Big Oil and Nuclear Power

It is received wisdom in pro-nuclear circles that sinister fossil fuel interests are partly if not largely responsible for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its remarkable promise. To examine this premise, we must divide fossil fuel into coal, oil, and gas. There has never been much overlap between coal and oil and, until recently, surprisingly little overlap between oil and gas.

Coal

Coal and nuclear have been in direct competition since the inception of nuclear power. Coal interests have fought hard against nuclear, concentrating on the support that nuclear was getting from the government. Their biggest victory was closing the Section 104(b) loophole in which commercial plants were claiming to be demonstration plants to get more favorable licensing procedures and subsidized fuel. Unfortunately, they closed the loophole in a way that effectively precludes extended full scale testing. But aside from that win, coal's main role has been to put an upper bound on the cost of nuclear. Unfortunately, that upper bound rose precipitously during the early 70's as coal simultaneously battled miner strikes, pollution regulation, and the costs of rapid expansion. This allowed ALARA based regulation to more than treble nuclear's did-cost.

Oil

Oil took a very different view of nuclear. For oil men, the power generation market was never a priority. Oil was never that interested in competing with coal in what they saw as a low value business, basically a dumping ground for the bottom of the barrel in a few places such as New England where coal was particularly expensive. Oil was focused on the far more lucrative transportation fuels and chemical markets.

So when nuclear power came along with all its promise, oil decided to jump on the train. W. R Grace, (chemicals, oil drilling, etc) built a fuel reprocessing plant at West Valley about 1963. Grace sold West Valley to Getty Oil in 1969. Getty gave up on West Valley in 1972 due to rapidly escalating regulation, taking a big hit in the process.

Pure Oil Company made a big investment in graphite to supply moderator to nuclear reactors. Pure Oil is gone, swallowed up by Union and then Chevron. But the graphite operation lives on with the name shortened to Poco. Atlantic Richfield ran the chemical waste processing effort at Hanford from 1967 to at least 1975, extracting and selling various isotopes. They also developed Pu-238 powered pacemakers, which could last several lifetimes.

Tidewater, Kerr-McGee, Skelly, and Getty, all oil companies, formed the Petrotomics partnership to develop the uranium reserves of the Shirley Basin in Wyoming. The silly name tells you all you need to know about Big Oil's embrace of nuclear.

Gulf Oil bought General Atomics in 1967 and renamed it Gulf General Atomic. In 1973, Shell through their nuclear subsidiary, Scallop Nuclear, became a 50-50 partner. Later Gulf Oil was swallowed up by Chevron. Chevron and Shell bailed out of General Atomics in 1986. Gulf and Shell also worked on a high temperature gas reactor, a project to which Shell contributed 200 million dollars. Gulf also had a fuel fabrication facility at Elmsford , New York. Shell also invested in a fuel reprocessing plant at Barnwell, South Carolina that thanks to Carter never went into operation. Shell was also involved in a Dutch attempt to develop centrifuge enrichment.

The biggest push into nuclear was by Exxon. Exxon intended to be the fuel supplier to the burgeoning nuclear power industry. They set up Jersey Nuclear (later Exxon Nuclear) in 1969, built fuel fabrication plants at Hanford and in Germany, and took a big stake in uranium reserves, as did Scallop Nuclear, and Gulf. Exxon became an early promoter of global warming, even instrumenting one of their largest tankers, the Esso Atlantic, to measure ocean water temperatures. Exxon finally bailed out of nuclear in 1986 after taking an enormous hit. Exxon's concern over global warming disappeared at the same time.

Along the way Gulf became embroiled in the Great Uranium Cartel. In 1966, with uranium prices plummeting despite all the predictions to the contrary, the AEC decreed that US plants could not buy foreign uranium. This embargo pushed domestic price up and foreign price down. The Canadian government responded by setting up a cartel with Australia and other uranium producing countries. Miners in Canada were forced to participate. Gulf, which had taken a big stake in the Rabbit Lake mine in Alberta through its Canadian subsidiary Gulf Minerals, was caught in the middle, and reluctantly obeyed Canadian law. In the event, the cartel was overtaken by the 1973 Oil Crisis which sent everybody scrambling for uranium. Prices soared far above the cartel's target, and the cartel fell apart.

Meanwhile Westinghouse had sold some 30 plants with uncovered, fixed price fuel contracts. When uranium price went through the roof, it found itself 2 billion dollars short, and declared force majeure. The utilities promptly sued Westinghouse; Westinghouse promptly sued the cartel claiming the cartel was the problem. The easy target in US courts was Gulf Oil because of its US presence. Shell became involved because of its partnership with Gulf. The whole mess dragged through the courts for years. As usual, the only winners were the lawyers.

Gas

Until the first decade of the 21st century, Big Oil wasn't that interested in gas. It was more of a nuisance than a commodity, often flared. Gas was more expensive than coal. It's only real market was heating, and specialized firms developed to produce and distribute natural gas, often electricity utilities. But as coal and nuclear were regulated into oblivion, gas for electricity became a big time business. Gas prices rose, and the big oil companies jumped into gas in a big way.

Their timing was terrible. Fracking exceeded everybody's projections, and gas prices plummeted. But now they were in the gas business and the gas business was now electricity generation. The oil companies found themselves in the same position as the coal companies 50 years earlier, and responded in a similar manner, fighting nuclear subsidies and promoting wind/solar, knowing that their intermittency would lock in gas as the dispatchable source.

But this is a recent development, which has nothing to do with nuclear's demise in the 1970's. I worked in the Oil Patch from the late 70's to around 2000. I cannot recall a single instance when the word “nuclear" came up in a conversation. Nuclear power simply was not on our radar.

The Rockefeller Foundation

The fossil fuel conspiracists often point to the Rockefeller Foundation's machinations against nuclear as evidence of Big Oil's guilt in destroying nuclear power. After all the Foundation was funded by the most successful oil man of all time. These people believe:

1) Big Oil was worried about nuclear power in the 1950's.

2) Big Oil hatched a radiophobia based plan to undermine nuclear power.

3) The Rockefeller Foundation people would do the bidding of Big Oil.

This dog does not hunt.

John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839. He retired around the turn of the century. And when he did so he really left the business, perhaps because his baby, Standard Oil, had been broken up into a dozen pieces. The family immediately began distancing itself from oil and the Old Man's business practices, preferring real estate, politics, and philanthropy. The current generation is openly critical of oil. And so is the Rockefeller Foundation which has divested itself of all oil stocks.

In the early 1950's, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) became concerned about nuclear weapons testing. This concern is hardly surprising. The intelligentsia had turned against nuclear weapons, and the people who ran the Foundation were members of that group. Everybody very reasonably feared a nuclear war. The Rockefeller family itself was almost certainly concerned.

Far more importantly, RF top management felt personally responsible for the bomb. In their support of theoretical physics in the 1930's, they had funded just about all the Manhattan Project greats. Much worse, they had single handedly funded Lawrence's cyclotron program which turned out to be crucial in developing the bomb. After the war, Lawrence wrote to the Foundation in thanks, saying ``that if it had not been for the RF, there would have been no atomic bomb". Foundation President Raymond Fosdick was not happy. He wrote to Warren Weaver, the RF's Director for Natural Sciences, ``his conscience was deeply troubled". Fosdick and Weaver decided to make amends and do whatever they could to suppress nuclear weapons, starting with ending weapons testing. (This motivation justified a string of major breaches of scientific ethics. But that's another story. )

Here's what Fosdick told the Rockefeller Trustees later that fall.

Whether the release of atomic energy in the long run will result in good or evil for the race, no one can now say; but whatever the consequences, the Foundation and its related boards cannot escape their share of the responsibility, indirect as it may be. The atomic bomb is the result of influences which, for the most part unintentionally and unwittingly, we helped to set in motion. ... The towering question which faces the world now is whether the new energies can be controlled. It is, I know, the hope of all of us that the Foundation may be able to make some contribution, however slight, to this end.

Fosdick and Weaver got right to work. The perfect weapon with which to fight weapons testing is the Linear No Threshold(LNT) theory of radiation harm. LNT holds that damage is both linear in dose and unrepairable. Thus the harm is cumulative in dose. If LNT is valid, then the opponents of weapons testing could accumulate the tiny dose rates from fallout over both hemispherical populations and decades and argue that the tests were invisibly killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. This required discarding the current model which held that there was a tolerance dose below which any harm was negligible.

In late 1945, the Foundation set up Herman Muller at Indiana University with a generous grant. In 1927, Muller had shown that X-rays could produce mutations in fruit flies. In 1930, Muller had claimed that the mutation frequency ``is exactly proportional to the energy of the dosage observed" despite the fact that his own data, which was based on extremely high doses and dose rates, did not support linearity. In 1946, Muller repeated the claim in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, despite the fact that a few weeks earlier, Muller was shown results that emphatically contradicted LNT. The Foundation made sure Muller got plenty of publicity, funding speaking trips all over the world.

In 1954, the RF set up and funded the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation Genetics Panel (BEAR1). Weaver was the Chairman, Muller the prominent member. The Panel was stacked with fruit fly geneticists funded by the Foundation. Radiologists who had actually worked with humans need not apply. The key decision by BEAR1 to accept LNT and discard the tolerance dose model was made as early as February, 1956. At the time, there was no such thing as commercial nuclear power. The tiny, experimental Shippingport plant would not go on-line until very late 1957. To assume Big Oil was worried about competition from nuclear power in 1956 and earlier in a market they had little interest in is a nonsensical stretch.

Calabrese's long carefully researched history of this mess makes no mention of Big Oil. Not even a hint. But the clincher is: at the same time, the Rockefeller Foundation people were undermining nuclear, Big Oil was making enormous investments in nuclear. That's a very strange form of collusion.

If we really want to know why nuclear power has been a flop, we need to look elsewhere. Might start with a mirror.