Belief-based Energy Technology Development in the United States: A Comparative Study of Nuclear Power and Synthetic Fuel Policies
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the price-determining view. This distinction illustrates a major difference between synthetic fuels and nuclear power policies. Sperling used nuclear power as an example in explaining his price-determining view:

It [the U.S. government] created and financed the Manhattan Project of World War II, legislated limitations on liability, and provided uranium enrichment and waste storage facilities, as well as huge and continuing subsidies for research and development…It is an incontrovertible fact, therefore, that nuclear power came into being because of government actions, not because it was inherently less expensive than other options…Active intervention by government in effect made nuclear power attractive by lower costs.3

John Deutch and Richard Lester's explanation for the failure of synthetic fuels programs provided a good example of the price-determined view:

The SFC eventually demonstrated the technical feasibility, project cost, and environmental impacts of several key synfuels technologies. The problem was that the world oil price, instead of continuing to rise as had been expected, actually declined … Whatever the original purpose of the synfuels program, the reality of declining oil prices meant that synfuels were not needed. Thus, to the public and critics the program was a failure.4

The two perspectives appear to explain the different fates of nuclear power and synthetic fuels: the government intervened to lower the cost of nuclear power in order to make it competitive, but gave up on synfuels because it was not competitive. Apparently the U.S. government was taking a price-determining role in its nuclear power policy, but let the price determine its attitude toward synfuels. John O’Leary commented in a congressional hearing that “Had the [synthetic fuel] program continued and expanded like nuclear, we would have had an orderly transit from our dependence on natural liquid fuels to synthetic fuels sometime in the 1960s.”5