From bombs to boilers: Seven decades of nuclear failure

By Arnie Gundersen | Climate & Capital Media
Published on Jun 20, 2025

The history of nuclear power is a tale of economic miscalculation, technological hubris, wishful thinking, political expediency, and corporate malfeasance that resulted in the largest managerial disaster in industrial history

In the autumn of 1954, Americans awoke to euphoric headlines: “Abundant Power from Atom Seen,” promised The New York Times, quoting the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC): “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Nuclear power, it was said, would be the engine of a new era — a world of limitless, affordable energy, courtesy of American ingenuity and the atom’s promise.

Seven decades later, the United States is still waiting for that atomic utopia. Instead, it has inherited a legacy of cost overruns, abandoned projects, taxpayer bailouts, and a nuclear industry that is perennially on the verge of a renaissance that never materializes. 

The failed history of nuclear power in America is not merely a tale of economic miscalculation and technological hubris; it is a cautionary epic of how wishful thinking, political expediency, and corporate lobbying can collide to create one of the most significant managerial disasters in industrial history.

The Genesis: Atoms for Peace and the Cold War Mirage

Nuclear power in the United States was born not from a desire to electrify homes, but to build bombs. The first reactors, constructed at the Hanford Site in Washington State during the Manhattan Project, existed to manufacture plutonium for atomic weapons, not to light up cities.

 The transition from bombs to boilers came in the shadow of the Cold War, when President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech sought to rebrand the atom’s destructive image into one of prosperity and progress.

This initiative, while noble in rhetoric, was as much a geopolitical strategy as an energy policy. The United States aimed to win hearts and minds in the developing world, ensuring that aspiring nuclear nations turned to Washington, not Moscow, for their technology. 

The Atoms for Peace program was, in effect, a nuclear Marshall Plan — part public relations, part market creation for American industrial giants like General Electric and Westinghouse.

Yet, from the outset, the economic case for nuclear power was dubious. Even General Electric’s own director of research warned in 1950 that atomic power was “an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy… not attractive at present, nor are they likely to be for a long time in the future”.

The Great Build-Out: Dreams, delays, and disasters

Between 1960 and 2000, more than 100 nuclear reactors were constructed across the United States, their designs ballooning from modest 300-megawatt units to behemoths exceeding 1,200 megawatts. The logic was simple: economies of scale would drive down costs. The reality was starkly different.

None of these reactors were built on time or within budget. All required massive taxpayer subsidies and ratepayer bailouts are needed to become operational. Not a single one proved financially viable or cost-competitive with conventional power sources. 

As construction costs soared, so too did the number of abandoned projects. Of the 253 reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, more than half were cancelled before completion, and only about 95 are still operating reliably today.

The financial and schedule collapse of these projects was so pervasive that, by 1985, Forbes magazine declared:

“The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale… only the blind or the biased can now think that the money has been well spent.

The price of failure: Cost overruns and cancellations

The pattern of cost overruns is legendary. The Shippingport plant, America’s first large-scale commercial reactor, was estimated at $37.8 million but ultimately cost nearly $100 million, with the government absorbing 95% of the bill. The recent saga of Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the flagship of the so-called “nuclear renaissance,” is a modern echo: initially budgeted at $14 billion for two new reactors, the project has now exceeded $30 billion and is more than six years behind schedule.

This is not merely a problem of the past. The much-hyped Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), touted as the future of nuclear energy, have already repeated the cycle. The first U.S. SMR project, led by NuScale, was cancelled in 2023 after its projected cost was 300% higher than planned. The notion that mass production would finally deliver the elusive economies of scale has, once again, proven illusory.

The safety myth: Accidents and regulatory capture

Beyond economics, the safety record of American nuclear power is checkered. The infamous Three Mile Island accident in 1979, caused by a cascade of design flaws and operator errors, had a lasting impact on public perception and regulatory oversight. A 2006 seminal report, researched and produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), analyzed 51 nuclear power plant failures that resulted in shutdowns of many atomic reactors for more than one year each. In its report entitled Walking a Nuclear Tightrope, UCS concluded:

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) seems to be following the script of the movie Groundhog Day, reliving the same bad event again and again. This event — an outage at a nuclear power plant that lasts more than a year — has happened 51 times at 41 different reactors around the United States and shows no signs of stopping.”

The regulatory system itself has been compromised by conflicts of interest. The Atomic Energy Commission, tasked with both promoting and regulating nuclear power, was eventually dissolved due to its perceived bias in favor of industry interests. Its successor agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy, inherited much of the same personnel and institutional culture, perpetuating a cycle of lax oversight and industry-friendly policies.

The SMR mirage: New wine in old bottles

Today, the nuclear industry’s latest gambit is the SMR — a technology promoted as cheaper, safer, and more flexible. Yet, the arguments echo those made in the 1950s: appeals to national pride, demands for government subsidies, and promises that mass production will finally make nuclear power competitive. The reality is that SMRs face even higher costs per megawatt than traditional reactors, and their commercial prospects are dim in a market now dominated by cheaper renewables such as solar, wind, and advanced geothermal.

As in the past, the industry’s survival depends on continued public funding. The Department of Energy has stepped in to provide billions in development funds for SMR designs that have no customers, while Congress and lobbyists keep the regulatory doors open.

A legacy of waste: Environmental and financial debts

The failure of nuclear power in the United States is not just a matter of dollars and cents. The industry has left a trail of environmental damage, including contaminated sites, leaking waste repositories, and decommissioned plants that require ongoing stewardship. Funding for cleanup and decontamination is inadequate, and the true costs will be borne by future generations. And because nuclear plants have the lowest thermodynamic efficiency of any thermal power plant, nukes produce 40% more waste heat into rivers than coal or oil plants. 

As policymakers and politicians once again flirt with the nuclear option — now repackaged as SMRs — the lessons of history remain as relevant as ever.

The cost to clean up this mess is staggering, with estimates as high as $500 billion, and that is just for our generation, not including meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Japan now estimates that the cleanup costs for Fukushima will exceed half a trillion dollars. Radioactive waste will be stored for the next 1,000 years, with the ultimate goal of achieving permanent isolation for up to 1 million years. But for now, nuclear waste remains in interim storage with no permanent solution in sight.

Conclusion: Lessons unlearned

Meanwhile, the opportunity cost is immense. As the nation poured resources into an atomic dream, cheaper and cleaner alternatives have surged ahead. In 2025, solar, wind, and batteries account for 93% of planned U.S. utility-scale electric-generating capacity additions, while nuclear’s share continues to shrink.

The history of nuclear power in the United States is a study in the dangers of technological hubris, regulatory capture, and the seductive power of grand promises. For seventy years, the industry has delivered not on its pledges of abundance, but on a record of cost overruns, safety lapses, and public bailouts.

Yet, as policymakers and politicians once again flirt with the nuclear option — now repackaged as SMRs — the lessons of history remain as relevant as ever. The American nuclear experiment stands as a monument to the perils of ignoring economic reality and the wisdom of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, who warned Congress in 1982:

“Now, when we go back to nuclear power, we are creating something (radiation) which nature tried to make life impossible… the most important thing we could do is… outlaw nuclear reactors too”.

The past, as Shakespeare wrote, is prologue. Unless the United States learns from its atomic misadventures, it risks repeating them — at ever greater cost.