Belief-based Energy Technology Development in the United States: ...

This book is a comparative study of nuclear power and synthetic fuel technology policies in the United States over the course of the three decades after the Second World War. Wait! Many readers are about to protest. Nuclear power and synthetic fuel are not comparable. Nuclear power generates electricity and synthetic fuel technology produces liquid fuels. Their products are not even in the same market. Although nuclear power and synthetic fuel are both energy technologies, they do not substitute for each other, and they are not competing technologies in an economic sense. I must ask readers to indulge me for a moment. I will show that we may actually learn something from this comparison.

Using an innovative technology to solve social problems is always an intriguing idea. People have hoped that a “dream” technology would provide clean, abundant, and inexpensive energy. Although the dreams have often failed to come true, the hope for a technological fix never dies. Americans were once told that nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap to meter,” and have hoped that synthetic fuels would free the country from its dependence on foreign oil. Neither technology has fulfilled its promise. Nevertheless, we should carefully examine what policy did not work so that we can shed some light on what might work in the future.

The trajectories of these two energy technologies—nuclear power and synthetic fuels—differed sharply and peculiarly. In the case of nuclear power, steady and strong political endorsement forced rapid development for decades. A civilian nuclear power industry was in place by the 1970s, but the industry entered dormancy shortly after it was established in the United States. Long after the dormancy of the business, nuclear proponents maintain their faith in the technology and believe nuclear power will eventually make a comeback. In the case of synthetic fuels (synfuels), the government's effort has undergone boom-and-bust cycles. The latest endeavor in the 1980s failed miserably and left the synfuels program with a bad reputation. Synfuel has practically become a symbol of government waste.

This book only discusses the development of these two technologies in the United States. Both technologies continue to be developed