From Business Week’s December 25, 1978 Special Report “Nuclear Dilemma: The Atom’s Fizzle in an Energy-Short World” (h/t Amory Lovins)

In April, I debunked a piece by journalist Mark Lynas (see “Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed“).  I also said I’d do a longer post about one particular myth he repeated:

In the 1970s it looked as if nuclear power was going to play a much bigger role than eventually turned out to be the case. What happened was Three Mile Island, and the birth of an anti-nuclear movement that stopped dozens of half-built or proposed reactors….

Just as the U.S. nuclear renaissance was mostly dead before Fukushima, so too was the original cycle of nuclear plant orders dead before TMI — killed by rising prices for plants and cost over-runs.  As a December 1978 Business Week’s Special Report “Nuclear Dilemma: The Atom’s Fizzle in an Energy-Short World” explained:

One by one, the lights are going out for the U.S. nuclear power industry. Reactor orders have plummeted from a high of 41 in 1973 to zero this year. Nuclear power stations are taking longer to build, and the delays are tacking hundreds of millions of dollars onto their costs. Waste disposal, which was supposed to be solved by now, is not. The export market is already glutted and shrinking fast. And the cumulative effect of these and other troubles has been a severe erosion of both public and political support for nuclear power.

Furthermore, domestic utilities are facing such shrunken growth projections for electricity demand that even if the nuclear industry’s political, social, economic, and regulatory difficulties could be solved, there may not be an adequate market left for their product. Not soon, but within 10 years, the U.S. nuclear industry is apt to contract dramatically, and it may collapse altogether. Says a senior, nonnuclear executive at General Electric Co., one of the four remaining reactor makers: ‘The existing nuclear industry can’t survive. Period.”

His is not a radical view.

Actually there appear to have been two orders in 1978.  But the point is the same –  the industry had collapsed long before TMI.  Indeed, nuclear power appeared to have a negative learning curve even back then.

I asked energy expert Dr. Jon Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford, if he would do a more detailed study of this question.   His excellent graph-filled analysis is below, done with the input of other leading energy experts, and co-authored by Nate Hultman, Associate Director of Univ. of MD’s Joint Global Change Research Institute.  They conclude:

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– William S. Becker

During one of his high-energy speeches earlier this month, Van Jones was back in fighting form.

He told his audience at Netroots Nation that figuratively speaking, a fight is brewing in America. The pushback will come from kids facing a future of climate disruption, unions being dismantled by conservative governors, college grads who can’t find jobs, veterans being dumped back into a disabled economy, people who can’t find work, and families having their homes taken away by some of the same banks that depended on the American people to bail them out.

Jones didn’t use the term “American Spring,” but he might have. He said he has no doubt we’re on the verge of a Popeye moment when Americans of all generations decide: “I’ve had all I can stand; I can’t stand no more.”

“This is guaranteed,” Jones said. “The only question is whether we fight together, or fight alone.”

Earlier this week, two groups of kids presented an opportunity to fight together. Kids vs. Global Warming and Youth for Climate Truth sent out an appeal for support in a legal case before the courts right now.

Both groups have some experience with the legal system. Kids vs Global Warming is the group that organized youth marches earlier this year in 160 cities in 45 countries and filed lawsuits against the US government to compel it to protect the atmosphere for their generation.

Youth for Climate Truth says it was taken to court for issuing a fake news release and web site that “called attention to the fact that Koch Industries has spent tens of millions of dollars through corporate front groups to deliberately confuse the public about the dangers of climate change.”

Koch Industries sued the kids for $100,000. “Koch lost the suit,” the youth group reports, “because whether the Koch Brothers like it or not, political dissent is protected by the First Amendment.”

Now the two organizations are appealing for help in another legal case. Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced to prison next month for an act of civil disobedience when he was a college student in 2008. DeChristopher, now 29, posed as a bidder in a federal auction held by the outgoing Bush Administration to drill oil and gas on public lands in Utah. He was prosecuted and convicted of obstructing a government auction. Here’s how the kids describe it:

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Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, works with a variety of progressive investors and corporations.  The groups she works with understand that sound environmental policy is good for business and good for the economy. By encouraging retrofits of environmental equipment and spurring the development of cleaner generation — all with limited ratepayer impact — tens of thousands of new jobs can be created through new standards on power plant emissions.