Joseph Somsel writes for the American Thinker about a key piece of American energy policy.
The loudly announced policy of the new Trump Administration is for the US to regain global “energy dominance.” Most of us would first think, “drill Baby, drill,” so that we can increase our exports of liquified natural gas (LNG). However, there is another energy source that the new administration should encourage, and that is nuclear power. But if the public thinks that means that American citizens working for American companies can now build a complete nuclear power plant either in the US or abroad, they should think again—we can’t. Will future reactor sales go to Russia or China instead?
Americans invented the nuclear reactor and, for decades following World War II, dominated the field globally. With that early national lead and with high global expectations, President Eisenhower offered to share the technology with any country that would forgo using it for nuclear weapons through his “Atoms for Peace” initiative. Many reactor designs were tried out across the globe, but most commercial reactors ended up being built on American light water-cooled designs (LWRs).
As a lack of sales caused many companies to pull out of the market or even go out of business, the impressive supply chains developed to supply the hardware and analysis languished and eventually atrophied. While the nuclear market entered its “long tail” phase (think the vacuum tube market), there was still money to be made and jobs to be had servicing the existing international fleets.
The hard reality is that we lost the ability to be a sole-source nuclear power plant provider long ago. Early aspirants like Allis-Chalmers and General Atomics gave up quickly. The Three Mile Island vendor, Babcock and Wilcox, no longer exists. Combustion Engineering built several large reactors, before being acquired by Westinghouse which also bought Sweden’s ASEA-Atom. Westinghouse, in turn, sold licenses and intellectual property for its designs to the French and to Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO). Today, Westinghouse is owned by a Canadian company, COMECO, a major international mining company and supplier of yellowcake, the raw material for nuclear fuel.
