Nuclear power first began to evolve prior to World War II thanks to several landmark breakthroughs in physics. In 1934, physicist Enrico Fermi conducted experiments in Rome showing neutrons could split many types of atoms. This was followed by the work of German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman who fired neutrons from radium and beryllium into uranium, causing it to fission. This set the stage for the world’s first controlled atomic chain-reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 by scientists who would go on to work for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret US government program that built the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.

 

Following the end of World War II, the federal government created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to promote the development of nuclear energy. The AEC authorized the building of the first commercial nuclear reactor (Experimental Breeder Reactor I) in Idaho which produced the first electricity from nuclear energy in 1951. A major goal of nuclear research in the mid-1950s was to show that nuclear energy
could produce electricity for commercial use. The first commercial electricity-generating plant powered by nuclear energy was located in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

 

Private industry became more involved in developing light-water reactors
after Shippingport became operational. The nuclear power industry grew rapidly in the 1960s as utility companies saw this new form of electricity production as economical. By 1971, 22 commercial nuclear power plants were operating in the US, producing 2.4 percent of the nation’s electricity.

 

In 1974, Congress passed the Energy Reorganization Act which divided the AEC’s functions into two new agencies – the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), to carry out research and development, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to regulate nuclear power. The 1970s also saw the government begin to grapple with the problem of how to dispose of nuclear waste from reactors, which was beginning to accumulate at plants around the country.

 

Some scientists and industry leaders proposed a way to recycle, or reprocess, spent nuclear fuel by using it again in nuclear reactors. This idea was controversial because of the danger that reprocessing brought about – namely, an unwanted surplus of plutonium, which can be used in nuclear bombs. Before spent fuel could be reprocessed back into reactors, the plutonium inside had to be extracted, which was done by chopping up fuel rods and dissolving them in acid and then extracting plutonium in an almost pure form. This process was derived in the 1950s from the U.S. nuclear weapons program, which used plutonium in warheads. Some officials worried about this surplus plutonium falling into the wrong hands. President Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, sided with opponents of reprocessing and ended the idea of reprocessing by deferring indefinitely any plans to use spent nuclear fuel in this manner. President Carter also took another significant action with regards to energy policy by creating the Department of Energy (DOE), a cabinet-level replacement for ERDA.

 

The year 1979 also marked the beginning of the end for the nuclear power industry’s momentum when the worst accident in U.S. commercial reactor history occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Although no one was injured in the accident, public approval of nuclear power began to wane, and it eroded even further following the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the then-Soviet republic of Ukraine in 1986. By the mid-1980s, nuclear power had become the second largest source of electricity, after coal, in the US, with 83 nuclear power reactors providing approximately 14 percent of the nation’s domestic electricity supply. Nuclear power reached its zenith in terms of plants and electricity generation in 1991, with 111 nuclear power plants producing a combined capacity of 99,673 megawatts, or almost 22 percent of the electricity generated commercially in the United States.

 

During the 1980s, Congress began addressing the problem of what to do with the growing amount of spent nuclear fuel. In 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was adopted which ultimately led to the adoption of a single location in Nevada, known as Yucca Mountain, where commercial and defense nuclear waste would be stored underground for thousands of years. This idea has sparked controversy over the past three decades, and Yucca Mountain still awaits its first shipments of waste. (For more information, see the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board)

 

By the 1990s, nuclear power was considered a dying industry, as no new plants were built. In addition to the issues of waste disposal and public concerns over safety, nuclear power was proving to be extremely expensive. A single new plant would cost between $3-5 billion to build, and another $2-4 billion to decommission once it had reached its lifespan. Given all of these impediments, President Bill Clinton placed greater emphasis on energy research and development into alternative forms of energy, including wind, solar and geothermal.

 

With the election of George W. Bush, however, the industry found a new champion, especially with Vice President Dick Cheney, who chaired a controversial working group during the early days of the Bush administration that was charged with crafting a new energy policy for the country. Among the recommendations of the National Energy Policy Development Group was a call to begin building new nuclear power plants. This led to the implementation of Nuclear Power 2010, a program run by the NE to begin building new nuclear power plants by the end of the decade. The Bush administration added to this effort with the release in 2006 of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which is designed to foster the development of nuclear power worldwide. To achieve this plan, GNEP is crafting an international fuel leasing regime where countries can establish nuclear power without the need for investing in fuel enrichment or processing facilities.

 

Outline History of Nuclear Energy (World Nuclear Association)

Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group (PDF)

Energy Policy Act of 2005 (PDF)

Bush urges more refineries, nuclear plants (by Catherine Berger and Elaine Quijano, CNN)

Bush Seeks to Jump-Start Nuclear Power: Proposed Test of New Waste-Reprocessing Methods Aims to Ease Concerns Over Storage (by John J. Fialka, Wall Street Journal)

The Office of Nuclear Energy is the lead agency within the DOE charged with promoting and developing nuclear power. NE helps spearhead new nuclear energy generation technologies, including plans to develop proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel that can maximize energy from other nuclear fuel. The NE also maintains and enhances the national nuclear technology infrastructure and manages research laboratories and radiological facilities. The programs funded by NE are designed to develop new nuclear reactors that will help diversify the domestic energy supply through public-private partnerships.

 

NE manages a total of nine programs: Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI), Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems (Gen-IV), Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), Laboratory Facilities Management, Isotope Program, Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative (NHI), Nuclear Fuel Supply Security, Nuclear Power 2010 and Radioisotope Power Systems.

Public Information Center.

 

In order for a new era in nuclear power to get underway, new technologies must be developed that can allow nuclear waste to be recycled in reactors. Otherwise, opponents of nuclear energy will still be able to point to the old problem of what to do with spent fuel rods (see Yucca Mountain) and make it difficult for new plants to be built. AFCI’s job is to support research that will find new ways to reprocess spent fuel without producing surplus plutonium and thus adding to concerns over nuclear nonproliferation. Currently, the hopes of developing a new reprocessing technology rests with UREX+, a project run by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. UREX+ is a method of removing plutonium and other long-lived radioactive elements in spent nuclear fuel that makes the elements reusable in nuclear power plants, but difficult to use for making nuclear weapons. It does this by extracting plutonium along with other heavy and highly radioactive elements that make it too hot to handle without advanced robotics to remove and deal with the material.

 

Since the beginning of commercial nuclear energy, three generations of nuclear reactors have been used. Generation I represented the first commercial reactors, such as the one at Shippingport. Generation II came online in the sixties and seventies, and Generation III, or light-water reactors, were the last to be built in the eighties. Gen-IV is dedicated to producing the fourth generation of nuclear reactor by 2030. Gen IV reactors are expected to be less expensive to build, safer to operate and produce less nuclear waste.

 

GNEP is designed to foster the growth of nuclear energy worldwide. The US, in partnership with France, Japan and Russia, will work to develop new reactors for use in developing countries, which would use nuclear fuel supplied by developed countries. Bilateral agreements will require developing countries to return spent nuclear fuel to developed countries to minimize the risk of terrorists gaining access to the fuel. GNEP is highly dependent upon the success of other NE programs, specifically AFCI and Gen-IV.

 

This office manages programs that support work at four nuclear research laboratories: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York. The support work ranges from maintaining the infrastructure at these labs to maintaining the safety and security of lab employees and classified information.

 

This program produces stable and radioactive isotopes that are widely used by domestic and international customers for medicine, industry and research applications. Examples include heart imaging, cancer therapy, smoke detectors, neutron detectors, explosive detection, oil exploration and tracers for climate change.

 

This program is exploring ways to produce hydrogen as a byproduct of nuclear energy so that the hydrogen can be used as fuel for automobiles, thus reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and can be produced from sources such as methane and water. However, existing hydrogen production methods are either inefficient or produce greenhouse gases. The success of the Gen-IV program to produce a new breed of reactor will help determine whether the hydrogen program gets off the ground.

This office is responsible for helping secure the safety of the nation’s nuclear fuel supply, particularly in the areas of uranium enrichment. Nuclear Fuel Supply Security provides advice on policy issues related to commercial aspects of uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. It also monitors nuclear fuel market issues involving implementation of the US/Russia HEU Agreement which is converting 500 megatons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads for use in US commercial reactors.

 

This program, unveiled in 2002, is geared toward new construction of modified Gen III light-water reactors by the beginning of the next decade. Formed as a public/private partnership, Nuclear Power 2010 is identifying sites for new nuclear plants, developing new reactor technologies, evaluating business models for building new plants and crafting new regulations that reduce barriers to new plant construction. 

 

This office supplies Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS), or small nuclear engines, to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for space missions that are beyond the capabilities of fuel cells, solar power and battery power supplies. RPS provides the energy for space missions to Mars and the moon as well as orbital missions around the earth and sun.

 

Those who closely follow the NE fall on either side of the nuclear energy debate. Energy companies and public utilities are very involved with NE programs or at least closely monitor them. These stakeholders include Ohio Edison, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Duke Power, Exelon Corporation, Constellation Generation, Pacific Gas & Electric, Georgia Power Company, Southern California Edison and more. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobby in Washington, DC, is another key player.

 

Other corporate stakeholders include contractors who run nuclear research labs that NE is involved with. The Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are run by Battelle, an applied science and technology company, which also jointly runs the Brookhaven National Laboratory in conjunction with the State University of New York. Los Alamos National Laboratory is run by the Los Alamos National Security LLC, consisting of the University of California system, and engineering giants Bechtel, Babcock & Wilcox and Washington Group International.

 

General Electric and Westinghouse are also important stakeholders thanks to their long histories of developing and building reactors. A new player on the scene is UniStar Nuclear, a joint partnership involving Areva, a French-owned nuclear company, Constellation Energy, a Baltimore company that operates five reactors in Maryland and New York, and Bechtel.

 

A slew of environmental, anti-nuclear and professional scientific organizations also keep watch on nuclear energy programs. Examples of these stakeholders include the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a worldwide clearinghouse for environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, Nuclear Watch South, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

 

U.S. Nuclear Power Plant Operators, Owners and Holding Companies (Nuclear Energy Institute)

President Bush was only months into his first term when Vice President Cheney unveiled

the administration’s energy policy, a product of a working group composed of energy titans. Both the composition of the group and its policy recommendations regarding nuclear power provoked criticism by environmentalists, who were excluded from the effort, and who questioned the merits of trying to build more reactors in America. But with the growing chorus over global warming, nuclear proponents played up the industry’s clean-power merits, since nuclear power plants don’t produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

 

Some environmentalists found themselves reacting more openly to the idea of nuclear power because of its potential impact in the fight against global warming, which set off a fight within the movement. “It's not that something new and important and good had happened with nuclear, it's that something new and important and bad has happened with climate change," said Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, in the New York Times.

Old Foes Soften to New Reactors (by Felicity Barringer, New York Times)

Environmentalists Oppose Bush-Cheney Plan to Revitalize Nuclear Power Industry (Nuclear Information and Resource Service)

 

Critics contended that investing in nuclear power would actually make the climate predicament worse. According to studies by the Rocky Mountain Institute, nuclear energy is seven times less cost-effective at displacing carbon than is energy efficiency. For example, a dollar invested in insulating a drafty house displaces seven times more coal than a dollar invested in a nuclear power plant because of nuclear's immense capital costs.

Bush's Nuclear Nonsense (by Mark Hertsgaard, Tom Paine)

 

As for the NE, the new push for nuclear power put it front-and-center in the debate. The office saw its budget rise dramatically as a result of this new initiative, and with it came scrutiny from the National Research Council, which was asked by the Office of Management and Budget to examine NE’s nuclear programs. The NRC argued that funding for GNEP’s research and development of Gen IV reactors should be scaled back and instead money diverted to facilitating the startup of new commercial nuclear power plants based on existing technology under the Nuclear Power 2010 program. The problem, according to the report, was the futuristic technologies that GNEP was relying upon was still decades away from fruition, making its budgetary outlays not cost-effective. The report also recommended scaling back funding for the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative because of its reliance on the lagging GNEP efforts.

NRC Report: DOE's Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing R&D Program Should Be Scaled Back (National Academies)

Review of DOE’s Nuclear Energy Research and Development Program (PDF)

 

Bush’s nuclear energy policy and GNEP also came under attack by activists in the South, which was being targeted as the home for several new proposed plants. Energy giants like Southern Company, Entergy and Florida Power and Light had received billions in governmental incentives to build in south Texas, Alabama, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. Other companies were considering sites in Mississippi and Georgia.