Corporate academics for directors Melman, Jewel Rich, Responsibility (Nader), of the Breeder Reactor Pierre Sprey National Interveners Corporation and the (Nader) Project Management Corporation480

478 The participants and organizations cited for each event are only those known via source material, which possibly did not mention all parties or individuals involved, so the resulting analysis probably represents a subset of the entire original network of participants, but it is the author’s opinion that this analysis nonetheless yields reliable conclusions about the participation of the most active members of this network. * Indicates an individual cited in a publication. 479 Cohn, “AEC Claims New Reactor Is No Hazard”; Elsie Carper, “Breeder Reactor Delay Sought,” Washington Post, April 26, 1972; Edward Cowan, “Scientists Oppose Breeder Reactor,” New York Times, April 26, 1972. 480 “Public Voice Urged on Nuclear Reactor.”

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Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1972 Summer Thomas Cochran Milton Searl* completes manuscript for The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and Economic Critique. 1972 Sept. 8 FOE testimony at JCAE David Brower Friends of the Earth, hearing on the LMFBR Amory Lovins Citizen’s Rights program.481 Thomas Cochran* Committee Barry Smernoff (Environmental Study Rep John Dow (D-NY) Group), SIPI, Edward Bauser Environmental Action 1973 August 30 Pugwash conference John Gofman* – Sept 4 meeting in Aulanko, Arthur Tamplin* Finland. John Holdren Ian A. Forbes* presents his analysis on Henry Kendall* nuclear fuel cycle Daniel Ford* hazards. Pugwash Alvin Weinberg* issues a statement Mason Willrich* advising against Theodore Taylor* reliance on fission and on lack of urgency in adopting breeders.482 1974 January John Holdren publishes Thomas Cochran* NRDC, SIPI Uranium Availability Dean Abrahamson* and the Breeder Donald Geesaman* Decision483

481 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) Demonstration Plant, September 7, 8, 12, 1972. 482 “The Aulanko Pugwash Conference and the World-Wide Energy Problem”; John P. Holdren, “Hazards of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 30, no. 8 (1974): 14-23. 483 Holdren, “Uranium Availability and the Breeder Decision.”

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Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1974 April Ford Foundation Harold Feiveson* Ford Foundation Energy publishes Nuclear Theft: Mason Willrich* Policy Project, RAND Risks and Safeguards by Victor Gilinsky* Taylor and Willrich.484 John McPhee* Alvin Weinberg* 1974 October The Ford Foundation Dean Abrahamson Union of Concerned Energy Policy Project Barry Commoner Scientists, Friends of the releases A Time to Daniel Ford* Earth, NRDC Choose: America’s Henry Kendall* Energy Future, which Amory Lovins* recommends a major Hannes Alfven* downscaling of the Theodore Taylor* LMFBR program and Mason Willrich* nuclear power Donald Geesaman* expansion plans.485 Arthur Tamplin* Thomas Cochran* John Holdren* Alvin Weinberg* 1975 March NRDC publishes Gus Speth* NRDC, Ford Foundation Bypassing the Breeder: A Arthur Tamplin* Energy Policy Project Report on Misplaced Thomas Cochran* Federal Energy Priorities Mason Willrich* for submission to Theodore Taylor* upcoming John Holdren* Congressional (indirectly, by citing the hearings.486 Sept 1973 Pugwash Conference)

484 Willrich and Taylor, Nuclear Theft. 485 Freeman, A Time to Choose. 486 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder.

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Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1975 June 2-6 Hearings before Morris Thomas Cochran NRDC Udall’s Subcommittee Robert Williams Ford Foundation Energy on Energy and Alan McGowan Policy Project Environment on the Milton Searl SIPI ERDA breeder John Holdren program.487 1975 June 10, Hearings before ad hoc Dean Abrahamson NRDC, SIPI 11, 17, 18, committee of the JCAE Thomas Cochran 24, July on the ERDA breeder Alan McGowan 10, 17 program488 John Holdren Theodore Taylor

487 United States Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Nuclear Breeder Development Program: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington, D.C. June 2, 5, and 6, 1975. 488 Review of National Breeder Reactor Program.

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Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1975 October National Council of (inter alia) SIPI, Friends of the Rene Dubos Churches of Christ Earth, NRDC, American Margaret Mead (NCCC) releases first Dean Abrahamson Civil Liberties Union Hannes Alfven draft of The Plutonium John Edsall Economy: A Statement of Amory Lovins Charles Morgan Concern 489 Eleanor Holmes Norton George Wald George Woodwell Christian B. Anfinsen Thomas Cochran Barry Commoner James Conant Carl Cori Andre Cournand Max Delbruck Theodosius Dobzhansky Paul Ehrlich Donald Geesaman Jon Gofman Harold Green John Holdren Gerald Holton M. King Hubbert Henry Kendall Robert K. Merton Lewis Mumford Linus Pauling David Riesman William Stein Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Arthur Tamplin

489 Committee of Inquiry: The Plutonium Economy, The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1975).

211

Year Date Event Participants or Cited Affiliated Authorities*478 Organizations 1975 Fall Ford/MITRE study team Dean Abrahamson NRDC, SIPI consulted with subject Thomas Cochran matter experts while George Kistiakowski preparing their report. Anthony Roisman The experts consulted Gus Speth who participated in Arthur Tamplin anti-LMFBR advocacy are listed.490

Table 5. Anti-Plutonium Advocacy Events: Participants and Cited Sources

490 Keeny et al., Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, xvi.

Appendix III.

NRDC Involvement in the National Council of Churches Statement of Concern over

the Plutonium Economy

Beyond conventional public relations efforts, the NRDC undertook a range of initiatives to promote the anti-plutonium message. Perhaps the most notable of these efforts was the role that the NRDC took in a debate that was waged during

1975 via public statements signed by eminent scientists for and against the further development of nuclear power. The first of these was a statement, released in

January of 1975, of strong support for nuclear power by thirty-two eminent scientists, mostly physicists (twenty-two of thirty-two) many of whom were veterans of the Manhattan Project. Notable signatories were Hans Bethe, who organized the statement, Harold Brown, Glenn Seaborg, Edward Teller, and Alvin

Weinberg.491 Eleven of those signing were Nobel laureates. The essence of the statement was:

Nuclear power has its critics, but we believe they lack perspective as to the feasibility of non-nuclear power sources and the gravity of the fuel crisis…. We can see no reasonable alternative to the increased use of nuclear power to satisfy our energy needs.492

The evident public relations purpose of this statement was to make the point that the architects of the Manhattan Project and of the AEC’s most notable successes—in

491 “Scientists Say Nation Badly Needs Atom Plants,” New York Times, January 17, 1975. 492 Samuel H. Day, “32 Scientists Speak Out: 'No Alternative to Nuclear Power',” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 31, no. 3 (1975): 4-5.

213 other words, the physicists with real stature and public credibility, supported nuclear power and further, that those scientists opposing nuclear power, such as those at the NRDC and UCS, were deluded in thinking that alternatives such as solar power could supplant nuclear technology. Bethe’s statement was a reaction to what he viewed as anti-nuclear hysteria: “I saw hundreds of people on the antinuclear side screaming at the top of their voices. ... It seemed to me necessary that some independent people come out on the pronuclear side.”493

The first counterpunch came on August 6, 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, via a statement orchestrated by the Union of Concerned

Scientists (UCS) that was signed by 2,300 scientists. Out of this total, nine signatories were Nobel laureates. The UCS statement highlighted three problems with nuclear power: reactor safety, which was the issue that the UCS had led criticism of the AEC on; unresolved long-term waste disposal arrangements; and weapons proliferation risks. The statement called for a halt in further construction of nuclear power reactors. The evident public relations strategy of Henry Kendall, the organizer of the UCS statement, to establish the scientific credibility of his petition was to overshadow the Bethe statement by virtue of the sheer number of signatories. Critics, however, noted that Kendall had sent his petition to 12,000

493 Philip M. Boffey, “Nuclear Power Debate: Signing up the Pros and Cons,” Science 192, no. 4235 (1976): 120-122.

214 scientists, implying that a majority in the scientific community did not share

Kendall’s views. 494

In October 1975, the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCCC) entered this contest by publicizing a draft statement, titled The Plutonium Economy: A

Statement of Concern, that was ultimately published as a booklet in March 1976 and distributed to member churches. In 1975, 40 million people were members of

Protestant and Orthodox churches affiliated with the NCCC.495 This booklet made many of the same arguments against the plutonium economy that the NRDC had been making throughout 1974-1975, emphasizing public health, diversion, and proliferation risks, threats to civil society, and the ethical dilemma of intergenerational burdens associated with nuclear wastes.496 The statement directly contested the earlier Bethe statement, contending that Bethe et al. were misguided in believing that the fundamental problems to be solved with nuclear energy were merely technical ones, instead arguing that it is the fallibility of human institutions that makes plutonium economy technologies unsustainable over the long run.497

The NCCC booklet was ostensibly the product of a “Committee of Inquiry on the Plutonium Economy” headed by Margaret Mead and Renee Dubos, both of whom

494 David Burnham, “2,300 Scientists Petition U.S. To Reduce Construction of Nuclear Power Plants,” New York Times, August 7, 1975; Boffey, “Nuclear Power Debate: Signing up the Pros and Cons.” 495 Patrica McCormack, “Mead Panel Questions Plutonium Use,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1975. 496 Committee of Inquiry: The Plutonium Economy, The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern, 1-2. 497 Committee of Inquiry: The Plutonium Economy, The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern, 24.

215 were prominent leaders of SIPI. Mead at the time was also the President of the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

(AAAS). Dean Abrahamson was listed as the committee secretary, along with eighteen other committee members. A further forty-five signatories were listed as endorsers of the statement. Of the total of sixty-five signatories, forty-four were scientists and fifteen were Nobel laureates. The disciplinary composition of the scientists in this group skewed towards and (twenty-seven of forty-four). Ten of fifteen Nobel Laureate signatories were also from these two disciplines. Looking more closely at the composition of the signatories, it is apparent that there were many linkages between most of these individuals and the

NRDC. In addition to Abrahamson, Thomas Cochran, Arthur Tamplin, and George

Woodwell, who was a trustee of the NRDC, were signatories. So were Donald

Geesaman and John Gofman, who were associates of Abrahamson. A further concentration among signatories was individuals with a connection to SIPI: In addition to Mead and Dubos, Barry Commoner and Linus Pauling were signatories.

This apparent overrepresentation of NRDC and SIPI in this group was not an accident: The NRDC conceived the idea for this statement and approached the NCCC

(through Margaret Mead) to serve as a sponsor for it. Dean Abrahamson, by his account, wrote the entire statement and recruited many of the signatories.498 In short, this statement was mostly the work of the NRDC, although this fact was not

498 Abrahamson, Interview by Author; Speth, Interview by Author.

216 publicized. Indeed, press coverage at the time the statement was released focused on Margaret Mead as the source.499

From October 1975 when it was first made public, the NCCC statement generated considerable controversy. The Atomic Industry Forum (AIF), a nuclear industry lobbying group immediately organized a campaign to persuade member churches to block the endorsement of the Mead-Dubos draft statement by the governing board of the NCCC. Pressure from the AIF led the NCCC to hold a debate on January 28, 1976, in New York between Abrahamson and two others representing the NCCC, and Hans Bethe and two others representing the AIF.

Ultimately, the governing board of the NCCC approved the Mead-Dubos statement at their meeting in Atlanta in March 1976.500

So, the NRDC played a role in presenting the case against the plutonium economy to the general public during the period 1975-1976 by orchestrating one of the key responses to the Bethe statement. The choice of the National Council of

Churches of Christ as a vehicle for their statement was shrewd, because it allowed the NRDC to amplify the credibility of a pool of prominent scientists, including more

Nobel laureates than had participated in the Bethe statement, with the reach and

499 McCormack, “Mead Panel Questions Plutonium Use”; Philip M. Boffey, “Plutonium: Its Morality Questioned by National Council of Churches,” Science 192, no. 4237 (1976): 356-359. 500 Boffey, “Plutonium: Its Morality Questioned by National Council of Churches.” In some respects, the contest between the Bethe, Teller et al. group and the Abrahamson, Pauling et al. group was a reprise of the 1958 debate between Teller and Pauling over the dangers of strontium-90 fallout. In this case, the NRDC-sponsored “hot particle” theory of plutonium toxicity closely mirrored the way that Pauling had earlier presented the toxicity of strontium-90. For more on the Teller/Pauling debates in context, see Elizabeth S. Watkins, “Radioactive Fallout and Emerging Environmentalism: Cold War Fears and Public Health Concerns, 1954-1963,” in Science, History and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn, ed. Garland E. Allen and Roy M. MacLeod, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dorndrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

217 moral credibility of a religious institution, thus framing plutonium economy policy as a matter of ethics rather than merely one of technology. The success of this effort also demonstrated the importance of the relationship between the NRDC and SIPI, as it is evident that this project probably would have been much more difficult to accomplish without the personal connections of Commoner, Dubos, Mead, and

Pauling.

The Carter campaign was aware of the NCCC statement and was probably influenced by it somewhat, although Carter first announced his opposition to the

LMFBR program in July 1975, several months before the Mead-Dubos draft statement was publicized. The contest between the NRDC/SIPI and the AIF over ratification of the Mead-Dubos draft, however, was playing out as Carter was contesting the early primaries, and key constituencies that Carter was appealing to were Protestant evangelicals and environmentalists.501 The Carter campaign had a dedicated organization, Conservationists for Carter, which had been set up in late

1974 to manage outreach to environmentalist groups. Jane Yarn and Carlton Neville led this portion of the campaign. Neville and Yarn knew of the NCCC statement and were on close terms with the leadership of the NCCC. Indeed, Neville invited Lucius

501 Jeffrey K. Stine, “Environmental Policy During the Carter Presidency,” in The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era, ed. Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 180.

218

Walker, who was the Associate General Secretary of the NCCC to be a member of a campaign task force on energy, and Walker agreed.502

502 Committee of Inquiry: The Plutonium Economy, “The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern,” 1976, folder: National Council of Churches of Christ—Nuclear Energy, box: 258, collection: Conservationists for Carter—Jane Yarn's subject Files, Jimmy Carter Library; Lucius Walker, “Letter: To Carleton Neville,” October 25, 1976, folder: National Council of Churches of Christ—Nuclear Energy, box: 258, collection: Conservationists for Carter—Jane Yarn's Subject Files, Jimmy Carter Library.

Appendix IV.

Influential Energy Policy Sources in Early 1975

There was a surge in material published on the topics of energy policy, nuclear energy, and nuclear proliferation after the October 1973 oil embargo and price shock and the May 1974 Indian nuclear test. These topics were very much on the agenda of the 94th Congress in early 1975 as it began its session. This appendix analyzes which sources among the flood of such material were the most relevant to the Carter campaign in the period immediately before Carter wrote his July 11,

1975, speech on energy policy in which he first stated his positions on the plutonium economy and on nuclear power.

As he began his presidential campaign, Carter was well informed about the activities in Congress related to energy and environmental matters because he had served as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 1974 election cycle and because two of his principal rivals for the Democratic nomination,

Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Morris “Mo”

Udall of Arizona, were prominently involved in environmental, energy, and nuclear matters. Joe Browder of the Environmental Policy Center and the League of

Conservation Voters was an advisor to the Carter campaign and in this capacity monitored Congressional activities in these areas and fed summaries of relevant

220 events and materials to Carter.503 As the 94th Congress began, Udall was the

Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Jackson was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic

Energy.

An indicator of the prominence of these issues as the 94th Congress convened was that Congressional Quarterly chose to publish a special issue in January 1975 titled “Continuing Energy Crisis in America,” which was intended to inform the impending legislative debates on energy matters.504 This source is interesting because it sought to summarize in a nominally bipartisan format the most salient and current policy analysis that all members of Congress would need to be familiar with at that time. An analysis of the sources cited in this special issue of

Congressional Quarterly, therefore, provides an important measure of the political relevance of various energy policy analysis sources in the period during which

Carter formed his plutonium economy policy choices. This source was likely one that Carter read prior to writing his July 1975 energy policy speech.

Senator Jackson’s views concerning which sources of policy analysis were most relevant in early 1975 can be deduced from a meta-source. At Senator

Jackson’s request, the Congressional Research Service published Readings on Energy

503 Browder, Interview by Author. 504 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).

221

Conservation: Selected Materials.505 This publication, which presumably was prepared with the assistance of Senator Jackson’s staff, was intended to inform the work of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs in the 94th Congress.

Readings on Energy Conservation is simply a compendium of reprints of other sources of policy analysis on this topic: The choice of what was included presumably reflected Senator Jackson’s views on energy conservation and on renewable energy.

As a member of the JCAE, however, it would have been more awkward for Senator

Jackson to publish or endorse policy analysis that was critical of AEC or ERDA nuclear programs, and indeed, such material is not evident. Jackson was, however, vocal in early 1975 about the need for congressional action to further restrict the export of nuclear fuel cycle technologies.506

A source that presents the energy policy analysis that the Udall campaign considered credible is the short bibliographic essay in The Energy Balloon, a book co-written by Stewart Udall and published in late 1974 just as Mo Udall was launching his bid for the Democratic nomination.507 Stewart Udall was the former

Secretary of the Interior under the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Mo

Udall’s older brother, and the Udall campaign manager. The issues focus of the Udall campaign was described as “the three E’s: Economics, Energy, and the

505 Congressional Research Service, Readings on Energy Conservation (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975). 506 David Burnham, “New Curbs Urged on U.S. Nuclear Sales Abroad,” New York Times, April 24, 1975. 507 Stewart Udall, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout, The Energy Balloon (New York: Penguin Books, 1974).

222

Environment.”508 Stewart Udall’s book presented the energy and environment aspects of this policy triangle, arguing that the U.S. was unnecessarily profligate in its energy use, that fossil fuels were soon to begin an inexorable decline, and that the

U.S. must adopt a national energy policy that stressed greater efficiency and more reliance on renewable energy sources. In keeping with the Udall campaign goal to appeal to the environmental advocacy community, Stewart Udall stated his opposition to the LMFBR, suggesting that the program was unethical.509

While it is important to consider the energy policy analysis sources that

Congress as a whole, Senator Jackson, and Representative Udall were consulting, it is also important to trace the relative importance of the material that Carter is known to have read himself in this period. David Freeman claims that Carter read A

Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future in late 1974, shortly after it was published and decided to adopt most of its recommendations in his own energy policy.510

Freeman’s claim seems plausible given that this report was so widely distributed, promoted and cited. Another source of policy analysis that Mr. Carter read in this period was Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction by Wilson Clark. Joe

Browder of the Environmental Policy Center commissioned Clark to write this book and then gave one of the first copies to Mr. Carter in 1974.511 Clark’s analysis broadly concurred with Freeman’s and Mr. Udall’s in emphasizing the need to

508 Carson and Johnson, Mo, 151. 509 Udall, Conconi, and Osterhout, The Energy Balloon, 116. 510 Freeman, Winning Our Energy Independence, 1. Joe Browder confirmed that Carter had read A Time to Choose in this period. Browder, Interview by Author. 511 Browder, Interview by Author.

223 reduce energy waste and to seek alternatives to fossil and nuclear energy. It is also apparent that Carter had read the works of John McPhee by early 1975, including

Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee’s profile of David Brower, and The Curve of

Binding Energy, his profile of Theodore Taylor.512 This fact is revealed in David

Brinkley’s preface to the 1996 retrospective edition of Mr. Carter’s campaign autobiography, in which Mr. Brinkley states that Carter had read all of McPhee’s work and was trying to emulate McPhee’s prose style when he wrote Why Not the

Best?513

Carter came into contact with a wide range of people and policy analysis material beyond the sources identified above. Peter Bourne in a recent interview stated that Carter during his governorship and campaign kept a very disciplined schedule that included time to read the New York Times and the Washington Post every day and Time and Newsweek every week and that he would supplement these regular sources with a diverse and eclectic range of studies and materials that were often of a technical nature.514 While it is not possible to reconstruct a complete inventory of everything that Carter read on energy policy before July 1975, it is nonetheless instructive to analyze the content and citation patterns in the specific sources described above in this appendix.

The following table (table 6) presents an analysis of relevant citations for the sources mentioned above.

512 McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid; McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy. 513 Carter, Why Not the Best? The First Fifty Years, xiv. 514 Bourne, Interview by Author.

224

Source Analysis of Relevant Citations

Congressional Quarterly – Bibliography lists 34 books or reports. Of these, five are reports Special Issue – “The published by the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project, including A Continuing Energy Crisis in Time to Choose. Other books cited are: Energy the New Era, by David America” (January 1975) Freeman, which essentially re-states the conclusions of A Time to Choose; The Energy Balloon by Stewart Udall; Energy for Survival by Wilson Clark; and Energy and Human Welfare by Barry Commoner.515 The text of the CQ special issue refers to only two studies of national energy policy: The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project and the Nixon/Ford Administration’s Project Independence study.516 Carter and most Democrats rejected the findings of the Project Independence study, which put less emphasis on energy efficiency and more on decontrolling prices for fossil fuels.517 The main policy analysis sources cited in the text on the subject of nuclear proliferation are the Taylor & Willrich report Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards and McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy.518 Citation frequencies in the text: David Freeman (22 times); Theodore Taylor (18 times); Joe Browder (8 times); Mason Willrich (5 times); John McPhee (3 times).

515 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America, 120. 516 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America, 9-26. 517 Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 207-209. Weinberg, who was involved in Project Independence, looked back on the effort as politically motivated, calculated by Nixon partly as an attempt to divert attention from the Watergate scandal. Carter dismissed the price decontrol policy recommendation of Project Independence as a “farce” calculated to deliver higher profits to oil companies. United States. Congress. House. Committee on House Administration, The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 72. 518 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America, 63-68.

225

Sen. Jackson. Readings on Cites the following non-governmental authorities as sources of Energy Policy: Selected relevant policy analysis: The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project; Materials (January 1975)519 Hans Landsberg of Resources for the Future (RFF); a special issue of Science Magazine published in April 1974 covering energy policy; The National Petroleum Council; and the Conservation Foundation. Stewart Udall. The Energy In a short section titled “Notes for Readers,” Udall and his co-authors Balloon (1974)520 recommend further sources (pp 285-288). An obvious clustering of sources related to the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project (FFEPP) is readily apparent in these recommendations: Freeman’s Energy the New Era, Taylor and Willrich’s Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards, the entire series of FFEPP reports including A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future, and John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy are all cited. Other energy policy works cited are: Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction by Wilson Clark, and the April 1974 special issue of Science magazine. A final notable cluster of works cited represented the contemporary literature on ecological limits to growth and impending Malthusian crisis. Examples cited in the category included Population, Resources and Environment by Paul and Ann Ehrlich, The Closing Circle by Barry Commoner, and The Limits to Growth by Meadows, Randers and Jorgen (The so-called “Club of Rome” report.)

519 Congressional Research Service, Readings on Energy Conservation. 520 Udall, Conconi, and Osterhout, The Energy Balloon.

226

Wilson Clark. Energy For Clark thought uranium was scarce. He cites Ralph Lapp as stating that Survival: The Alternative to reserves were only adequate to the year 2000 and the USGS that Extinction(1974)521 reserves might be less than Lapp’s figure. (p 292) Clark cites John Holdren in arguing that LWR capital costs were much higher than AEC projections and going up rather than down with reactor size, suggesting no scale economy or learning curve benefit. (p 292) Clark describes the SIPI/NRDC suit against the AEC over the LMFBR programmatic EIS. (p 296) Clark describes Amory Lovins’ testimony at the September 1972 JCAE hearing in which Lovins called the LMFBR unsafe and a bad deal for the taxpayer. (p 298) Clark extensively cites Thomas Cochran’s analysis in criticizing the economics of the LMFBR program. (p 299-301) Clark argues that the LMFBR program would generate dramatically larger reprocessing waste streams and criticizes AEC plans to inject high level waste under bedrock at the Savannah River site near where the proposed Barnwell reprocessing plant would be built, noting that leaks would potentially contaminate the Savannah River estuary. (p 301-307) Clark quotes Alvin Weinberg indirectly in citing the need for a perpetual “nuclear priesthood” to manage wastes (p 301).522 Clark cites Theodore Taylor and Victor Gilinsky in arguing that the plutonium economy would significantly increase risks of special nuclear material (SNM) diversion at either national or sub-national levels. (p 303)

521 Clark, Energy for Survival. 522 Alvin M. Weinberg, “Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy,” Science 177, no. 4043 (1972): 27-34.

227

David Freeman et al. A Freeman cites Willrich and Taylor on SNM diversion risks. (p 212)

Time to Choose: America’s Freeman cites Daniel Ford, Henry Kendall, and Amory Lovins in Energy Future (1974) discussing reactor safety. (p 206) Freeman cites Alvin Weinberg and Hanes Alfven in questioning whether it is feasible to maintain adequate quality standards to safely manage nuclear facilities over the long term. (p 208) Freeman cites Don Geesaman, Arthur Tamplin, and Thomas Cochran in discussing the “hot particle” theory of Pu toxicity. (p 211) Freeman cites Thomas Cochran’s critique of the economic benefits and safety risks of the LMFBR program. (p 215) Freeman cites John Holdren’s estimates of uranium reserves. (p 216)

Table 6. Citation Analysis of Relevant Energy Policy Analyses.

The figure on the following page (figure 7) presents a graphical summary of the relevant citation relationships cataloged in table 6. It is evident from this summary that there were several common sources of independent energy policy analysis that many in Congress, and particularly the Jackson and Udall campaigns thought were relevant and credible as the 94th Congress began. In particular, the studies produced by the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project (FFEPP), including the special study of nuclear diversion risks written by Taylor and Willrich, and the work of Wilson Clark at the Environmental Policy Center were widely known and cited among Carter’s primary competitors, so it is reasonable to presume that Carter paid attention to these sources in formulating his own energy policy.

228

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Appendix V.

Analysis of Key Elements in Jimmy Carter’s Speech on Energy Policy Delivered July

11, 1975, at the Washington Press Club523

During the early phase of Carter’s campaign, before he achieved front-runner status among Democratic candidates, Carter sought to develop campaign platform positions that contrasted with those of the Ford Administration and that would position him for success in the first few critical primary contests for the Democratic nomination.524 During this period over the course of 1975, Carter collaborated with advisors Stuart Eizenstat and Steven Stark to develop his positions on policy issues.525 Both Eizenstat and Stark, however, stress the active role that Carter took in choosing the substance of these positions.526 Stark, who was working full time for the Carter campaign in the period immediately prior to this July speech, recalls that

Carter was more qualified than his staff in the area of energy and nuclear issues.

Consequently, Carter developed his policy material in this area largely on his own, and it appears that Carter wrote the July 11, 1975, energy policy speech himself.527

523 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol. 1, part 1, 71-76. This speech was the first statement of plutonium economy policy that Mr. Carter made during his campaign. 524 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 525 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 275-276. Eizenstat was only a part-time advisor to the campaign until April 1976. 526 Stuart Eizenstat, Carter Presidency Project: Final Edited Transcript (Redacted Version): Interview with Stuart Eizenstat, 1/29-1/30, 1982 . 527 Stark, Interview by Author.

230

Both Stark and Eizenstat recall that Carter was a supporter of nuclear energy technology, and that he did not support a moratorium on nuclear power plants.

Eizenstat recalls that the Carter campaign took the “measured position that nuclear power was a last resort because of concern over nuclear power in the Democratic primaries.”528 Eizenstat also stated his opinion that Carter was the most environmentally conscious president since Theodore Roosevelt, suggesting that

Carter considered environmentalism and responsible support for nuclear power to be compatible positions.529 Such a view was out of step with the mood of many environmental activists at the time, and certainly with those seeking a moratorium on nuclear power.

During the first half of 1975, a number of events occurred that prompted

Carter to seek to establish his credibility on the broader topic of energy policy and on the specific issues related to nuclear power. Carter’s key rivals for the

Democratic nomination, Scoop Jackson, and Mo Udall, were frequent speakers on energy issues in this period and consequently were reinforcing their credibility with voters on these issues and thereby attempting to appeal to voters who were interested in environmental matters. Carter sought to appeal to this same constituency and therefore needed to establish his credibility and appeal in this issue area in order to compete. This issue was particularly relevant in the New

Hampshire primary, in which Udall was Carter’s most determined and well- organized competitor. As of April 1975, Udall was leading polls of New Hampshire

528 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 529 Eizenstat, Interview by Author.

231

Democrats.530 Throughout 1975, most of the national environmental advocacy groups were supporting Udall as their preferred candidate in the Democratic primary, so Carter’s challenge was not just in appealing to primary voters but also to attempt to secure the approval and endorsement of the leadership of national environmental groups as well.531

Udall capitalized on his position as the Chairman of the Energy and

Environment Subcommittee of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee to organize and preside over an extensive series of hearings on nuclear energy that would extend from April though November of 1975. Udall, in announcing his intention to hold these hearings, said he planned to “take a leading role in the national dialog on nuclear energy.”532 Further confirmation of Udall’s intent to use these hearings as a vehicle for appealing to New Hampshire primary voters was his scheduling for the last hearing to be held in Boston specifically to cover nuclear power issues in New England. By July 11, Udall had already held seven days of hearings, concentrating on reactor safety and the breeder program. Other hearings were under way in the JCAE on the LMFBR program.

Given this context for Mr. Carter’s motivation to deliver the July 11 speech, and his personal role in writing the text, it is instructive to closely scrutinize selected elements of this speech, as such an analysis offers a window into Carter’s

530 Carson and Johnson, Mo, 154. 531 Browder, Interview by Author. 532 Udall, “Energy and the American Future April, 1975.”

232 thinking and likely influences at this time. The following table (table 7) associates likely sources with relevant elements from the text of Carter’s energy policy speech.

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation “If the Gerald Ford/ oil industry Carter in this passage and several others in the speech policy is implemented [i.e. Project criticizes the central recommendation of the Project Independence]: it will add 3 to 4 Independence study, which was to decontrol prices for percent to the nation’s inflation domestically produced oil and gas and to allow supply and rate; it will cost us consumers more demand to come into balance at presumed higher price levels. than $30 billion annually… it will Carter was evidently skeptical of the operation of market aggravate fuel distribution mechanisms in U.S. energy markets at this time. Freeman in A inequities and further damage New Time to Choose expressed a similar skepticism.533 England and other areas which are It is notable that Carter mentions the energy problems of New especially dependent on declining England. At no other point in the speech does he specifically oil sources; it will not result in mention another region. This choice suggests his focus at this decreased consumption equivalent time on competing successfully with Udall and Jackson in the to price increases because of New Hampshire and Massachusetts primaries. inelastic demand for certain petroleum products…” “In effect, the OPEC cartel has This and other overview facts about national energy policy levied a $60 billion annual excise appear to have come from the January 1975 special issue of tax on the rest of the world.” Congressional Quarterly.534 “Electric power companies demand Carter in criticizing power companies for passing on that their present customers construction costs to ratepayers for unnecessary capacity finance huge construction projects additions is echoing one of the key arguments that the while less than half of their present Seacoast Anti-Pollution League (SAPL) was making at the time capacity is utilized. Some of their to oppose the construction license that Public Service of New

533 Freeman, A Time to Choose. Freeman notes that petroleum demand may be inelastic due to consumer preferences for car trips and air conditioning (134) and devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 9) to the ways in which energy companies influence government policy and distort market mechanisms. 534 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America, 40.

233

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation projections for annual power Hampshire (PSNH) was seeking for the Seabrook nuclear consumption increases are double power plant.535 even those of the Federal Energy Freeman in A Time to Choose describes and criticizes the Agency administrator! practice of utilities using promotional block pricing and Unnecessary electrical powerplant advertising to encourage increased electricity consumption.536 construction should be stopped. Advertising at consumer’s expense to encourage increased consumption of electricity should be prohibited.” “We have at most a 35 year supply Carter believed, as did many environmentalists and Rickover, of oil in the world at present rates that the world was immanently running out of oil. His use of of consumption. In a few years, oil the figure of 35 years probably derives from figures cited in and gas will be too valuable to be the January 1975 special issue of Congressional Quarterly.537 used for heating buildings or Notably, using this same source, Carter would have concluded generating electricity. Almost all of that the U.S. had domestic reserves equal to just ten years our dwindling supplies will be consumption. required for the production of In stating that the energy crisis would require a fertilizer and petrochemicals and reprioritization of oil and gas use to support food production, for transportation.” Carter was likely echoing the views of Philip Handler, President of the National Academy of Science, who was an occasional advisor to the Carter campaign.538 “The potential for dramatic energy Freeman’s A Time to Choose, Udall’s The Energy Balloon, Clark’s conservation remains untapped. Energy for Survival all argue that the U.S. had to improve Our energy waste in transportation energy efficiency. The particular figures Carter cites here is 85 percent, in generating reflect thermodynamic inefficiency, so they overstate potential electricity 65 percent. Overall, 50 savings. Wilson Clark placed particular emphasis on describing percent of our energy is wasted.” energy waste in terms of second law of thermodynamics

535 Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power, 68. 536 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 258. 537 Congressional Quarterly Inc., Continuing Energy Crisis in America, 28. 538 Philip Handler, “On the State of Man,” BioScience 25, no. 7 (1975): 425-432; Bourne, Interview by Author.

234

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation inefficiencies. The 85% waste figure cited for transportation further suggests Clark as the source.539 The remark about an overall waste of 50% was likely drawn from the observation that Western Europeans used only 50% as much primary energy/capita as Americans. “ We must also exploit the potential All of the environmental interest groups were promoting solar of solar energy in the construction energy at the time as an alternative to nuclear power. Wilson of new homes and offices.” Clark’s book was prominent in this respect. “During the past few years, two- The General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the LMFBR thirds of all federal research and program published in April 1975540 presents AEC funding as a development funds went for atomic percentage of total federal energy R&D programs, citing the power, primarily for the liquid figure of 63.8% for 1974. Immediately after this figure, the metal fast breeder reactor report states: “The largest nuclear program is ERDA’s civilian (LMFBR). “ fission reactor program. Most of this program is devoted to developing LMFBR” (pp 34-35). Carter is arguing that federal research and development funds were over allocated to the LMFBR program. Both the NRDC in their Bypassing the Breeder paper and A Time to Chose made this same argument.541 “Since this potential source of There were several sources at this time that made the energy will not be economically argument that the LMFBR would only be economically feasible feasible until the price of natural if uranium prices increased substantially. Among anti-LMFBR uranium increases several times advocates, Thomas Cochran of the NRDC and John Holdren over….” were prominent in making the argument that uranium was not scarce and that higher prices would engender more prospecting and more discoveries, thus preventing the price of uranium from increasing “several times over”.542 There were also various studies by analysts who were not active in

539 Clark, Energy for Survival, 164. 540 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future. 541 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder; Freeman, A Time to Choose. 542 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder; Holdren, “Uranium Availability and the Breeder Decision.”

235

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation advocating against nuclear power who came to this same conclusion.543 The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project report A Time to Choose also supported the view that U.S. uranium reserves were far higher than AEC/ERDA estimates, thereby also challenging the official justification for the LMFBR program.544 “since England, France, and the Chapter 5 of the April 1975 GAO report on the LMFBR program U.S.S.R. have design experience presents an overview of foreign LMFBR programs and with the LMFBR, and because of observes, “Although there are some differences in approach mounting costs and environmental and emphasis, all of the programs either contain or plan many problems, our excessive emphasis of the same elements that are in the long-range U.S. program.” on this project should be severely (p 40). While the report goes on to quote the AEC and ERDA in reduced and converted to a long- stating their preference not to rely on foreign programs, the term, possibly multinational implication is clear that in the opinion of the GAO, sharing effort.” research findings from these foreign programs would be feasible. The progress of foreign LMFBR programs was also reported in the popular press at this time.545 A probable source of Carter’s comment about the “mounting costs” of the LMFBR program is again the April 1975 GAO report. The GAO projected that the LMFBR program would require an additional $8.9B to complete. The report comments on the significant escalation in program costs: “Thus since 1968, the expected costs of the LMFBR program have increased by about $6.8B, nearly a three-fold increase.” (p 10) Carter’s characterization of an “excessive emphasis” on the LMFBR program reflects the argument that the NRDC was making at the time about the LMFBR constituting a “misplaced priority” among federal energy research projects. The NRDC had just in April 1975 published a report that made this

543 David J. Rose, “Nuclear Eclectic Power,” Science 184, no. 4134 (1974): 351-359; Bupp and Derian, “The Breeder Reactor in the US: A New Economic Analysis.” 544 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 484. 545 Chris Fitzgerald, “Europeans Outpace U.S. On Fast Breeder Reactor,” New York Times, May 19, 1975.

236

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation argument and submitted this as a supporting statement for its testimony before both Udall’s hearings before the House Energy and Environment subcommittee and the JCAE’s hearings on the LMFBR program.546 “Our atomic plants use light water By discussing Canadian heavy water reactors as an alternative with enriched uranium. Some immediately after disavowing the LMFBR program, Carter was countries, such as Canada, use reflecting the argument that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited heavy water with more plentiful (AECL) had made since 1963 that the Canadian CANDU reactor natural uranium. Our government’s was a superior alternative to the LMFBR as a technical solution fuel enrichment plants can produce to improving uranium utilization efficiency.547 The AECL had adequate enriched uranium for the again presented this argument at the annual meeting of the next decade. A shift away from American Physical Society (APS) in April 1975 and the New sustained production of atomic York Times had reported on this concept of the CANDU as a weapons or toward heavy water less expensive alternative to the LMFBR.548 reactors can extend the time of Another possible reason that Carter might have mentioned adequate supply.” heavy water reactors is that Rickover’s Naval Reactors program was just starting an analysis to determine if the breeding ratio of water-cooled thorium-based breeder reactors could be improved through the use of heavy water rather than light water.549 “The private commercial On June 18, 1975, President Ford announced plans to end the production of enriched nuclear fuel federal monopoly on uranium enrichment that the AEC.ERDA should be approached with had held to that point. This was reported in the New York extreme caution.” Times.550As Brenner argues, the conflict over privatization of enrichment facilities had gone on since the beginning of Nixon’s first term.551 It was the resulting impasse that led to

546 Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin, Bypassing the Breeder. 547 Lewis, “Breeders Are Not Necessary.” 548 Sullivan, “Physicists Are Told of Canadian Reactor That Could Be Fueled Indefinitely by Nonfissionable Material.” 549 ERDA Fiscal Year 1976 Authorization for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, 23. 550 Philip Shabecoff, “Ford Would Shift Uranium Industry to Private Hands,” New York Times, June 19, 1975. 551 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, Chapter 2.

237

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation the AEC decision in July 1974 to stop accepting enrichment orders, prompting foreign LWR customers to seek alternative sources for uranium and enrichment services and to become more determined to pursue plutonium economy technologies. In opposing the privatization of enrichment, Mr. Carter was stating the position of mainstream congressional Democrats. “In addition to the physical damage Carter is reflecting the concerns of the nuclear moratorium and human suffering which would advocates such as the UCS and Ralph Nader in asserting that a result from a nuclear disaster, the reactor accident would be catastrophic, but implicitly economic, psychological and disagreeing with them by suggesting that it is possible to avert political consequences to our such an accident. The reactor safety issue was so topical when energy supply system would be Carter wrote this speech because the March 22, 1975, Browns more devastating than a total Ferry incident was still fresh and this event came just before Middle East oil embargo. It is coverage of the American Physical Society review of the imperative that such an accident be Rasmussen Report on reactor safety. Articles in the popular prevented.” press linked these events.552 “We must maintain the strictest By advocating that the government be honest about any possible safety standards for our dangers associated with nuclear power, Carter was responding atomic power plants and be to the complaints about alleged AEC cover-ups that anti- completely honest with our people nuclear advocates had been making since the beginning of the concerning any problems or 1971-1973 period of hearings over the effectiveness of dangers.” emergency core cooling systems. It appears that the AEC had been obstructing anti-nuclear activists investigating reactor safety issues.553 “For instance, nuclear reactors The idea of locating nuclear plants underground had been should be located below ground advocated by many people. One of the earliest and vocal level.” advocates of underground siting was Edward Teller, who had chaired the AEC’s Reactor Safeguard Committee that was formed in 1947 to oversee reactor siting and safety.554 Carter

552 David Brand, “Atomic Anxiety,” New York Times, July 9, 1975. 553 Robert Gillette, “Nuclear Safety (IV): Barriers to Communication,” Science 177, no. 4054 (1972): 1080-1082. 554 Balough, Chain Reaction, 123-127.

238

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation knew Teller and was possibly in contact during the campaign.555 Many others also advocated this safety measure. For example, fellow Trilateral Commission member Carroll Wilson made the same suggestion.556 The American Physical Society report on reactor safety also made this suggestion.557 “The power plants should be This recommendation reflects Carter’s unusual familiarity with housed in sealed buildings within arcane technical aspects of the Canadian CANDU heavy water which permanent heavy vacuums reactor technology. At the time he wrote this speech, the only are maintained.” reactor in the world that had a vacuum containment structure was the Pickering power station just north of Toronto, which had four CANDU reactors.558There had been an article in the Washington Post that briefly touched on this feature.559 It seems likely that Carter had retained an interest in the progress of the Canadian nuclear program since his first exposure to it in 1952. “Plants should be located in It seems clear that Carter intended this statement to appeal to sparsely populated areas and only anti-nuclear activists, since one of the grievances in many local after consultation with state and campaigns against nuclear plant projects was the ability of the local officials. Designs should be federal government to overrule local authorities. This was the standardized.” case in California and the other five states contemplating moratorium ballot initiatives and certainly one of the grievances of the Seacoast Anti Pollution League (SAPL) in New Hampshire.560 The comment about standardizing plant

555 Brown, Interview by Author. Brown remembers that Carter was speaking with Teller during the campaign, but is not sure if this was during the 1976 or the 1980 campaign. It is possible that Carter had met Teller in 1952 at the Chalk River reactor clean-up as both men participated in this effort. 556 Carroll L. Wilson, “A Plan for Energy Independence,” Foreign Affairs 51, no. 4 (1973): 664. 557 Committee et al., “Report to the American Physical Society by the Study Group on Light- Water Reactor Safety,” S7. 558 Michael Watters, Barry Spinner, and Probe Energy, CANDU: An Analysis of the Canadian Nuclear Program (Toronto, Ont.: Energy Probe, 1975). 559 Koven, “Boom in Canadian Reactors.” 560 Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power, 20. In June of 1975, the NRC was opening hearings on the Seabrook, New Hampshire plant construction license. The SAPL hired the same law firm that had represented the opponents to the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant (p 71).

239

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation design both addressed one of the safety criticisms that Daniel Ford of the UCS repeatedly made,561 and also was a harbinger of Carter’s efforts once in office to rationalize nuclear plant licensing. “And a full-time federal employee, This statement advocating that federal employees be deployed with full authority to shut down the to reactor control rooms undoubtedly came from Admiral plant in case of any operational Rickover. Rickover had repeatedly testified before the JCAE abnormality, should always be and other congressional committees imploring them to impose present in control rooms.” this requirement. In each such instance, Rickover stated that this was a requirement that he had imposed on Duquesne Light Company, the utility that operated the Shippingport reactor. Rickover often complained that this practice had not been made standard in the industry.562 “ An international conference on Carter’s confidence in the desirability and feasibility of sharing energy research and development energy technology research with other countries likely was would benefit all nations. It is encouraged by similar suggestions that the Trilateral ridiculous for each of us to go our Commission was making at this time.563 Bourne stated that own separate way and replicate Carter carefully studied material sent to him from the research projects which are being Trilateral Commission.564 completed in other nations.”

561 Ford, Cult of the Atom. 562 Public Works for Water and Power Development and Energy Research Appropriation Bill, 1976: Energy Research and Devlopment Administration, 1025; ERDA Fiscal Year 1976 Authorization for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, 25. 563 “Trialogue: A Bulletin of N. American-European-Japanese Affairs” (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1974), . 564 Bourne, Interview by Author.

240

Relevant Speech Element Likely Source(s) and Explanation “Unless we conserve energy This statement represents the first time that Carter introduced drastically, make a major shift to the notion of nuclear energy as a lowest priority or last resort. coal, and substantially increase our The formulation he uses echoes the justification that David use of solar energy, we will have no Freeman employed in A Time to Choose for arguing that under alternative to greatly increased either the Technical Fix or Zero Energy Growth scenarios, dependence on nuclear power. As reliance on nuclear energy could be minimized.565 one who is intimately familiar with the problems and potential of nuclear energy, I believe we must make every effort to keep that dependence to a minimum.”

Table 7. Analysis of Carter’s July 11, 1975, Speech on Energy Policy

The following figure (figure 8) summarizes this source analysis in a graphic format.

565 Freeman, A Time to Choose, Chapters 1-4.

241

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

I$)7#,(2.'"35()*( Z''+(-'+'.-'.,'().(.&,/'4"(+)1'"( Q'-&,'('7+;48#8().( !4.4-4 $)(4(7#.#7&7 .&,/'4"(+)1'"

Figure 8. Schematic of Likely Influences: July 1975 Energy Policy Speech

Appendix VI.

Analysis of Public and Leadership Attitudes towards Nuclear Power in 1975

Attitudes towards energy policy in general and nuclear power in particular in the period before Carter formulated his position on nuclear energy policy in July

1975 reflected a range of views that would be difficult to satisfy with either a very strongly pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear set of policies. The prospect of energy supply inadequacy or insecurity was still a widespread concern among the general public as Carter began his campaign in late 1974, as gasoline shortages and the resulting disruption that these caused had abated only as recently as July of 1974.566 Over a series of national polls from early 1973 to early 1975, Louis Harris and Associates had asked the question “How serious is the energy shortage in the U.S. today?” The results, summarized in (figure 9) show that even though public concern had mounted immediately after the oil embargo was put in place in October 1973 and then declined over the spring of 1974 as gasoline shortages abated, public concern had again risen by early 1975 to the point that 80% of the public thought energy shortages or presumably the potential for a repeat of the experience in late 1973 and early 1974 represented a somewhat or very serious problem. Given this widely held view and the focus on this issue that Jackson and Udall demonstrated, it is not

566 Jay Hakes, A Declaration of Energy Independence: How Freedom from Foreign Oil Can Improve National Security, Our Economy, and the Environment (New York: Wiley, 2008), 35.

243 surprising that Carter would have devoted significant attention to framing his energy policy early in the campaign.

How Serious is the Energy Shortage in the U.S. Today? (Public)

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Jul-73 Jul-74 Jan-74 Jan-75 Jun-73 Jun-74 Oct-73 Oct-74 Feb-74 Feb-75 Sep-73 Sep-74 Dec-73 Dec-74 Apr-73 Apr-74 Apr-75 Aug-73 Aug-74 Nov-73 Nov-74 Mar-74 Mar-75 May-73 May-74

Very Serious Somewhat Serious

Figure 9. U.S. Public Perception of Energy Shortages 1973-1975567

An useful primary source to review in analyzing public and elite attitudes towards nuclear power from the period immediately prior to Carter’s July 1975 energy policy speech is a poll that Louis Harris and Associates conducted under the sponsorship of Ebasco Services Inc.568 To counter the likely objection that the poll

567 “Study No. 2515: A Survey of Public and Leadership Attitudes toward Nuclear Power Development in the United States: August 1975.” (Louis Harris and Associates, 1975), . 568 Ebasco was an architecture and engineering firm that worked extensively on nuclear power plant projects, so presumably Ebasco’s purpose in sponsoring this poll was to document public support for nuclear power in order to counter a downward trend in orders for new nuclear plants that had begun in 1974 and that seemed partly due to the efforts of anti-nuclear advocates. Ebasco was acquired by Raytheon in 1993.

244 might be biased due to the source of its funding, Louis Harris and Associates controlled the design and content of the study with no involvement from Ebasco.569

The Harris study was conducted from March to April of 1975 and was composed of three related surveys: A sample of 1,537 U.S. households was surveyed to represent the attitudes of the U.S. public; a sample of 301 households that were near existing nuclear plants was conducted to focus on the attitudes of nuclear plant neighbors; and a survey of 201 “leaders” was conducted to assess elite opinion on the same questions. The “leaders” sample was composed of 51 political officials, 51 business leaders from large and medium-sized corporations, 47 regulators from agencies such as ERDA, NRC, EPA, and state agencies, and 52 leaders of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club.570 Both the summary report and the original survey response data are available from this study, and I have analyzed both the summary report and the original response data to examine questions that were especially relevant to Carter’s policy choices while he was formulating his positions as expressed in his July 1975 energy policy speech.571

The results of this Harris study were not published until August 1975, so

Carter would not have had this report as a source when he wrote his July 1975 energy policy speech, but nonetheless this study reflects public and elite opinion at the time and suggests the political consequences of various possible nuclear energy

569 “Study No. 2515.” 570 “Study No. 2515.” 571 “Study No. 2515.” The raw survey response data can be accessed from the Odum Archive Dataverse at hdl:1902.29/H-2515 under the tab labeled “Documentation, Data and Analysis.” Subset analysis was performed using cross-tabulation.

245 policy stances that Carter might have adopted. Presumably, Carter had some sense of these attitudes and potential consequences either via his own polling research or via more intuitive means.

The key finding of the Harris study and the one that received the most press coverage was that 63% of the public favored building more nuclear power plants and that 19% were opposed.572 When asked if they favored speeding up the building of new nuclear plants to help solve the energy crisis, support among the public increased to 67%.573 There were some differences among the public according to party affiliation: Republican voters supported nuclear power slightly more than

Independents or Democrats (figure 10).

572 Burnham, “2,300 Scientists Petition U.S. To Reduce Construction of Nuclear Power Plants.” 573 “Study No. 2515.”

246

Question 5A_4: Steps to Help Solve Energy Crisis: Speed Up the Building of New Nuclear Power Plants: Favor/Oppose (Public) 100%

80% 12% 21% 18% 73% 60% 67% 67% Oppose 40% Favor 20%

0% Republican (18%) Independent (24%) Democrat (49%)

Figure 10. Public Support, by Party Affiliation, for Nuclear Plant Construction, 1975.574

A more significant finding, however, was the far more polarized view of nuclear power among the various leadership groups that Harris surveyed. Political leaders were evenly dived while business leaders and environmentalists were clustered around the extremes of pro- and anti-nuclear positions (figure 11).

574 “Study No. 2515.”

247

Question 5A_4: Steps to Help Solve Energy Crisis: Speed Up the Building of New Nuclear Power Plants: Favor/Oppose (Leaders) 100% 8% 80% 90% 47%

60% 79% Oppose 40% 51% Favor

20%

13% 0% Political Leaders Business Leaders Environmental Leaders

Figure 11. Leadership Support, by Category, for Nuclear Plant Construction, 1975.575

While the public at large and Democratic voters exhibited more support for nuclear plant construction than either the political leaders or environmental leaders sampled, the strongly held views of environmental leaders, many of whom were also scientists, held the potential to sway public opinion. Among Democratic voters sampled, the views of scientists and environmentalists carried substantially more credibility on the subject of nuclear energy than the views of other leadership groups such as utility executives and local politicians (figure 12). It is not surprising, given this finding, that Carter sought to identify himself as a scientist and environmentalist during his primary campaign. It also suggests that it would have been politically dangerous for Carter to antagonize leading environmentalists through his choice of nuclear power policies.

575 “Study No. 2515.”

248

Question 10e: On matters concerning nuclear energy development, how much trust and conidence would you have in what these people or groups had to say. (Responses of self-identiied Democrats: n=767) 100% 6% 80% 13% 35% 32%

60% 56% Hardly any 40% Only some Great deal 20% 26% 16% 10% 0% Scientists Leading Heads of electric State governors Environmentalists companies

Figure 12. Credibility, among Democratic Voters, of Policy Elites by Category,

1975.576

On the topic of public attitudes towards breeder reactors, the Harris study found that the public did not have strong views:

While the public does not appear to have a sophisticated understanding of breeder plants, they nonetheless are convinced that nuclear power plants will eliminate future shortages of energy to produce electric power. In its unlimited availability, the public clearly opts for nuclear energy over coal or oil.577

So, one of the attributes of nuclear power that the public most valued was the idea of nuclear power as an unlimited source of energy, which was one of the main

576 “Study No. 2515.” 577 “Study No. 2515.”

249 promised benefits that had been used to justify the development of various breeder concepts, but the public at this time was not well informed about the LMFBR program.

This finding further highlights the conclusions that the general public in early

1975 had a much more positive view of nuclear power than did either policy- makers or environmental activists, and that the debate about plutonium economy technologies and proliferation was primarily occurring at an elite level. The general public at this time was presumably largely unaware of the distinctions between

LMFBR, LWBR, and LWR technologies and of the various fuel cycle policy options.

Thus, while a majority of the public supported nuclear power, there was not a broad public constituency for whom continuing the LMFBR program was a specific concern.

Appendix VII.

Ford/MITRE Study Background

The Ford/MITRE study team had a great deal of common prior associations among them. This was no accident and one of the reasons that the conclusions reached in this study were consensus findings that did not engender dissenting statements, as had been the case with the diverse Advisory Board of the prior Ford

Foundation Energy Policy Project study. This appendix examines the prior associations of the Ford/MITRE study group members and provides additional detail about how the study was staffed, organized, and conducted.

Origins and Team Selection

According to Spurgeon Keeny, in early 1975, McGeorge Bundy and Hans

Bethe discussed the possibility of a new study of nuclear power policy issues that would be sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Bethe had known Bundy since the

Kennedy Administration.578 In June 1975, Mr. Bundy convened a meeting to discuss the proposed study and Bethe and several others attended. Shortly afterwards, at a meeting on arms control in Aspen that Bundy, Keeny, and Wolfgang Panofsky attended, Keeny and Bundy discussed the proposed study, and on Bethe’s and

578 Keeny, Interview by Author.

251

Panofsky’s recommendations, Bundy asked Keeny to lead the study.579 Keeny made as a condition for accepting the offer the proviso that he be allowed to pick the study participants. Bundy agreed, but nonetheless complemented Keeny’s selections with several of his own. The following table (table 8) presents Ford/MITRE study participants by who selected them580:

Keeny’s Selections Bundy’s Selections Harold Brown Kenneth Arrow Albert Carnesale Hollis Chenery Abram Chayes Joseph Nye Paul Doty Howard Raiffa Philip Farley John Sawhill Richard Garwin Hans Landsberg Marvin Goldberger Carl Kaysen Gordon MacDonald Wolfgang Panofsky George Rathjens Thomas Schelling Seymour Abrahamson* Arthur Upton*

Table 8. Ford/MITRE Study Participants by Source

579 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 152. 580 Keeny, Interview by Author. * Shortly after the study began, Keeny realized that he did not have any experts in the area of evaluating radiation risks, so he approached biologists Seymour Abrahamson and Arthur Upton to join the study. Abrahamson and Upton were not associates of Keeny or most of the other study participants prior to their collaboration on this study.

252

Process and Subject Matter Responsibilities

The study participants met once a month usually at the MITRE office in

Virginia and typically focused on one major issue per meeting. One participant was detailed to prepare an analysis on each such issue prior to the meeting at which it was considered, and these analyses and related discussions became the basis for a chapter in the final study related to the corresponding issue. These monthly meetings culminated in a week-long meeting in Aspen during the summer of 1976, at which the study group discussed and decided the remaining issues and policy recommendations. All of what became the first ten chapters of the final report had been covered and essentially decided by the 1976 Aspen meeting. After the Aspen meeting, Keeny focused his time on completing the drafting and editing of the final report. In this work, he was assisted by Tom Neff, a staff member working on the study, and by Tom Schelling. The complete draft of the report was complete by approximately November of 1976.581

The following table (table 9) presents a breakdown of which study members were the principal authors of each section of the report582:

581 Keeny, Interview by Author. 582 Keeny, Interview by Author.

253

Chapter Topic Author(s) 1 Energy Demand Kenneth Arrow 2 Uranium and Fossil Fuel Resources Hans Landsberg 3 Cost of Nuclear vs. Coal Generation George Rathjens 4 Alternative Energy Sources Richard Garwin 5 Health Effects of Coal vs. Nuclear Seymour Abrahamson and Arthur Upton 6 Environmental Effects Gordon MacDonald 7 Reactor Safety Wolfgang Panofsky and Mr. Keeny 8 Radioactive Waste Group effort 9 Proliferation Philip Farley – This topic generated significant discussion within the group 10 Nuclear Terrorism Spurgeon Keeny 11 Plutonium Reprocessing and Recycle Group effort – Aspen 12 Breeder Reactors Group effort - Aspen 13 Uranium Enrichment Group effort - Aspen 14 Nuclear Export Policy Group effort - Aspen Appendix Nuclear Power Technology Albert Carnesale

Table 9. Chapter Authorship—Ford/MITRE Study

Most of the study participants attended most of the meetings, as did Bundy.

Keeny noted that the degree to which Bundy participated was unprecedented when compared with other Ford Foundation studies. Bundy also attended the week-long

Aspen meeting at which recommendations were agreed and attended the March 21,

1977, meeting at which the report was presented to President Carter at the Oval

Office.583 Keeny speculated that the reasons that Bundy involved himself so deeply in the study included Bundy’s friendships with several of the study participants and his interest in the topics of nuclear power and proliferation. Bundy saw the study as

583 Keeny, Interview by Author.

254 a good opportunity to learn about these topics. Keeny commented that Bundy was friendly with or a social acquaintance of the following study members: Harold

Brown, Abram Chayes, Hollis Chenery, Carl Kaysen, Joe Nye, and John Sawhill.584

The study team consulted a series of advisors at the monthly meetings while deliberating on various aspects of the study. Nye described this arrangement as having the consultants “testify as expert witnesses,” serially. The consultants shared their views, and Nye remembers that the study team gave each a “good listen.”585

Carnesale similarly described the purpose of hearing this testimony as “hearing the whole range of opinion.”586 Keeny characterized the effect of the testimony from the witnesses opposed to various aspects of ERDA programs as not influential, stating that the study group was “going through the motions” in hearing the views of some of these individuals. Keeny commented that the study team was “not impressed” with Ralph Nader and thought that some of the experts consulted had a record of

“seizing on any detail of a nuclear plan to criticize in order to impede it.”587 The advisors consulted were (table 10):

584 Keeny, Interview by Author. 585 Nye, Interview by Author. 586 Carnesale, Interview by Author. 587 Keeny, Interview by Author.

255

Advisor Affiliation Position on Plutonium Economy Programs William Anders Chairman, NRC Hans Bethe Cornell Supporter588 Gordon Corey Vice Chairman, Commonwealth Supporter Edison Lewis Roddis Former CEO, Consolidated Supporter Edison Robert Seamans Administrator, ERDA Supporter, but investigating589 Eric Zausner Deputy Admin, FEA Dean Abrahamson NRDC, SIPI Opponent Thomas Cochran NRDC Opponent George Kistiakowski Harvard, former PSAC James MacKenzie Audubon Society Opponent Anthony Roisman Berlin, Roisman, and Kessler Opponent John Simpson Pugwash Opponent Gus Speth NRDC Opponent Arthur Tamplin NRDC Opponent

Table 10. Advisors Consulted for the Ford/MITRE Study

It is notable that of the fourteen advisors consulted, four were closely associated with the NRDC. This over-representation further illustrates the predominance of the NRDC within the anti-plutonium issue network.590

588 Victor McElheny, “Hans Bethe Urges U.S. Drive for Atom Power and Coal,” New York Times, December 14, 1974. 589 Cowan, “Energy Development Plan Offers Priorities for U.S.” The initial purpose of the CONAES study that Seamans asked Philip Handler to undertake in April 1975 was to make a recommendation on the LMFBR program. 590 Abrahamson appeared at the initiative of the Ford/MITRE team. Cochran, Speth, and Tamplin requested an opportunity to speak to the Ford/MITRE team.

256

Prior Associations of the Ford/MITRE Study Team

Not surprisingly, given the selection process, the Ford/MITRE study team had many prior associations amongst themselves. The following table (table 11) presents a series of prior affiliations:

Activity or Affiliation Ford/MITRE Study Group Other Notable Participants Members Involved American Physical Society Bethe, Panofsky, Keeny, Garwin Ted Taylor, Frank von Hippel review of Rasmussen Report on Reactor Safety591 Ford Foundation Energy Policy Kaysen, Bundy Dean Abrahamson, David Project Freeman, Ted Taylor, Mason Willrich Committee for Economic Schelling, Garwin, Carnesale, Mason Willrich, Robert Fri593 Development (CED)—Nuclear Nye,* Kaysen* Energy and National Security Study 1975-6592 Report of the Atlantic Council’s John Sawhill Mason Willrich Nuclear Fuels Policy Working Group594 ACDA / State Department /NSC Keeny, Bundy, Brown, Carnesale, Doty, Farley,

591 Committee et al., “Report to the American Physical Society by the Study Group on Light- Water Reactor Safety,” S1. 592 Committee for Economic Development, Nuclear Energy and National Security: A Statement on National Policy. 593 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 372. Greenberger et al. speculate that the CED study may have influenced the Fri report that led President Ford to issue his October 28, 1976, policy statement on deferring reprocessing. The evidence for such influence is circumstantial: Greenberger notes that Fri attended the dinner in September 1976 at which the results of the CED study were presented. Mr. Nye remembers that Mr. Fri and Mr. Sawhill knew each other at this time, as both had served in Ford Administration. Nye, Interview by Author. 594 Nuclear Fuels Policy: Report of the Atlantic Council's Nuclear Fuels Policy Working Group (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976).

257

Activity or Affiliation Ford/MITRE Study Group Other Notable Participants Members Involved Chenery, Garwin, Rathjens, Schelling, Kaysen, Chayes Worked on SALT/ABM Carnesale, Chayes, Farley, Garwin, Goldberger, Brown, Keeny Worked on Partial Test Ban Keeny, Brown, Chayes, Doty, Treaty Garwin, Kaysen SST Technology Assessment Garwin, MacDonald Pugwash Carnesale, Chayes, Doty, Garwin, Panofsky, Rathjens, Schelling President’s Scientific Advisory Panofsky, Garwin, Goldberger, Committee MacDonald, Doty, Rathjens, Bethe AEC/ Manhattan Project Bethe, Doty, Garwin, Goldberger, Panofsky, Rathjens, Upton RAND Arrow, MacDonald, Rathjens, Schelling, Raiffa Council on Foreign Relations Nye, Brown Trilateral Commission Brown Brookings Farley Signatories of Bethe statement Bethe, Brown of January 16, 1975 Harvard Arrow, Carnesale, Chayes, Chenery, Doty, Garwin, Nye, Raiffa, Schelling, Bundy MIT Kaysen, Rathjens Princeton Goldberger, Kaysen College roommates Nye, Sawhill * CED Research Advisory Board

Table 11. Common Associations among Ford/MITRE Study Participants

258

The following figure presents a graphical summary of the associations cataloged above (figure 13).

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259

The most notable clustering of associations relate to prior work on arms control matters under various auspices, including within ACDA, at the State

Department or as staff to the National Security Advisor, or in various advisory or consulting capacities through RAND, the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee

(PSAC) or for the AEC. Another notable cluster of relevant association was via involvement in the Pugwash Conferences, which focused heavily on arms control and nonproliferation during this period. Abram Chayes and George Rathjens were especially prominent as leaders of the U.S. Pugwash Group. Abram Chayes was at this time co-chairing with Bennett Lewis of AECL a study under the auspices of the

U.S. and Canadian Pugwash groups on the subject of international arrangements for nuclear fuel reprocessing.595

Other associations are important to note. For a study that was promoted as operating under a charter of no preconceived notions regarding the merits of nuclear energy, the involvement of Bethe, Brown, Keeny, Garwin, and Panofsky suggests that there were a few such preconceptions particularly about the need for nuclear power and the adequacy of existing reactor safety measures. Bethe had led the publication in January 1975 of an open letter to President Ford asserting the need for nuclear power and the inadequacy of conservation and renewable sources as a substitute. Thirty-two prominent scientists, of whom eleven were Nobel laureates, signed the letter. Brown was one of the co-signers.596 Bethe, Garwin,

595 Abram Chayes and W. Bennett Lewis, “International Arrangements for Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 30, no. 3 (1976): 5-12. 596 Day, “32 Scientists Speak Out: 'No Alternative to Nuclear Power'.”

260

Keeny, and Panofsky had also in late 1974 and early 1975 participated in a review conducted by the American Physical Society (APS) of the conclusions of the AEC’s reactor safety study that had been supervised by Professor Norman Rasmussen, of

MIT. The APS study findings, released in April 1975, found that while Rasmussen had underestimated the casualties probable in a worst-case accident, there was not reason for urgent concern over the risk of accident in light water reactors.597 This conclusion challenged the main argument that prominent nuclear moratorium advocates such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Ralph Nader’s various organizations had been making at the time. There was some controversy at the time over the exact meaning of the APS findings, with the debate overviewed in the

September 1975 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Bethe argued for the view that the APS study had not changed the proposition that reactor accidents were very unlikely and that therefore the average risk per year was extremely low, and by implication, socially acceptable.598 So, although the Ford/MITRE study included in its mandate an overview of reactor safety, it was unlikely going in to this effort that the Ford/MITRE team would have reached a conclusion on this issue that conflicted with the APS study finding.

Several members of the Ford/MITRE study team were involved with relevant technology assessments that dealt with the issue of proliferation risks. Schelling led a study for the Committee on Economic Development (CED) titled Nuclear Energy

597 Committee et al., “Report to the American Physical Society by the Study Group on Light- Water Reactor Safety,” S5. 598 Bethe, “No Fundamental Change in the Situation.”

261 and National Security that dealt extensively with proliferation concerns.599

Carnesale and Garwin were advisors to the CED subcommittee on Nuclear Energy and National Security that was responsible for the report. Nye and Rathjens were members of the research advisory board of CED at the time. It is also worth noting that Willrich was an advisor to this same CED study. Carnesale was a member of the

NRC advisory panel that worked on the GESMO study to evaluate the merits of licensing LWRs to use mixed oxide fuel containing reprocessed plutonium.600 In

January 1975, the Council on Environmental Quality had rejected the NRC’s draft

GESMO statement on the grounds that it did not address proliferation and diversion risks, so presumably, the GESMO panel that Carnesale participated on paid close attention to this issue. Kaysen had been a member of the Advisory Board of the Ford

Foundation Energy Policy Project, and had thereby been associated with Freeman,

Taylor, and Willrich. There was also a study of nuclear fuel cycle policy going on under the auspices of the Atlantic Council at this time, and Sawhill and Willrich were participants. So there were multiple studies going on near the time of the

Ford/MITRE study that dealt with many of the same issues and many of the members of the Ford/MITRE study were also involved in these other efforts. It is reasonable, therefore, to presume that there was some diffusion of policy analysis concepts among these various efforts.

599 Committee for Economic Development., Nuclear Energy and National Security: A Statement on National Policy. Greenberger et al. also note this association. Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 372. 600 Final Generic Environmental Statement on the Use of Recycle Plutonium in Mixed Oxide Fuel in Light Water Cooled Reactors, Executive Summary.

262

Although it is apparent from the figure above that Hans Landsberg of

Resources for the Future (RFF) did not share many of the associations that most of the other team members did, this reflected the fact that his background was in resource economics rather than in government or arms control. Landsberg was notably associated, however, with Thomas Cochran and Milton Searle, both of whom had worked at RFF in the early 1970s and both of whom had drawn on Landsberg’s work in resource economics to argue that existing AEC estimates of uranium resources would be proven too low when prices rose and stimulated further prospecting. When Mr. Cochran had completed his critical analysis of the LMFBR program while at RFF, there had been some hesitancy within the leadership of RFF to publish it because RFF derived some of its funding from the AEC. It was through

Landsberg’s intervention that Cochran’s analysis was finally approved for publication under RFF auspices in 1974.601 This association between Landsberg and

Cochran appears to have been meaningful as the Ford/MITRE team relied on

Landsberg in assessing the adequacy of uranium reserves.

There were several other points of association between the study team members. The most immediately apparent was the large portion that were either full-time or adjunct faculty at Harvard, reflecting both the role of Bundy in the selection process and the role at the time that Harvard faculty members had played in high-level arms control efforts. A more trivial association but one that reinforces

601 Cochran, Interview by Author.

263 the impression that the study team was somewhat homogenous in background was the fact that Nye and Sawhill had been roommates in college.602

Nexus to the Carter Campaign in May 1976

Carter delivered a speech to at a U.N. conference on nuclear energy and world order on May 13, 1976, in which he first articulated his interest in preventing the spread of plutonium economy facilities to non-weapons states and in which he introduced the proposition that the United States should lead by example in forgoing commercial plutonium technologies.603 Richard Gardner of Columbia Law

School and a colleague of Carter’s from the Trilateral Commission organized the U.N. conference at which Carter delivered this address and assisted Carter in drafting the speech. Gardner consulted several members of the Ford/MITRE team in this project.

The following diagram presents the nexus between the Carter campaign and the

Ford/MITRE study team at the time that this speech was drafted.

Carter already knew Harold Brown at this point via their common membership on the Trilateral Commission. Several other of Carter’s friendships from the Trilateral Commission provided second order connections to the

Ford/MITRE team. Carter had become close with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Gardner

602 Nye, Interview by Author. 603 Jimmy Carter, “Speech: Nuclear Energy and World Order: At the United Nations,” May 13, 1976, folder: Carter's Statements on Energy, box: 250, collection: Pre-presidential 1976 Campaign, Jimmy Carter Library.

264 during a trip to a Trilateral Commission meeting in Japan in May 1975.604 Gardner knew several of the members of the Ford/MITRE team through various associations extending back to the period of his tenure in the State Department during the

Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.605 In preparing the May 1976 U.N. speech,

Gardner consulted with two members of the Ford/MITRE team: Carnesale, and

Rathjens. Figure 14 represents these associations.

604 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 268; Gardner, Mission Italy, 13. Bourne states that Brzezinski and Gardner helped draft Carter’s speech. Gardner remembers that Carter had written this speech by himself. 605 Gardner, Interview by Author.

265

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Other second order associations between the Carter Campaign and the

Ford/MITRE study team via other Trilateral Commission members in this period were: a connection between Cyrus Vance and Nye via their common participation on

266 the Council on Foreign Relations.606 Vance had committed to the Carter Campaign after the Florida primary.607 Another Trilateral Commission member who was a close advisor of Carter’s was Henry Owen of the Brookings Institution.608 Owen was a close associate of Philip Farley, a colleague at Brookings who was the subject matter expert on nuclear proliferation and also the author of the chapter on nuclear proliferation in the Ford/MITRE study. Owen edited a long article on the proliferation risks of nuclear power expansion that Farley wrote during early

1976.609 Presumably there were other second order associations between Carter’s contacts on the Trilateral Commission and the members of the Ford/MITRE study team because many of these individuals had collaborated on various efforts since the Kennedy Administration.

Subsequent Roles in the Carter Administration

One of the reasons that many accounts have ascribed decisive influence on

Carter Administration nonproliferation policy to the work of the Ford/MITRE study is the fact that many members subsequently took full time or advisory roles in the

Carter administration. Notably, Nye joined the State Department with responsibility for nonproliferation policy, Keeny and Farley took roles in ACDA with Trilateral

Commission members Paul Warnke and Gerard Smith, and several others of the

606 Nye, Interview by Author. 607 Gardner, Mission Italy, 16. 608 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 268; Stark, Interview by Author. 609 Philip J. Farley, “Nuclear Proliferation,” in Setting National Priorities: The Next Ten Years, ed. Henry Owen and Charles L. Schultze (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976).

267

Ford/MITRE team participated in the U.S. delegation to the International Nuclear

Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) effort, the goal of which was to implement one of the key nonproliferation policy initiatives that had been outlined in the Ford/MITRE study. Brown became the Secretary of Defense.

The diagram on the following page summarizes these associations (figure

15).

268

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Appendix VIII.

Chronology of Relevant Events

Year Date Event 1944 April Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard conceptualize a reactor that produces more fissile fuel than consumed. They coin the term “breeder” to describe this type of reactor. 1946 June Jimmy Carter graduates from the Naval Academy 1951 December Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 (EBR-1) goes critical at Idaho site. EBR-1 uses an early (nonbreeding) version of the LMFBR design. 1952 November 3 Lt. Jimmy Carter is assigned to duty at the Naval Reactors (NR) branch of the Atomic Energy Commission under the command of Hyman Rickover610 1952 December 12 The NRX heavy water reactor at Chalk River Laboratory in Canada experiences a power excursion and release of radioactivity. Carter, together with 150 colleagues from NR, is sent to assist with decontamination.611 1953 October 9 Jimmy Carter receives an honorable discharge from the Navy and returns to Plains, GA to manage the family business.612 1950s Many reactor designs are investigated at Oak Ridge NL and Argonne NL613 1955 November 29 EBR-1 accident. 1957 December 18 The first U.S. civilian nuclear power plant goes online in Shippingport, PA. It is a LWR adapted from a naval propulsion design. Rickover’s Naval Reactors organization is responsible for the project.

610 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 73. 611 “Accidents in Reactors Rare and Seldom Fatal,” New York Times, July 17, 1963. 612 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 81. 613 Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, Chapters 3-6.

270

Year Date Event 1959 November Alvin Weinberg, Director of ORNL publishes paper titled Energy as the Ultimate Raw Material: Or—Problems of Burning the Rocks and Burning the Seas, in which he argues that the key to avoiding a Malthusian resource crisis is the development of a breeder reactor with a ten year fuel doubling time. 1961 March 1 Glenn Seaborg is appointed as Chairman of AEC. Seaborg would promote the LMFBR program throughout his tenure as AEC chairman. 1962 November 20 Punlication of AEC’s Civilian Nuclear Power: A Report to the President, which laid out the urgency of developing plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors and the program for linking the fuel cycles of LWRs and plutonium fast breeder reactors together. 1963 January W. Bennett Lewis, VP of Research and Development of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) publishes Breeders Are Not Necessary—A Competing Other Way for Nuclear Power, in which he argues that the Canadian heavy water reactor design is superior to the LMFBR as a solution to potential concerns about uranium scarcity.614 1963 February Barry Commoner, Margaret Mead, Linus Pauling, Rene Dubos and others form Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI) to disseminate information about radiation, pollution, pesticides and similar. SIPI origins extend back to 1950s in public debate about fallout from atmospheric weapons testing615 1963 November 11 Experimental Breeder Reactor-2 (EBR-2) goes critical at Idaho site. It uses a small scale LMFBR design. 1963 November Rickover informs the AEC that breeding can be accomplished in a light water reactor using the thorium cycle.616 He initiates work on a light water breeder reactor (LWBR) project in his Naval Reactors program. 1963 December New Jersey Power and Light places an order the for Oyster Creek LWR. This was the first LWR built under a “turnkey” contract (offered by GE) that yielded lower capital and operating cost projections than available for a fossil fueled plant.

614 Lewis, “Breeders Are Not Necessary.” 615 Commoner, The Closing Circle. 616 Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 124.

271

Year Date Event 1964 Boom in orders for LWRs by U.S. utilities. The early part of this period is to called “The Great Bandwagon Market” by Bupp and Derian. Over 250 1973 LWRs are ordered in this period. 617 1965 December AEC approves Rickover proposal to build LWBR core prototype in existing Shippingport reactor618 1966 October 5 Enrico Fermi nuclear plant near Detroit experiences a melt-down accident. This was the only civilian power plant built using the LMFBR design. The Fermi plant never achieved full design power and was decommissioned in 1975. 1967 AEC Report to President identifies the LMFBR program as the agency’s highest priority civilian project.619 1968 February Dean Abrahamson, at a meeting of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), launches a campaign to oppose granting a permit to a proposed Northern States Power Reactor planned for construction at Monticello, MN on grounds that the AEC standards for permissible routine releases of radioactive effluents were too permissive. This leads the MPCA in February 1969 to set its own more stringent standards for effluents, prompting the AEC to sue the MPCA to assert the primacy of federal authority on nuclear energy matters.620 1968 July 1 Signing of the U.N. Nonproliferation Treaty, which went into formal effect in 1970. 1968 Scoop Jackson and Mo Udall support passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act of 1968, legislation that authorizes construction of dams across the Colorado River.621 David Brower of Friends of the Earth would later crusade against these dam projects.622 Supporting this project damages both Udall’s and Jackson’s reputation with environmentalists.

617 Bupp and Derian, The Failed Promise. 618 Beaver, A History of Shippingport, 125. 619 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future, 6. 620 Boffey, “Radioactive Pollution: Minnesota Finds AEC Standards Too Lax.”; Abrahamson, Interview by Author. 621 Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, 165. 622 McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid.

272

Year Date Event 1969 AEC LMFBR development plan includes three demonstration plants and estimated commercial operation of LMFBRs starting in 1984. Seaborg testified that required LMFBR program costs to achieve commercial launch of the LMFBR would be $2B.623 1969 March Edward Teller tells Seaborg that he is concerned about the safety of LMFBR reactors and thinks that they should be built underground.624 1969 March 4 Union of Concerned Scientists is formed at MIT625 1969 May 3-4 At a Sierra Club board meeting, David Brower, Sierra Club President, is forced to resign over personally stating opposition to the Sierra Club’s decision to endorse PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant as a better alternative to building a nuclear plant at Nipomo Dunes.626 1969 September David Brower convenes a meeting in Aspen to form Friends of the Earth (FOE), to promote, inter alia, the anti-growth ideas of Paul Ehrlich, an ecological worldview, and the goal of working for a moratorium on nuclear power.627 1969 Autumn Nixon OMB begins to push back on AEC budget request for LMFBR program.628 1969 November Nixon OMB attempts to zero out all breeder programs other than LMFBR. Up to this time, AEC had been providing modest funding to Alvin Weinberg’s Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR), Rickover’s Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR), and a Gas Cooled Breeder Reactor (GCBR) program. Other than Rickover’s program, which benefitted from Rickover’s close connections with the JCAE, these other breeder programs are put on starvation budgets.

623 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 157. 624 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 170. 625 Todd, “The 'Ins' and 'Outs' at M.I.T.” 626 Wellock, Critical Masses, 91; McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, 208-220. 627 Wellock, Critical Masses, 91-92. 628 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 157-158.

273

Year Date Event 1969 November 18 John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin of LLNL testify at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, chaired by Sen Muskie, that health effects of radioactive effluents are twenty times worse than current AEC estimates consider, suggesting that LWRs are significant threats to public health.629 Ralph Nader lobbies Muskie to hear testimony from Gofman and Tamplin.630 1970 January 1 National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 is enacted. A key provision requires federal agencies to file environmental impact statements for any projects that might have environmental consequences. 1970 April 22 First Earth Day. Organizing team, led by Denis Hayes subsequently forms Environmental Action (EA), an environmental advocacy group.631 Hayes and EA become outspoken opponents of nuclear power.632 1970 April Dean Abrahamson publishes under the auspices of SIPI a booklet titled “The Environmental Cost of Electric Power” for distribution at Earth Day teach-ins.633 1970 The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is founded. Initial funding comes from the Ford Foundation. 1970 May Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF) and Edison Electric Institute (EEI) inform the AEC that the utility industry will only contribute to one LMFBR demonstration plant.634Industry financial support for the LMFBR program is weak.

629 Arthur Tamplin, “Issues in the Radiation Controversy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 27, no. 7 (1971): 25. 630 O'Toole, “Muskie Enters AEC-Physicists Fight.” 631 “Earth Day Sponsors to Stay Together,” New York Times, April 22, 1970. 632 Denis Hayes, Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post-Petroleum World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). 633 Dean E. Abrahamson, “The Environmental Cost of Electric Power,” ed. Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (New York: SIPI, 1970). 634 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 160.

274

Year Date Event 1970 December 3 Senate votes to end support for the supersonic transport (SST) program. President Nixon had in 1969 convened a scientific panel headed by Richard Garwin to evaluate the program. The panel had recommended against proceeding, but Nixon rejected their conclusion and continued his support. The Senate loss for the SST is a victory for environmental groups and a loss for Nixon, and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, who was nicknamed “The Senator from Boeing”.635 A coalition of 15 environmental groups led by Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action, and the Sierra Club organized Congressional opposition to the SST program.636 1971 January The Calvert Cliffs verdict sets precedent that AEC must conduct public review of all new plants through open hearings. The practical effect is to delay licensing of new plants. 1971 Winter Joe Browder and the staff of Washington office of Friends of the Earth split off to form the Environmental Policy Center (EPC) and the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). Both are environmental lobbying organizations. The LCV shortly thereafter began publishing an environmental scorecard for members of Congress and a “Dirty Dozen” list of the legislators most opposed to environmental priorities. 1971 March Chet Holifield, of the JCAE personally lobbies Nixon for support for the LMFBR program. Holifield presents the LMFBR as a project that would secure a positive legacy for Nixon to offset the negatives of Vietnam.637 1971 April 13 At a Nixon Cabinet meeting, Seaborg, Holifield, and Sen. Pastore present the case for accelerating the LMFBR program. Seaborg promises that LMFBR technology will save the U.S. economy $1-2B per year after its introduction. Holifield and Pastore tell Nixon that the JCAE unanimously supports the program.638

635 Primack and von Hippel, “Scientists, Politics and the SST: A Critical Review.” 636 Christopher Lydon, “Fund for the SST Is Voted in House by a Slim Margin,” New York Times, May 28, 1970. 637 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 162-163. 638 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 164-165.

275

Year Date Event 1971 May 25 The NRDC files a lawsuit against the AEC on behalf of SIPI to require a programmatic environmental impact statement (per NEPA) to justify the entire LMFBR program.639 1971 June 4 President Nixon delivers his Special Message to Congress on Energy Resources. David Freeman drafts the speech. Nixon announces that the LMFBR program is the top long-term priority among energy research programs and that it would be a goal of the U.S. program to complete a commercial demonstration LMFBR by 1980.640 Funding is restored and expanded for LMFBR program. 1971 June 9 AEC lowers permissible limits for radioactive effluents from LWRs by a factor of 100. This action is a result of the controversy initiated by the conflict over the proposed Monticello, MN, Northern States Power reactor. 1971 July 9 Thomas Ayers, Chairman of Commonwealth Edison, informs Seaborg that the EEI would ask all members to contribute 0.25 mils per KWh to provide a $250M subsidy over 10 years to the LMFBR demonstration plant. Commonwealth Edison and TVA would lead the project on behalf of the other utilities.641 1971 July The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) publishes report on deficiencies in LWR emergency core cooling systems (ECCS).642 1971 August 17 Glenn Seaborg steps down as chairman of the AEC. James Schlesinger becomes the new Chairman. 1971 September Donald Geesaman publishes an article titled “Plutonium and the Energy Decision” in which he outlines the public health and nuclear terrorism critiques of the AEC plutonium economy roadmap.643

639 “Scientist Sue AEC, Charge New Reactor Is a Pollution Danger,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 1971. 640 Nixon, “Special Message to Congress on Energy Resources: June 4, 1971.” 641 Seaborg and Loeb, The AEC under Nixon, 167. 642 Ford, Cult of the Atom, 111. 643 Donald P. Geesaman, “Plutonium and the Energy Decision,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 27, no. 7 (1971): 33-36.

276

Year Date Event 1971 December At the annual meeting of the AAAS, Dean Abrahamson organizes a syposium presenting the work of the Power Study Group of the AAAS Committee on Environmental Alterations, of which he is chairman. Notable speakers were: Daniel Ford, David Freeman, Donald Geesaman Arthur Tamplin, Theodore Taylor, and Barry Commoner, who is chairman of the AAAS Committee on Environmental Alterations.644 SIPI and the Ford Foundation provide funding to the study. 1971 December The Ford Foundation trustees vote to authorize funds to launch the Energy Policy Project. David Freeman shortly thereafter signs on as director of the project. 1972 January The AEC convenes public hearings on the adequacy of LWR emergency core cooling systems. The contentious hearings continue until December 1973, generating significant press coverage of potential reactor safety shortcomings.645The UCS and Ralph Nader are prominent AEC antagonists during this process. 1972 March An agreement is signed between the AEC, TVA, and Commonwealth Edison to form Project Management Corporation (PMC) to build and operate a LMFBR demonstration plant at Clinch River site. Westinghouse later is selected as prime contractor. Breeder Reactor Corporation (BRC) is formed to administer the financial contributions to the Clinch River LMFBR project that are collected via a subscription assessed to participating utilities. 1972 April 25 Environmental Action organizes a joint statement signed by 31 scientists arguing that Congress should not approve funding for the Clinch River LMFBR project and instead should spend the money on fusion research, solar energy, and coal gasification.646 Among the signers are: Thomas Cochran, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Linus Pauling, Harold Urey, and Robert Rauch of Friends of the Earth.647

644 Abrahamson, “The Energy Crisis: Some Implications and Alternatives.” 645 Ford, Cult of the Atom, 127. 646 Carper, “Breeder Reactor Delay Sought.” 647 Cohn, “AEC Claims New Reactor Is No Hazard”; Cowan, “Scientists Oppose Breeder Reactor.”

277

Year Date Event 1972 April 28 Allen L. Hammond publishes an article in Science critical of AEC cost/benefit claims for the LMFBR program.648 Thomas Cochran supplies the preliminary analysis for the article and in doing so commits to completing a comprehensive critical analysis of the LMFBR program.649 1972 Summer Thomas Cochran, while employed at RFF, completes The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and Economic Critique and circulates the manuscript among colleagues at RFF, to the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project, and widely among environmental groups.650RFF ultimately publishes Cochran’s book in early 1974 after some internal controversy.651 1972 August 1 A coalition of seven environmental organizations sends a letter to John Pastore, Chairman of the JCAE proposing that environmentalists including Dean Abrahamson be appointed to the Boards of Directors of the Project Management Corporation and of the Breeder Reactor Corporation. The sponsoring groups were: Environmental Action, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Interveners (Nader and UCS), SIPI, and the Project on Corporate Responsibility (A Nader organization).652 1972 September David Brower and Amory Lovins of Friends of the Earth appear at a hearing of the JCAE. Lovins testifies against the LMFBR program. He cites Cochran’s analysis when he later publishes his testimony.653 1972 October Jimmy Carter decides to run for President654 1973 January 3 Ralph Nader and Henry Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announce a joint campaign to change nuclear power policy.655 Nader and Kendal call for a moratorium on further plants and a 50% down-rating of existing plants.

648 Hammond, “The Fast Breeder Reactor: Signs of a Critical Reaction.” 649 Cochran, Interview by Author. 650 Cochran, Interview by Author. 651 Cochran, Interview by Author. 652 “Public Voice Urged on Nuclear Reactor.” 653 Lovins, “The Case against the Fast Breeder Reactor.” 654 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 233. 655 Ripley, “Nader Attacks Policy on Nuclear Power.”

278

Year Date Event 1973 January 26 President Nixon abolished the President’s Science Advisory Committee in retaliation for PSAC’s opposition to the SST and ABM. 1973 February 3 James Schlesinger steps down as Chairman of AEC to become CIA Director. Dixie Lee Ray is appointed as Chairperson of the AEC. 1973 April Thomas Cochran joins the NRDC. 1973 April John McPhee publishes an article in the New Yorker titled “Travels in Georgia” in which he describes meeting Jimmy Carter and canoeing with him on the Chattahoochee River.656 Shortly afterwards, Carter supports measures to restrict development along the Chattahoochee River. 1973 April-May Jimmy Carter is selected for nomination to the Trilateral Commission. The choice is driven by the need for politicians from the “New South” to offset overrepresentation of Eastern Establishment and by Carter’s conspicuous promotion of his state trade missions.657 Through the Trilateral Commission, Carter meets prominent persons involved in arms control and non-proliferation interest networks. 1973 June SIPI wins suit vs. the AEC on appeal in Federal court, compelling the AEC to issue an EIS for the LMFBR program.658 1973 June 28 Nader federal court lawsuit seeking the shutdown of 20 nuclear power plants is dismissed.659 The suit had been filed in conjunction with Friends of the Earth on the grounds that the emergency core cooling systems of the plants were inadequate.660 1973 August 30 – At the Pugwash conference meeting in Aulanko, Finland, John Holdren September 4 presents his research on uranium supply and conclusions on the lack of urgency in proceeding with breeder programs. Pugwash issues a statement questioning the wisdom of relying on nuclear fission for power generation.661

656 McPhee, “Profiles: Travels in Georgia.” 657 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 240; Gardner, Mission Italy, 13. 658 Scientists' Institute for Public Information, Inc., Appelant V. Atomic Energy Commission et al. 659 “Judge Rejects Nader Suit to Shut 20 Nuclear Plants.” 660 Clark, Energy for Survival, 311. 661 “The Aulanko Pugwash Conference and the World-Wide Energy Problem.”

279

Year Date Event 1973 Fall Jimmy Carter meets in Washington with representatives of national environmental organizations, including Joe Browder of EPC and privately reveals his intention to run for President.662 Browder commits to support the Carter candidacy. 1973 Fall Jimmy Carter vetoes the Georgia Flint River dam project, an action that he promotes in his campaign autobiography as evidence of his environmentalism.663 1973 October U.S. aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War leads OPEC to enact an oil embargo, leading to a fourfold increase in oil prices and gasoline shortages in the U.S. through mid-1974. 1973 December John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy is published in the New Yorker and shortly afterward as a book. 1974 January 23 Nixon announces “Project Independence,” the goal of which is to reduce U.S. vulnerability to future energy embargos. As part of this plan, he reaffirms the priority of the LMFBR program.664 1974 January 24 Ralph Nader, at a hearing of the JCAE, calls for the unique power of the JCAE in overseeing the AEC to be dismantled.665 1974 January John Holdren publishes Uranium Availability and the Breeder Decision, in which he argues that there is adequate uranium to render breeders unnecessary for many years. He cites Cochran’s analysis.666 1974 January At Board of Directors meeting, Sierra Club votes to oppose nuclear power and support efforts to seek a moratorium on civilian nuclear power even if doing so results in more use of coal.667 1974 March 14 AEC issues a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the LMFBR program for public comment. The NRDC is prominent in the public commenting process.

662 Bourne, Jimmy Carter, 251; Browder, Interview by Author. 663 Carter, Why Not the Best? 137. 664 Nixon, “Special Message to Congress on the Energy Crisis: January 23, 1974.” 665 Anna Mayo, “Critical Mass on Capitol Hill,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 30, no. 4 (1974): 8-9. 666 Holdren, “Uranium Availability and the Breeder Decision.” 667 Wellock, Critical Masses, 111.

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Year Date Event 1974 April The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project publishes Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards. Written by Ted Taylor and Mason Willrich, this report detailed the risks outlined in McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy. 1974 April 4 Mo Udall, speaking to the National Wildlife Federation, says “we ought to draw the line on this LMFBR program.”668 1974 April-25-26 The AEC holds public hearings on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the LMFBR program. 1974 May 18 India detonates a “peaceful” nuclear explosion, sparking a renewed interest in nonproliferation policy and eroding confidence in existing safeguards arrangements. 1974 July AEC Chairperson Dixie Lee Ray announces that the U.S. AEC would accept no further long-term uranium enrichment orders, leading U.S. nuclear trading partners to seek independent fuel cycle operations. 1974 August A draft of the “Rasmussen Report” on reactor safety (WASH-1400) is circulated for comment. This report uses probabilistic risk assessment to estimate accident probabilities and consequences. The draft provokes controversy. 1974 August The AEC issues a Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement for Proposed Use of Mixed Oxide in LWRs. The acronym “GESMO” is coined to describe this study and proposal. The NRDC is prominent in the public commenting process. 1974 October The Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project releases A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future, which attacked the AEC’s projections of electricity demand growth and recommended among other things that the LMFBR program be demoted among research priorities.669 This report is distributed to all members of Congress and all state Governors.

668 Morris K. Udall, “The Environment at Valley Forge: National Wildlife Federation “Legislator of the Year” Award Acceptance,” University of Arizona Library . 669 Freeman, A Time to Choose, 343.

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Year Date Event 1974 November 16 At the conclusion of his Critical Mass ’74 conference in Washington, Ralph Nader releases a petition to Congress calling for an appointment of a select committee to review nuclear power. The signers of the petition were: Dean Abrahamson, Hannes Alfven, Barry Commoner, David Freeman, Donald Geesaman, John Gofman, Henry Kendall, Nader, and George Wald.670 1974 November 24 Mo Udall announces his campaign for the Democratic nomination. He concentrates his campaign messages on the three “E’s”: Economics, Energy, and the Environment. He focuses efforts on winning the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries.671 Udall is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Udall is the Democrat favored by national environmental groups.672 1974 December AEC issues a Proposed Final Environmental Statement for the LMFBR program. The NRDC is prominent in the commenting process. 1974 December 12 Jimmy Carter announces that he is a candidate for President. 1975 January The AEC Releases the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the LMFBR Program. In this document, the AEC projects that 60 LMFBRs will be in operation by 2000 and 1,178 LMFBRs will be in operation by 2019.673 1975 January The AEC is split into the Energy Research and Development Agency (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)

670 Burnham, “Inquiry on Impact of a-Power Urged.” 671 Carson and Johnson, Mo, 151-153. 672 Browder, Interview by Author. 673 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future, 3.

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Year Date Event 1975 January 16 A group of prominent scientists led by Hans Bethe signs a letter to President Ford urging continued progress on nuclear power and increased use of coal. Notable signatories are: Bethe, Seaborg, Weinberg, Edward Teller, Harold Brown (32 total).

Another group of prominent individuals organized by Ralph Nader and the Union of Concerned Scientists signs a letter to President Ford asking that he personally reconsider the policy of promoting nuclear power. Notable signatories are: Nader, Hannes Alfven, Barry Commoner, John Edsall, Henry Kendall, Linus Pauling, Harold Urey, George Wald, and James Watson (8 total)674 1975 January 20 The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) rejects the AEC’s draft GESMO statement and requests that the NRC incorporate an analysis of the environmental and other impacts of proliferation and diversion risks before resubmission.675 1975 March 10 ERDA requests that JCAE authorize legislation to allow ERDA to take over management of the Clinch River LMFBR project from the Project Management Corporation.676 The ERDA request reflects the dysfunction of the earlier complex management arrangements. 1975 March The NRDC publishes Bypassing the Breeder: A Report on Misplaced Federal Energy Priorities, which advocates delaying the LMFBR program by 10 years. This paper is intended to support upcoming NRDC Congressional testimony. 1975 March 22 A fire at TVA’s Browns Ferry reactor disables the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) for two reactors for what at the time was the world’s largest capacity nuclear plant. This accident further called into question the adequacy of reactor safety systems.677 1975 April The Comptroller General report on the LMFBR program projects total program cost for the Clinch River LMFBR at over $10B 678

674 “Nuclear Power Speed-up Draws Comment.” 675 Burt Schorr, “Figuring a Future for Plutonium,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1975. 676 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future, 32. 677 David Burnham, “Fire Raises Issue of Safe Reactors,” New York Times, March 26, 1975. 678 The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program, Past, Present and Future, 9.

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Year Date Event 1975 April 1 Robert Seamans, Director of ERDA requests that Philip Handler, President of the National Academy of Sciences, initiate a study of alternative, converter and breeder reactors. Handler launches the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Sources (CONAES) study, which is published in January 1980. Handler was an advisor to Carter during his campaign. 1975 April 24 Mo Udall delivers a speech titled “Energy and the American Future.” He lays out his energy policy and promotes Congressional hearings that he plans to chair to “take the leading role in a national dialog on nuclear energy.”679 1975 April 27 The EPA announces that they support a delay of between 4 to 12 years in implementing the ERDA LMFBR program because they believe that the AEC/ERDA has overestimated the rate of electricity demand growth in their programmatic environmental impact statement.680 1975 April 28-30 At the American Physical Society (APS) meeting, a panel headed by Hans Bethe reports on the APS LWR safety study commissioned to review the AEC’s “Rasmussen Report”(WASH-1400). The APS study concludes that the Rasmussen Report underestimated the consequences of a major accident, but otherwise concurs in deeming LWRs safe enough to continue operating.681 Also at the APS meeting, AECL promotes the CANDU reactor as an alternative to the LMFBR. Bethe says he wishes U.S. was developing both technologies.682

679 Udall, “Energy and the American Future April, 1975.” 680 Edward Cowan, “E.P.A. Backs Delay on Atom Breeders,” New York Times, April 28, 1975. 681 Walter Sullivan, “Long-Term Reactor Peril Is a Worry to Physicists,” New York Times, April 29, 1975; Committee et al., “Report to the American Physical Society by the Study Group on Light- Water Reactor Safety.” 682 Sullivan, “Physicists Are Told of Canadian Reactor That Could Be Fueled Indefinitely by Nonfissionable Material.”

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Year Date Event 1975 April 28 – Mo Udall holds four days of hearings before his Subcommittee on Energy May 2 and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs on nuclear energy generally, reactor safety, a nuclear moratorium and related topics. The NRDC, the UCS, Norman Rasmussen, the APS study team, Mason Willrich, and Ted Taylor from the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project are prominent witnesses.683 Over 150 organizations formally state their support for a moratorium on nuclear power. 1975 June While the five-year review conference of NPT treaty is under way, France discusses agreements with Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Argentina to provide fuel cycle facilities including reprocessing. West Germany negotiates with Brazil to sell reactors and reprocessing facilities.684 These deals are widely reported in the U.S. press, sparking Congressional concerns over proliferation risks. 1975 June The NRC opens hearings on the construction permit for the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Opposition to the construction of the Seabrook plant extended back to 1969 when the Seacoast Anti- Pollution League (SAPL) was founded.685 1975 June McGeorge Bundy holds a meeting to discuss options for a Ford Foundation study on nuclear energy. Hans Bethe attends the meeting and subsequently advises Bundy on the formation of what became the Ford/MITRE study.686

683 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment., Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Overview of the Major Issues: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington D.C. April 28, 29; May 1 and 2, 1975 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975). 684 “Nuclear Peril...,” New York Times, June 9, 1975. 685 Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power. 686 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 152; Keeny, Interview by Author. Keeny, in the author’s interview with him, remembered that this dialog between Bethe and Bundy began “early in 1975,” so Bethe’s influence on this study may extend back a few months earlier.

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Year Date Event 1975 June 2-6 Mo Udall holds three days of hearings before his Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs on ERDA breeder reactor programs. The NRDC is prominent among those who testify. Other witnesses are: John Holdren, Milton Searl, and Robert Williams from the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project.687 1975 June 18 President Ford announces plans to allow private ownership of uranium enrichment facilities.688 1975 June 10, 11, Ad hoc committee of the JCAE holds hearings on the national breeder 17, 18, 24, reactor program. Prominent opposition witnesses are: Dean Abrahamson, July 10, 17 Thomas Cochran, John Holdren, and Ted Taylor. Hans Bethe testifies in support of the LMFBR. The Ad hoc committee delivers its recommendation in January 1976 to proceed with the LMFBR program.689 1975 June/July McGeorge Bundy, and Spurgeon Keeny attend a conference in Aspen at which they discuss a possible nuclear power study under Ford Foundation auspices. Shortly afterwards, Bundy selects Keeny to lead the Ford/MITRE study. 690 1975 June 30 ERDA publishes a National Plan for Energy Research, Development and Demonstration, which proposed higher spending on solar energy and conservation but reaffirmed support for the LMFBR program. ERDA announces plan to approve the EIS for the LMFBR after completing further study of plutonium hazards.691

687 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment., Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—Nuclear Breeder Development Program: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington, D.C. June 2, 5, and 6, 1975. 688 Shabecoff, “Ford Would Shift Uranium Industry to Private Hands.” 689 Review of National Breeder Reactor Program. 690 Greenberger et al., Caught Unawares, 152-153. 691 Cowan, “Energy Development Plan Offers Priorities for U.S.”

286

Year Date Event 1975 July 11 Jimmy Carter delivers a speech on energy policy in which he first states his “plutonium economy” policy. He asserts that the emphasis on the LMFBR program should be “severely reduced” and that although it is possible to build safe nuclear plants, dependence on nuclear power should be “kept to a minimum.”692 1975 July21-24 Mo Udall holds three days of hearings before his Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs on nuclear proliferation. Prominent witnesses are: Victor Gilinsky, NRC Commissioner; and Ted Taylor.693 1975 August 6 On the 30th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, UCS leader Henry Kendall presents a petition signed by 2,300 U.S. scientists, including 9 Nobel laureates, asking for a “drastic reduction” in construction of nuclear power reactors.694 1975 October The National Council of Churches of Christ (NCCC) releases The Plutonium Economy: A Statement of Concern, which was signed by 15 Nobel laureates and later distributed to member churches. 1975 November 14 Mo Udall holds one day of hearings before his Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs on nuclear power in New England. The hearing is held in Boston. Most witnesses heard are New England area environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists.695

692 United States. Congress. House. Committee on House Administration., The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 71-76. 693 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment., Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—International Proliferation of Nuclear Technology: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Washington D.C. July 21, 22, and 24, 1975 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975). 694 Burnham, “2,300 Scientists Petition U.S. To Reduce Construction of Nuclear Power Plants.” 695 United States. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment., Oversight Hearings on Nuclear Energy—New England Regional Power Issues: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session: Hearings Held in Boston, Massachusetts November 14, 1975 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975).

287

Year Date Event 1976 January The Ford/MITRE study is reported as being officially under way.696 1976 February 24 Jimmy Carter wins the New Hampshire primary, beating Udall by 30% to 24% 1976 April The NRDC files suit against the NRC to prevent the NRC from the interim licensing of MOX use (plutonium) in civilian reactors prior to the completion of the proliferation supplement to the original GESMO analysis. 1976 May 13 Jimmy Carter delivers a speech on nuclear power and world order at the UN. He proposes a ban on exports of fuel cycle facilities to non-weapons states.697 Richard Gardner drafts the speech after consulting with Albert Carnesale,and George Rathjens.698 Carnesale and Rathjens are members of the Ford/MITRE study team. 1976 Spring President Ford asks Robert Fri, Deputy Director of ERDA to study subsidies for the proposed Barnwell reprocessing plant. 1976 May 26 The NRDC wins suit against the NRC over MOX licensing. The NRC is prohibited from licensing MOX use until GESMO is finalized. 1976 June 6 The California ballot initiative seeking a moratorium on nuclear plant construction is defeated by a 2:1 margin. 1976 August 9 At Ralph Nader’s Forum event, Carter called the LMFBR “a substantial waste of money” and said atomic power should be “relegated to a last priority” among energy sources.699 1976 August Joe Browder (of EPC and LCV) and David Freeman (former head of the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project) formally join the Carter campaign to coordinate energy issues.700

696 Barbara J. Culliton, “Health Manpower: The Feds Are Taking Over,” Science 191, no. 4226 (1976): 449; Keeny, Interview by Author. Mr. Keeny remembers that work on the study began in the second half of 1975, so presumably organizational matters were settled before the study was officially reported. 697 Carter, “Three Steps.” 698 Gardner, Interview by Author. 699 The Presidential Campaign, 1976, vol 1, part 1, 485. 700 Luther J. Carter, “Carter Transition Scramble: See-Saw for Energy Policy Specialists,” Science 194, no. 4270 (1976): 1139-1140.

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Year Date Event 1976 August 17 Joe Browder organizes an energy briefing for Jimmy Carter in Plains, GA. This is one of a series of briefing sessions Carter holds on various topics to prepare for the campaign. Notable briefers and participants are: - Wilson Clark of EPC, author of Energy for Survival - Charles Warren, anti-nuclear chairman of California Energy Commision - Alvin Weinberg701 - David Freeman is excluded at the request of oil industry representatives. 1976 September Scoop Jackson recommends Jim Schlesinger to Carter as potential Secretary of Energy.702 David Freeman endorses the choice of Schlesinger to the energy role in private communication with Carter.703 1976 September 25 Jimmy Carter reiterates his positions on nuclear proliferation risks in a campaign speech in San Diego. He promises to restrict French and German nuclear supply deals with Pakistan and Brazil704 1976 October 28 President Ford, after receiving the Fri Report, announces that reprocessing of spent fuel was not a “necessary and inevitable step in the nuclear fuel cycle”.705 1976 November 2 Jimmy Carter defeats Gerald Ford in the 1976 Presidential election 1976 November 19 Joe Browder is forced out of Carter transition over a dispute with Frank Moore, Hamilton Jordan, and others regarding Moore’s decision to exclude David Freeman from Carter’s energy policy briefing in August in response to pressure from oil industry campaign contributors. Moore had been responsible for campaign fundraising.706 1976 December President-elect Carter appoints Jim Schlesinger to head an Energy Policy Planning Group (EPPG). David Freeman is appointed as one of Schlesinger’s deputies.

701 Carlton Neville, “Agenda—Energy Briefing,” August 17, 1976, folder: Energy Task Force, box: 253, collection: Pre-Presidential, Jimmy Carter Library. 702 Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, 339. 703 Freeman, Interview by Author. 704 United States. Congress. House. Committee on House Administration, The Presidential Campaign, 1976, 5 vols., vol. 1, part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1978), 815-818. 705 Brenner, Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation, 269-280. 706 Gladwin Hill, “Carter Advisor on Resources Quits, Citing Friction,” New York Times, November 20, 1976.

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Year Date Event 1977 January 20 Jimmy Carter is inaugurated. Carter tasks Schlesinger with developing a National Energy Plan within 90 days. 1977 January 21 Policy Review Memo (PRM-15) is assigned to a team representing NSC, State, OMB, Energy Policy Planning Group (EPPG), CEQ to develop nuclear nonproliferation policy options.707 1977 February - Environmentalists appointed to Carter Administration positions: March – Jessica Tuchman (Udall campaign Issues Director) to NSC – Kitty Schirmer (Ex EPA) to DPS – David Freeman to EPPG then as Chairman of TVA – Gus Speth (NRDC) to CEQ – Charles Warren (CA Energy Commission Chair) to CEQ – Joe Browder (EPC, LCV) to Interior Dept. – Denis Hayes (Environmental Action) as President of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) – Jane Yarn (Conservationists for Carter) to CEQ 1977 February 2, 5, Rickover visits President Carter five times during the month. 7, 25, 28 1977 February 17 President Carter requests a status report from Schlesinger on the LMFBR and Thorium breeder programs. In handwritten comment asks “whether we need it.”708

707 John Helmer, “Memorandum to Stuart Eizenstat Subject: Decision Analysis—Selected Case Studies,” May 18, 1977, folder: Breeder Reactor (General) O/A 6239[3], box: 151, collection: DPS Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter Library. 708 Schlesinger, “Memo: Your Inquiry Regarding the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor and Thorium Breeders,” folder: box: collection: Jimmy Carter Library.

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Year Date Event 1977 February 22 Schlesinger assembles a Breeder Reactor Review Steering Committee to review the LMFBR program.709 Thomas Cochran, Frank von Hippel, Russell Train, and Robert Williams are appointed as known opponents of the LMFBR program. Others appointed were: Thomas Ayers, Chairman of Commonwealth Edison , Prof. of Nuclear engineering at MIT F.L Culler, Deputy Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ERDA) J.L. Everett, President of Philadelphia Electric Company R.V. Laney, Deputy Director of Argonne National Laboratory (ERDA) C.D. Perkins, President of National Academy of Engineering Chauncy Starr, President of Electric Power Research Institute Carl Walske, President of the Atomic Industrial Forum710 1977 March 21 The Ford/MITRE team presents their report Nuclear Power: Issues and Choices to President Carter in an Oval Office meeting. 1977 April 6 The Breeder Reactor Review Steering Committee dissenting minority of Cochran, von Hippel, Train, and Williams submits a report to Schlesinger recommending against proceeding with LMFBR program and Clinch River project, suggesting that the thorium cycle would be preferable if breeders prove necessary.711 1977 April 7 President Carter delivers a speech on nuclear nonproliferation policy in which he states that the U.S. would “defer” commercial reprocessing and restructure the breeder reactor program.712 1977 April 7, 8 President Carter accompanies Rickover to Groton Navy Yard to christen nuclear submarines USS Georgia and USS Ohio 1977 April 17 President Carter meets Rickover at the White House

709 Helmer, “Helmer Decision Analysis Memo,” folder: box: collection: Jimmy Carter Library. 710 William Metz, “Carter's New Plutonium Policy: Maybe Less Than Meets the Eye,” Science 196, no. 4288 (1977): 405-407. 711 Thomas B. Cochran et al., “Proliferation Resistant Nuclear Power Technologies: Preferred Alternatives to the Plutonium Breeder,” Natural Resources Defense Council . 712 Carter, “Nuclear Power Policy Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters on Decisions Following a Review of U.S. Policy, April 7, 1977.”

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Year Date Event 1977 April 18 and President Carter makes a televised speech and a speech to a joint session April 20 of Congress to announce his National Energy Policy (NEP). In these speeches, he reiterates the decision to indefinitely defer reprocessing, restructure the breeder program and cancel the Clinch River plant.713 The NEP includes a provision to speed licensing and siting of standardized reactor designs. 1977 May 2 President Carter rejects the advice of Bert Lance and Stuart Eizenstat to cut funding to Rickover’s LWBR project at Shippingport, granting Rickover’s full budget request.714 1977 October First meeting of the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) held in Washington. The aim of this program was to conduct a review with foreign nuclear programs of technical and institutional aspects of avoiding proliferation risks of fuel cycle activities.715 1977 November 5 President Carter uses the first veto of his administration to block a bill that Congress passed to fund the Clinch River LMFBR project in defiance of Carter’s policy announced in April 1977. Congress would continue to attempt to support the LMFBR program in defiance of Carter through his term. 1977 December 2 President Carter dedicates Rickover’s Shippingport Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR) from the Oval Office. Carter is an enthusiastic participant in the ceremonies. 1978 March 10 President Carter signs the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 (NNPA 1978). This legislation codified existing arrangements aimed at restricting export of sensitive fuel cycle technologies, but left some presidential discretion to exempt certain bilateral agreements.

713 Carter, “National Energy Plan—Address Delivered before a Joint Session of the Congress, April 20, 1977.” 714 Lance, “Memorandum for the President—Subject: ERDA Funding for the Water Cooled Breeder Reactor Program,” folder: box: collection: Jimmy Carter Library. 715 Joseph S. Nye, “Nonproliferation: A Long-Term Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 56, no. 3 (1978): 615.

292

Year Date Event 1977 The Carter Administration battles with Congress over the Clinch River – LMFBR project in every subsequent DOE appropriation bill. Congress 1979 maintains program funding and components are ordered despite ongoing program stalemate. 1979 March 26 Schlesinger writes to President Carter advocating a “strengthened and aggressive nuclear siting and licensing bill.”716 Eizenstat recalls that President Carter supported this and was readying it for submission to Congress.717 1979 March 28 Three Mile Island accident ends the possibility of proposing new reactor licensing and siting initiatives for the rest of President Carter’s term. 1980 February INFCE concludes without significant consequence. France, Japan and others continue with programs to construct LMFBR demonstration plants and reprocess plutonium for use as MOX in LWRs. 1981 October President Reagan rescinds President Carter’s ban on reprocessing of civilian plutonium and orders government agencies to re-start work on the Clinch River LMFBR project.718 Industry support is weak. 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act establishes tax of 0.1 cent per kwh to fund construction and management of an underground repository for U.S. spent LWR fuel. U.S. D.O.E. assumes responsibility for disposal of spent fuel. 1983 May House of Representatives votes 388 to 1 to discontinue funding for Clinch River LMFBR Project 1983 October 27 Senate votes 56 to 40 against funding Clinch River LMFBR project. The Clinch River LMFBR program is terminated. 1984 Initiation of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project, a restart of LMFBR development at the EBR-II facility with the addition of an on-site reprocessing capability. 1987 Congress selects Yucca Mountain, NV, as site for an underground geologic repository for spent LWR fuel.

716 James Schlesinger, “Memorandum for the President—Subject: The Breeder within a Nuclear Policy Framework,” March 26, 1979, folder: Energy—CRBR[4], box: 7, collection: Domestic Policy Staff—Energy and Natural Resources—Ward/Schirmer, Jimmy Carter Library. 717 Eizenstat, Interview by Author. 718 Ronald Reagan, “Statement Announcing a Series of Policy Initiatives on Nuclear Energy October 8, 1981,” UCSB .

293

Year Date Event 1993 September 27 The Clinton Administration reiterates a commitment to a open fuel cycle for civilian nuclear power, justifying its policy on nonproliferation grounds. 1994 September The Clinton Administration cancels the IFR project. Senator Kerry is a key proponent of cancelling the IFR, calling it the “son of Clinch River.”719 1994 June Jimmy Carter travels to to diffuse a nuclear crisis. He negotiates the Agreed Framework, which offers North Korea two LWRs and fuel oil in exchange for not reprocessing their spent fuel.720 2002 The Bush Administration revives the fast neutron reactor effort. The Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor (SCFR), a LMFBR variant, is designated as one of two priority choices among six concepts selected for the D.O.E. Generation IV Reactor Technology Roadmap. The justification is shifted to actinide disposal rather than breeding. 2006 President Bush announces the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program, which proposes international spent fuel reprocessing in weapons states and then ultimate disposal of actinide wastes via construction of fast neutron reactors (similar to the LMFBR design).721 2009 March The Obama Administration budget proposal signals cancellation of further progress on the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository. 2009 June 29 The Obama Administration cancels the preparation of a programmatic environmental impact statement for the GNEP program, signaling a decision to not proceed with GNEP.722

719 Thomas Lippman, “Senate Votes to Continue Work on an Experimental Reactor,” Washington Post, October 1, 1993. 720 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 56-58. 721 Richard K. Lester, “Will the Bush Administration’s GNEP Help or Hurt the Prospects for a Nuclear Energy Revival?” Industrial Performance Center Massachussetts Institute of Technology Working Paper Series (2006) . 722 “Notice of Cancellation of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS).”

294

Year Date Event 2010 January 29 Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, acting on behalf of the Obama Administration, announces a Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to consider and recommend policies for the back end of the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle including reprocessing, fast reactors, and waste disposal options. Essentially, the charter of this panel is to reconsider the fuel cycle policy that has been in practice since the Carter Administration. Albert Carnesale is one of the experts appointed to the Blue Ribbon Panel.723

Table 12. Chronology of Relevant Events

723 Dan Yurman, “Chu Names Blue Ribbon Panel,” Idaho Samazdat: Nuke Notes, .

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