Note: This article was published in the weekend magazine supplement Today, in June, 1928]
In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower proposed an international Atoms for Peace program under which the United States would turn over to the United Nations its entire peace-time nuclear industry for the benefit of humanity at large. Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower's atomic energy advisor, enthusiastically predicted that nuclear-generated electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” That same year, Ontario Hydro chose a nuclear future.
Eisenhower's offer was deceptive, because the United States then had essentially no nuclear industry – and Strauss's soaring fantasies have crashed and shattered. In 1980, 16 planned nuclear plants were canceled in the United States, about 60 more postponed, and Americans were deriving more energy from firewood than from nuclear power. Southern California Edison had renounced nuclear expansion in favor of conservation, solar and wind power. Donald Cook, former chairman of American Electric Power, the largest privately owned U.S. utility, was publicly regretting that his company had been sent “down the wrong road [by] an erroneous conception of the economics of nuclear power. The economics that were projected...never materialized – and never will materialize.” Financial analysts on Wall Street, steering investors away from utilities with heavy nuclear commitments, were predicting that nuclear power would push some companies into bankruptcy.
And in Canada?
