On 10/15/2024 at 9:12 AM, tadmjones said:
I have a hard time seeing electrical generation and transmission as a purely market driven ‘for profit’ industry/enterprise. . . .
Government-Owned Utilities
In the US, the constitutional clause of Eminent Domain is usually invoked to obtain land for transmission lines.* Early on the power company for northern Illinois, for whom I worked, had gotten the land by sending out individuals posing as buying land for themselves, though in fact they were buying for the company. As I recall the story, the cover was blown, and the company had to switch to Eminent Domain. Utilities in the US are private companies, legal monopolies, and regulated in many economic decisions by State agencies.
In the case of nuclear-power generation in the US, there is naturally a close connection to the federal government, not in economic decisions, but in regulation for public safety of plant construction and plant operations. That is an independent oversight beyond the internal requirements for safety, which are intense. My father mentioned to me once that the federal government considered having nuclear generation to be simply run by the federal government. But they opted for private generation under regulation by a federal agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. Additionally, Congress passed a statute limiting overall liability for any nuclear accident at the generating stations. Responsibility for spent fuel rods was given to the Department of Energy. Our operations benefit greatly by hires out of the Nuclear Navy; their training there is superb, and they do well at passing tests required to become a Senior Reactor Operator.
The AEC was not only regulating for safety but was promoting the expansion of nuclear generation in the US. After the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant, a new agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, replaced AEC. The NRC’s mission is only public safety (and we have a damned good track record since then), not promotion of nuclear generation. During completion of the plant where I worked (which was the last plant built in America, though new, additional reactors are being added to a plant in Georgia) we had these standing jokes: “We can’t make steam until the weight of the paper equals the weight of the plant.” “Making the world safe for coal power.” Making nuclear operations ultra-safe is very expensive, and I think that is why nuclear did not, as had been expected in my youth, take over from the other ways of making steam for the turbine. I still remember the day I arrived at the plant under construction (no fuel on site yet) and the young man from nuclear navy (attack sub) giving me a tour of the facility. When we walked into the containment building, I was in awe and thought “this is something from Star Wars.” When I see the fabulous constructions in science fiction movies to this day, I think of what it actually takes to build such things were they for real and what it takes for safe operations and how astronomical would be the cost.
My coffee mug for each morning many years now is a memento of our achievement of initial criticality for the first of two reactors at my plant. I see printed on the mug that Initial Criticality was reached 29 May 1987, 10:39 p.m. That was a lot stress, teamwork, and dedication (and damage to family relations because of the hours). It was like we were in a war, ultimately because so much money was on the line with passage of more time. I was the first person to be allowed to leave the plant without leaving the company, due to my lover in Chicago getting AIDS, a death sentence at that time. What good people in that company.
In a long vista, Tad, this interlacing of private endeavors with government, especially the defense function in government, is a continuation of what began in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.
, when was the Fed established ? 