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Too cheap to meter

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Too cheap to meter describes a commodity so inexpensive that it is cheaper and less bureaucratic to simply provide it for a flat fee or even free and make a profit from associated services. It can also refer to services which it would cost more to itemize bills for the service than it costs to provide the service in the first place, thus it being simpler and less expensive to just provide it in a bundle along with other services.

Origins

Although sometimes attributed to Walter Marshall, a pioneer of nuclear power in the United Kingdom,[1] the phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who, in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers, said:

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.[2][3]

The statement was contentious even when stated. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission itself, in testimony to the U.S. Congress only months before, lowered the expectations for fission power, projecting only that the costs of reactors could be brought down to about the same as those for conventional sources.[4] A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[5] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously."[6]

Fusion or fission?

Strauss's prediction did not come true, and over time it became a target of those pointing to the industry's record of overpromising and underdelivering.[6]

In 1980, the Atomic Industrial Forum wrote an article quoting Lewis H. Strauss, Strauss's son, claiming that he was not talking about nuclear fission, but nuclear fusion.[7] As the AEC's Project Sherwood was still classified at the time, he was not allowed to refer to this work directly, thus causing confusion. Since that time, the claim has been widely repeated, including in 2003 comments by Donald Hintz, chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute.[6]

To support this argument, Strauss and biographer Pfau point to statements made in which he noted "industry would have electrical power from atomic furnaces in five to fifteen years."[8] It was claimed that this timeline implies that Strauss was referring to fusion, not fission.[6] But this is not a direct quote, this version of the statement appeared in the New York Times overview of the speech the next day.[9]

The statement in question is actually:

Dr. Lawrence Hafstad, whom all of you surely know, happens to be speaking, today, in Brussels before the Congress of Industrial Chemistry. He heads the Reactor Development Division of the Atomic Energy Commission. Therefore, he expects to be asked, "How soon will you have industrial atomic electric power in the United States?" His answer is "from 5 to 15 years depending on the vigor of the development effort."[3]

This statement is referring directly to fission reactors and immediately precedes the "too cheap to meter" statement.[3]

The speech as a whole contains large sections about the development of fission power, and the difficulties the Commission was having communicating this fact. He wryly notes receiving letters addressed to the "Atomic Bomb Commission" and then quotes a study that demonstrates the public is largely ignorant of the development of atomic power.[10] He goes on to briefly recount the development of fission, noting a letter from Leo Szilard of sixteen years earlier where he speaks of the possibility of a chain reaction.[11]

Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles", Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[6] Once again, Strauss is directly referring to fission. A later examination of the topic concluded: "there is no evidence in Strauss's papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library to indicate fusion was the hidden subject of his speech."[6]

Strauss viewed hydrogen fusion as the ultimate power source. He was eager to develop the technology as quickly as possible and urged the Project Sherwood researchers to make rapid progress, even suggesting a million-dollar prize to the individual or team that succeeded first.[12] However Strauss was not optimistic about the rapid commercialization of fusion power. In August 1955 after fusion research was made public, he cautioned "there has been nothing in the nature of breakthroughs that would warrant anyone assuming that this [fusion power] was anything except a very long range—and I would accent the word 'very'—prospect."[6]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ "Nuclear doubts gnaw deeper". BBC News. 15 June 2000.
  2. ^ "This Day in Quotes: SEPTEMBER 16 - Too cheap to meter: the great nuclear quote debate". This day in quotes. 2009. Retrieved December 13, 2009.
  3. ^ a b c Strauss 1954, p. 9.
  4. ^ "ATOMIC ENERGY: The Nuclear Revolution". Time Magazine. 6 February 1956.
  5. ^ Brown, M.J. (14 December 2016). "Too Cheap to Meter?". Canadian Nuclear Society.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Wellock 2016.
  7. ^ Livingston, Robert; Bianchi, Ron, eds. (May 1980). Report on public understanding of nuclear energy, #142. Atomic Industrial Forum.
  8. ^ Billington 2010, p. 238.
  9. ^ "Abundant Power from Atom Seen; It will be too cheap for our children to meter, Strauss tells science writers". New York Times. 17 September 1954. p. 5.
  10. ^ Strauss 1954, p. 5.
  11. ^ Strauss 1954, p. 7.
  12. ^ Bromberg, Joan Lisa (1982) Fusion: Science, Politics, and the Invention of a New Energy Source MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 44, ISBN 0-262-02180-3

Biblography

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