Throughout January 2011, a suite of overlapping articles has extolled President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s prescience about the “continuing imperative” of disarmament, the rise since World War II of a “permanent war-based industry dictating national policy,” and the need for citizen vigilance and engagement to curb the “military-industrial” (and Congressional) complex. In his brief January 1961 farewell address, the two-term president also warned of the undue influence of the scientific-technological elite and their quest for magic bullets to cure every ill; of the loss of independent intellectual pursuit in “the free university” with the rise of government research grants; and of mortgaging the future by overconsuming finite resources in the moment. Manifold insight, indeed.
Yet eight years prior to his farewell address, Eisenhower made a fateful decision which set our country and the world on a course from which we must find our way back.
In 1951 President Truman created a blue ribbon commission to evaluate and propose a plan for the U.S. energy future. The 1952 Paley Commission Report, named for the commission chair, proposed that the U.S. build the economy on solar energy sources. The report also offered a strong negative assessment of nuclear energy and called for “aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy” as well as R&D on wind and biomass. In 1953 the new President Eisenhower ignored the report recommendation and inaugurated “Atoms for Peace,” touting nuclear power as the world’s new energy miracle that would be “too cheap to meter,” according to Lew Strauss, Chair of Atomic Energy Commission. Fundamentalist faith in nuclear energy abounded.
In this same period, photovoltaic solar cells (PV) were developed by Bell laboratories for the new space program and used to power the Vanguard satellite. Our country was poised to make energy breakthroughs in PV; but, with the magic, millennialist bullet of nuclear power, photovoltaics were consigned to power miniscule cells in watches and calculators. The revolution in solar-derived energy, which should have joined the one in personal computers and the Internet, was aborted. When it revived much later, it did so elsewhere: in Denmark, Germany and Japan yielding green jobs, industry, technical expertise, infrastructure, and market niche for renewable energy technologies.
Why the early myopia in energy policy? Scientists of the 1950s were seduced by the omnipotence of atomic fission and fusion, writes energy policy expert Hermann Scheer and author of the groundbreaking book, Energy Autonomy. An “arrogant fossil/nuclear worldview emerged,” which dismissed solar energy as backward and pre-industrial; as an “ideological fixation and technological pipedream” — precisely, Scheer posits, what the proponents of nuclear power themselves were guilty of.
– from opednews.com