Fluid Things: Oil Money in US Nuclear Industry in the 1970s

Just as demand for nuclear energy rose in the world spurred by the 1973 oil shock, government subsidies for the US nuclear industry fell. Oil companies, such as Gulf Oil and Exxon, flush with surplus from rising oil prices began reinvesting in the nuclear industry— reactor construction and uranium mining— disrupting longtime players like Bechtel, Union Carbide, and others. For the first time since the Second World War, US nuclear industry witnessed unprecedented challenges. Not only did these setbacks involve the entry of rich oil companies and reduction in state subsidies, but also included increased Congressional oversight through antitrust legislations, anti-nuclear protests, and Indigenous legal activism against mining­ and nuclear weapons testing sites. The spillover of oil money into reactor and mining laid bare the susceptibilities of the nuclear industry, notably, its dependence on state subsidies, chronic unprofitability, and vulnerability to competition in domestic and international markets. Through emphasizing interconnections between oil, gas, and nuclear in the transformative decade of the 1970s, this paper de-exceptionalizes the “nuclear,” placing it in the fraught landscape of US politics and society. While US diplomats were preoccupied fighting calls for a New International Economic Order at the United Nations by countries from the Global South, lawmakers at home faced a different ideological landscape. Here, objections to “big government” on the political right and “big corporations” on the left, united civil society opposition to the nuclear industry. In response, these companies adopted a rhetoric of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism to improve their image on the one hand, and financially reconstituted themselves offshore to save costs, prevent accountability, and avoid effects of antitrust laws, on the other. By the time the 1979 Three Mile Island accident shook the country, hopes had been long shattered for any revival of the industry.