David Rossin: Ike grasped the potential of 'Atoms for Peace'

Last Modified: Friday, May 17, 2013 at 3:40 p.m.

Sixty years ago this month I was a senior at Cornell University, getting ready for final exams. I lived in a fraternity house. A dozen of us hung out in the living room to watch President Eisenhower's big speech on our Muntz TV.

Eisenhower was a father figure to us. He spoke in May 1953 about the atomic bombs that had ended World War II and the hope that their power could be captured and transformed into electric energy for America and the world.

And then he outlined his "Atoms for Peace" proposal. I was intrigued and thrilled. Little did I know that 15 months later I would be teaching an experiment at Argonne National Lab near Chicago about radiation shielding to nine foreign students, most older than me (but not by much). They were from nine different countries. "Atoms for Peace" was at work.

I heard about or stayed in touch with all nine of the international students in that first class. Most became leaders in nuclear power research and development in their own countries. A couple of them stayed here and became citizens and professors.

By the mid-1970s more than 100 nuclear power plants were running or being built in the United States and as many more around the free world. Today there are more than 500. Even back then, we knew that, unlike coal-burning power plants, nuclear plants didn't pollute the air or emit carbon dioxide.

We also knew about the nuclear fuel cycle, how fuel rods, after they had done their time in a reactor, would be sent to a reprocessing plant and separated. About one percent would be plutonium. One to two percent would be radioactive nuclear waste and contaminated metal. The remaining 97 percent would be uranium, mostly U-238, the inert isotope that made up 96 percent of all the uranium that had been loaded into the reactor in the first place.

The dream for the future was a sustainable electric energy supply. The key would be to mix the separated plutonium with some new uranium, make it into new fuel rods and recycle it to make more electricity.

The long-range plan was to recycle it into breeder reactors. These power plants would actually make more plutonium which could be recycled even more efficiently in future breeder reactors. All of these steps had been proven in experimental facilities and a couple of prototypes were already in successful operation.

Breeders would be designed to burn plutonium in a closed fuel cycle, rather than store it and bury it with the waste. The real dream was a nonpolluting, proliferation-proof system which would supply a third of all the electricity the nation would need, all under international inspection and control.

That may yet happen decades from now, once our political leaders recognize that energy shortages are the most serious national risk. Nuclear power must play a decisive role while reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector.

Today nuclear power provides around 20 percent of our nation's electricity. A total of 71 nuclear plants are being built worldwide, including five in the United States; another 150 are planned and more than 340 are proposed. More than 1 billion people in 30 countries are benefiting from nuclear-generated electricity.

Yet, despite the overarching importance of nuclear power to our well-being, organized environmental groups are demanding action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by incremental alternatives like solar and wind, taking care never to mention the "N" word. What remains to be seen is whether they will ever wake up and recognize that nuclear power must be part of the answer.

David Rossin of Sarasota is a retired engineer and expert in nuclear energy. He holds a doctorate in metallurgy from Case Institute of Technology and formerly was president of the American Nuclear Society.

This story appeared in print on page A14


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