Converging on the Clinch River: the politics of the US breeder reactor program

For decades the development of nuclear technologies, including the fast breeder, was controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and the nuclear industry, the three pillars of the nuclear technoscience network, the analysis of the formation, culture, growth, and disruption of the network sets the stage for the study of the fast breeder, a program conceived by the scientific estate and carried along and nurtured by the administrative and political estates of the nuclear technoscience network, the early chapters delineate the dimensions of the network. The relationships and influence of its actors, and its unique and secretive culture. The cooperative-client politics of the breeder's deployment ended when the program, for years protected within the interstices of the network, emerged from this protected environment into the larger political system, where it became the subject of Washington's entrepreneurial politics. Under these changed circumstances progress on the LMFBR came to a virtual standstill. Nevertheless, the LMFBR survived the turbulent seventies, when energy and the environment dominate the political agenda, because remnants of the nuclear technoscience network in the executive branch, in Congress, and in the private sector retained sufficient power to prevent the breeder's death. This case study of the politics of the breeder's deployment addresses the dilemma of the experts, their role in the decision-making process as well as the problem of uncertainty within the framework of network theory. This perspective allows for the examination of the multifaceted controversy over the deployment of the fast breeder in the United States, a national debate that eventually converged on the Clinch River