Word: aec
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Regulation of reactors began under the Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1946 shortly after the first atomic bomb fell on Japan. The AEC had the job of both promoting and safeguarding the development of atomic power. In 1974 President Gerald Ford signed a bill splitting the AEC into two agencies with separate functions: the Energy Research and Development Administration, which encourages the growth of nuclear power, and the NRC, which is concerned with safety...
...AEC chairman, Ray showed she was just as tough as Schlesinger suspected. Says one former AEC member: "She has a streak of Golda Meir in her." She created a separate division to set up stiffer safety standards for reactors, although the move affronted some top AEC officials who claimed it was unnecessary. She also made the AEC pay more heed to environmental-impact studies on reactors...
...with her constant companions?a miniature gray poodle named Jacques and a huge, dignified Scottish deerhound named Ghillie. She moored the $18,000 bus on a dairy farm in Maryland. A Government limousine would pull up every morning, and Ray and her two dogs would be whisked to the AEC offices. At her suggestion, the AEC was reorganized in 1975 into two agencies and Ray then moved on to become Assistant Secretary of State for scientific affairs. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dodged her frequent requests for meetings, she quit after six frustrating months, declaring that trying...
...former AEC chairman believes the atom is the answer. Ray argues that strict safety standards are being incorporated into the state's six nuclear reactors now planned or under construction ?including two at Hanford, site of the nation's first center to produce plutonium. Says she: "We are going to have atomic power as fossil fuels dwindle, so we may as well get used...
Carter, a former nuclear engineer, and Schlesinger, the onetime head of the AEC, might have been expected to put more emphasis on the development of nuclear power as a major part of the solution to the U.S. energy shortage. Not so. Apparently frightened about the possibility of reactor byproducts falling into the hands of irresponsible governments or bomb-building terrorists, Carter has already chopped $200 million from Ford's leftover budget for the development of advanced breeder reactors, which produce bomb-grade plutonium even as they produce energy. The Schlesinger program will call for a modest acceleration...