The Nuclear Engineer Who Introduced Himself as a Peanut Farmer
James Earl Carter Jr., October 1, 1924 – December 29, 2024
By Matthew L. Wald
Jimmy Carter held an engineering degree from the Naval Academy, served on diesel-electric submarines from 1946 to 1953, and worked closely under Hyman Rickover to develop nuclear submarines. But he described himself as a peanut farmer, which must say something about his attitude toward nuclear energy, and his assessment of what Americans wanted in a candidate.
Carter, who died in December and was buried on January 9 in Plains, Georgia, near his peanut farm, made three critical decisions about nuclear energy during his term as president (1977-1981). None of them is much remembered today, outside the industry itself.
He went to Three Mile Island (TMI) four days after the melt-down there in March 1979, but he refrained from making any broad statements about the need for nuclear energy.
He continued a ban, begun by his predecessor, on reprocessing used nuclear fuel to recover the unburned uranium and the plutonium created during operations for re-use in reactors.
And he presided over the early stages of the decline in the United States’ ability to produce nuclear fuel for power plants here and around the world, despite his pledge to do the opposite.
The TMI accident presented an unlikely intersection of technology and politics. A common complaint about political leaders in democracies is that they don’t understand the details of technical subjects well enough to make smart decisions. But in a twist that approaches the implausible, a reactor melted down and the president actually was a nuclear engineer—one of only two presidents who were engineers. (The other was Herbert Hoover.)
Carter, a graduate of the Naval Academy, walked through the control room at TMI and undoubtedly understood what he was seeing. Carter graduated in 1946, before the Academy offered degrees in nuclear engineering, and arguably before nuclear engineers can be said to have existed, but he can fairly be called one, given his role in propulsion reactor development.
And yet at TMI he said very little that added to public understanding; his contribution was mainly in simply showing up, with his wife, Rosalynn, four days after the event, making clear that he was confident enough about safety to make a visit.
It was a time of considerable uncertainty. The Carters and other visitors wore bright yellow booties, fastened tight with masking tape around the ankles, a precaution often used in reactor containments (but not in control rooms, which is what he toured). The booties assure that if any radioactive particles are picked up while walking around, they can be easily contained by stripping off the booties and turning them inside out, like dirty socks, so they can be disposed of as low-level waste.
His statement after touring the place was about as mild as could be imagined. “My primary concern in coming here this afternoon has been to learn as much as I possibly can, as President, about the problems at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power plant and to assure the people of this region that everything possible is being done and will be done to cope with these problems,” he told reporters. He did, however, appoint a top-notch commission to investigate.
TMI Was Round 2
Even more unlikely, it was Carter’s second nuclear accident. A quarter-century earlier, he was sent by the Navy to lead a team of 23 people at the Canadian national nuclear lab in Chalk River, Ontario, to help clean up a research reactor that suffered fuel damage in an accident in December 1952. In that case, some control rods failed to descend into the core and were mistakenly withdrawn, causing the reactor power to surge to about three times its maximum safe operating power, melting a few of the rods. The United States was using the reactor to test submarine fuel, and wanted it fixed quickly.
It reopened 14 months later.
The story of Carter’s role at Chalk River has grown somewhat in the retelling, as well as the degree of risk involved. Cleanup work was shared among many Canadian nuclear technicians and the Americans who came to help, to reduce the radiation dose to any individual, and according to one estimate, the average dose was less than half the limit now set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States for power plant workers each year. If the estimate is correct, average exposure was below the dose that, in this country, would trigger consideration of taking protective action for members of the public in a nuclear accident.
At TMI, one helpful part of his statement was that radiation levels were “quite safe for all concerned.” It might have carried more weight if he’d stressed his nuclear credentials, but he didn’t.
There hasn’t been a nuclear mishap in this country that was remotely worth a presidential visit since 1979.
Three Mile Island was a national fixation. Saturday Night Live did a skit about “Two Mile Island,” in which a control room operator brings back lunch for his colleagues and spills a soda on the control panel, triggering a melt-down. President Carter visits and immediately realizes that the plant has been through “the Pepsi Syndrome,” when cola shorts out the control panels. He goes into the containment, and the radiation exposure makes him grow into a giant, “The Amazing Colossal President.”
But the skit gave the public more presidential dialogue than the real event.
Despite not saying much on his visit to central Pennsylvania, Carter may have been the most consequential president for nuclear energy since Dwight Eisenhower, who pledged in his “atoms for peace” speech of December, 1953, to make nuclear technology “a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.” But Carter’s influence wasn’t very positive for the technology. “There is no dilemma today more difficult to resolve than that connected with the use of nuclear power,” he said in April, 1977, a few days after the TMI accident. Carter cited nuclear energy’s benefit as a domestic energy source that would outlive oil and gas, but also highlighted the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons. He called for research into fuel cycles that he thought were less likely to facilitate nuclear weapons proliferation.
The Early States of a Nuclear Fuel Crisis
In that same statement just after TMI, Carter said he would support increasing the country’s capacity to make enriched uranium. But through his single term and beyond, the government failed to modernize the 1940s gaseous diffusion technology that had its origins in the Manhattan Project. The United States lost its dominance in the enrichment market because it failed to assure international customers that the U.S. would be a reliable supplier. That led the Europeans to develop centrifuges for their own use. Today that is the dominant technology and the U.S. is struggling to catch up, and wean itself off Russian enrichment services.
Carter is one of a series of presidents who led the United States into that problem, but he was probably the one who understood it best. And he made the fuel supply problem worse by banning reprocessing, which meant that all the fuel had to come from virgin uranium.
His successor, Ronald Reagan, reversed the ban on reprocessing, but by that time, the private sector had given up. The utility sector in general, and especially the nuclear industry, does not deal well with sudden shifts in federal policy.
And, ironically, the U.S. Government’s decision to let Europe go its own way on enrichment eventually led to nuclear weapons proliferation, because a Pakistani metallurgist stole the European centrifuge design and took it home, where his government used it to make bomb fuel. In contrast, nobody has used reprocessed fuel from light water reactors to make weapons fuel, largely because it isn’t well suited for that purpose.
President Carter, the Engineer
Carter was unusual for being in politics with an engineering degree; Engineers aren’t well represented in American politics. According to the Congressional Research Service, there are eight in the House and one in the Senate. (Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering.) Representative Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, worked as a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Among the fifty governors, two have B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering: Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Bill Lee of Tennessee, both strong nuclear backers. The governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, has a degree in electrical engineering. Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who supports the Seabrook reactor in his state, has a B.S. in environmental engineering. But the engineers are far outnumbered by the lawyers, consultants, and people who list their profession as “public service” or just plain politician.
And Carter, the engineer, showed some energy savvy and some aspiration in two decisions as president. Faced with the aftermath of the Arab Oil Embargo (which occurred during Richard Nixon’s presidency) and a high bill for energy imports, he declared a campaign to conserve that he called “the Moral Equivalent Of War,” although it was derided by some who noted the acronym, “MEOW.” And he spent $28,000 to put 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, where they saved oil by heating tap water. This was in the days before solar panels were remotely practical for making electricity. But Reagan, his successor, had the panels removed.
Carter also signed the legislation establishing the Department of Energy, although much of that agency’s responsibility isn’t in energy at all; it is in nuclear weapons.
What Carter’s presidency did not include was any policy helpful to nuclear energy that was based on his unusual background. He clearly understood the essential nature of propulsion reactors, for the Navy’s submarines and surface ships, and must have understood that the technology could be operated to a very high standard. He himself had helped that happen.
And he was in a better position understand nuclear power and its benefits than his successor, Ronald Reagan, who had once worked as a a paid spokesman for a reactor manufacturer, General Electric, and who could be very persuasive on all kinds of topics, despite a lack of technical credentials.
But Carter stressed thrift and personal sacrifice, de-emphasizing material prosperity. He advocated turning down the thermostat, wearing a sweater, and driving slower on the highway. Before the TMI accident and after, Carter did not extend his deep understanding of the possibilities of nuclear to its obvious civilian applications, despite his unique qualifications for doing so.