Talk:Too cheap to meter

Improper redirect

What an insane redirect... My electricity comes from a nuke plant, the electricity company certainly doesn't think it' too cheap to meter. At least judging by the bills they keep sending.

I've completely rewritten the entry. It needs further work. Blubbaloo (talk) 02:03, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Popularity and ambiguity

We should not discount the popular impact of this statement. I added "Newspaper articles at the time..." and I wonder why there is any question about Strauss' meaning. Clearly the New York Times, writing about the Sept. 16 1954 speech, understood that Strauss was referring to the entire atomic energy program. Even if Strauss was misunderstood, he did not take any great pains to clear up the record. User:wkovarik -- Bill Kovarik, March 15, 2011.

A direct copy of the entire speech would clear up most of the questions around the usual (often mangled, as the one included today is) quotes. (Did the NYT reprint the entire speech or just portions?)
Robert Pool, 1997 p.71,[1] quotes this preceding line, often left out: "Transmutation of the elements--unlimited power ... these and a host of other results all in fifteen short years. It is not too much to expect that our children...." etc. There's little question that Strauss was waxing poetic; more to the point: many sources say he was encouraging science writers to promote fission power to these ends. Which completely makes sense considering their need to create more plutonium.
His view was not widely shared; in 1951, General Electric's own C. G. Suits, who was operating the Hanford reactors, said that "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.... This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."[2] Twang (talk) 16:53, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

The evidence that Strauss was referring to fusion is pretty strong. Strauss' biography states point blank that he was referring to fusion. Also Strauss' son (also named Lewis Strauss) was a physicist who served as the elder Strauss' eyes and ears on Project Sherwood and sent his father a steady stream of enthusiastic progress reports. Moreover, while Strauss was also a promoter of fission power and was more optimistic than most of its economic potential, the comments he made that are unambiguously directed at fission only went so far as to express a belief it could become "cost effective" given enough innovation and industrial scaling. Also the AEC, in testimony before Congress only months before only indicated fission might eventually become "competitive" with conventional sources. It would be hard to provide a convincing rationale why Strauss would have believed fission power could be "too cheap to meter". At the time fission wasn't being promoted as a source of cheap electricity but to provide a competing use for uranium as part of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. It was an attempt to stem the buildup of nuclear weapons with the idea that uranium that was being used for atomic "plowshares" was material that was not being used for nuclear swords. I question whether C.G. Suits and others were even aware of Project Sherwood at the time they made their statements. It was, after all, a secret program. Strauss' enthusiasm for fusion research is well documented in Joan Bromberg's history of the fusion program (which was commissioned by DOE and drew from interviews with many of the researchers from Project Sherwood). Blubbaloo (talk) 11:07, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

@Bulbbaloo: I'm sorry, but I find this link to fusion extremely hard to believe. Sherwood was top secret at the time, and we're supposed to believe that he would so casually hint it in public with a bunch of science writers? Hmmm. And the evidence offered to back this claim up is that some weeks earlier he spoke of industrial use of nuclear power? How does one get fusion from that? The fission industry has been promoting the use of process heat since it formed. The rest of your post then apparently contradicts the first part, as it goes on about why be might believe fission would be economical. And as somone who's read Bromberg cover to cover, and written some great amount of the fusion related articles here on the wiki, I find the casual linkage offered here to be rather SYNful. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:48, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Quote discrepancy

The quote in the article begins, "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter". The linked text from the AEC release says "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter". Our quote and the sources given should agree. - Remedial Reading Assistant (talk) 05:11, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. Opencooper (talk) 02:20, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Rewrite

I have rewritten this page based on the actual speech, who's text is now available online in PDF format. It can be found in the references section. I have also clarified the claims that he was talking about fusion - he was not, and that is clear when one reads the original speech. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:15, 29 January 2020 (UTC)