Atomic Slowdown

Six years ago, basking in the prospect of atomic power tamed for peaceful uses, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that the U.S. would have a capacity of 2,000,000 kw. of atomic-generated electricity by 1960. To fulfill its hopes, the AEC took private U.S. companies into partnership, helping with the cost of research and the fuel core while industry financed its own reactors. Last week the AEC admitted that its much-heralded partnership with private enterprise was in trouble--and that the U.S. would be lucky to have 750,000 kw. of atomic-generated power capacity by year's end. Confessing that not enough research had gone into the project, the commission canceled an advanced gas-cooled reactor scheduled to be built in Florida by a group of Florida and Midwestern utilities.

Burnt Fingers. The AEC's partnership with industry was strained from the beginning. Many companies joined up only because they feared losing out to a sort of atomic Tennessee Valley Authority if the AEC went it alone. All told, private companies poured out more than $500 million to complete five atomic power projects, and have seven more abuilding. Critics complain that the AEC lured the utilities into exotic, untried generating methods before they had been proved on an experimental scale. New York's Consolidated Edison had to make so many changes in its Indian Point reactor that the plant on the Hudson is two years behind schedule, will cost twice as much as planned.

The economic facts of atomic energy also proved disheartening. Though the cost of nuclear power has dropped notably (from 65 mills per kw-h at the original Shippingport, Pa., reactor to about 15 mills at the newest reactor in Rowe, Mass.), it is still prohibitively high; even the most expensive conventionally produced electricity costs only nine mills per kwh. And there have been unfamiliar problems to face. The Enrico Fermi project outside Detroit, and the Los Angeles-Pasadena reactor have been stalled by arguments over their safety--arguments rendered more acute by the deaths of three technicians in the recent explosion of an Army reactor near Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Falling Behind? In recent months, when the AEC has tried to start new projects, it has found private-utility partners cool. Conceded Dr. Frank Pittman, AEC director of reactor development: "Industry would like to wait and see." Predictably, industry's flagging enthusiasm has brought new demands for more public and less private research to speed development. Argues California's Democratic Representative Chet Holifield, chief critic of the "partnership" approach: "The world technological leadership of the U.S. is at stake."

The situation is probably not yet as critical as Holifield suggests: Russia has shown no evidences of a major breakthrough in nuclear power, and Britain, though it produces twice as much atomic-generated electricity as the U.S., has done so only by concentrating on a type of gas-cooled reactor that would be uneconomical in this country. New AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel prizewinning former chancellor of the University of California, has suggested direct construction grants to utilities to help offset the high cost of experimental plants. Some members of the congressional Joint Atomic Energy Committee argue instead that the AEC should do all of the basic experimentation on its own, turning over a reactor to private utilities only after it has been proved technically feasible and commercially practical.

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