Engineer Memoirs
erected a lot of legal and bureaucratic obstacles to the program. That's a factor that
can't be totally discounted.
But I also think that the people in government and the people in industry that were
running it didn't rise to the challenge. The culmination was that nuclear power has been
discredited. I think it is human mismanagement that technology offered something here
which the United States, at least, hasn't done well with.
You look on the continent of Europe and the French are doing very well with this. They
have handled it differently from us. It was more critical to them because they didn't
have a fossil fuel option.
Q:
That's right.
A:
There was more single-mindedness on the part of the government and on the part of
industry there to make it succeed. And perhaps the people, as well, knowing they didn't
have a fossil fuel option, were more willing to accept the risk, if there was any. I don't
think there was much, frankly.
Q:
You mentioned the environmental opposition. Of course, that comes later in the 1960s
and the 1970s.
A:
There was no environmental opposition worth mentioning in the late 1940s and the
1950s.
Q:
There was a consensus--
A:
In my view, remembering those days, there was a national consensus that this was
positive.
Q:
Do you suppose this lulled people who made policy into complacency?
A:
Very much. I also think--this is critical of him, but others have criticized him--that the
tenure of Glenn Seaborg as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission [AEC] was
unfortunate. He was a brilliant man, and he had made very important contributions to
nuclear energy as a nuclear chemist. But he was not an able administrator. He was not
an able formulator of public policy. The country needed the guiding hand of somebody
with more vision and experience in public policy during that formative period. We lost
that period. That was the 1960s. He held that office for seven years during the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations.
Q:
A critical period.
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