The Great Nuclear Fizzle at Old B & W

Abstract

The long-awaited transition for the US electric power industry into the nuclear age has been slowed by a number of factors, including technological difficulties and public resistance. But a specific and unexpected cause for delay has been one company’s crucial failure to deliver a single vital component of nuclear power plants. The failure, basically, was a management failure, and on a scale that would be cause for concern even to a fly-by-night newcomer to the nuclear industry. The company, however, was no newcomer. It was proud old Babcock & Wilcox Co. (B & W), a pioneer of the steam generating business, whose boilers were used in one of the first central power plants ever built (in Philadelphia, in 1881). B & W had an impressive $648m in sales last year, making it 157th on Fortune’s, list of 500 largest industrials, and it has been engaged in nuclear work in a major way for 15 years, producing, among other things, atomic power systems for Navy submarines.

Everything went wrong when the venerable boilermakers turned to building pressure vessels for atomic reactors. The whole electric power industry felt the consequences.