Word: aec
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...main argument is over how much help the U.S. Government should give private industry. AEC's position is that nuclear power for peaceful purposes should be largely a private venture, with AEC supplying only limited funds. Originally, businessmen supported the idea, lest nuclear energy grow into a giant public-power program. Now their position has changed. Even the stoutest private-power men feel that the program needs a strong infusion of Government aid because commercial nuclear power is so new, so complex and so costly that private companies cannot carry the burden alone. Says President Newton I. Steers...
...hump is the fact that conventional U.S. power is so cheap-and nuclear power so expensive-that the U.S. itself has no pressing domestic need for a crash program. Thus, AEC orients its program toward the laboratory, has considered well over 100 different ways of producing nuclear power, and is concentrating on small experimental reactors to test the most likely methods. AEC hopes to foster an industry producing possibly 95 million kw. of nuclear power by 1980, or 25% of the estimated total power demands of the U.S. But U.S. industry is learning, to its sorrow, that there...
...large nuclear power plant completed to date, the 60,000-kw. station built by Westinghouse Electric Corp. for AEC and the Duquesne Light Co. of Shippingport, Pa. (TIME, Nov. 25), is a major milestone for the U.S. -and a perfect example of the cost problem. Westinghouse's original cost estimate was $37.8 million. The plant will ultimately cost about $100 million. The Government paid 95% of the bill to get it operating; the power produced is so expensive that AEC also pays a heavy subsidy to make it marketable...
...privately sponsored plants, which comprise the bulk of the program. Builders are largely on their own, working under fixed-price contracts with risk of heavy losses. As a result, one small experimental plant is completed, only four are under construction. Two others have been contracted for, but negotiations with AEC for another five are poking along, and four more have been canceled...
Underlining nuclear power's international promise, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss stressed that U.S. and British scientists have been working in ''close cooperation" on controlled thermonuclear reactions, and will continue to do so. Added President Eisenhower next day, in a statement aimed toward Russia: "All Americans sincerely hope that other scientists in other countries will be encouraged by their governments to do similar research. As these and other experiments continue, the adoption of a worldwide atoms-for-peace program becomes more inevitable to permit all scientists to devote their skills and energies to the betterment of mankind...