Nuclear power plants are completely safe and produce energy that is 'too cheap to meter.'
Nuclear power carries real risks including core meltdowns (Three Mile Island 1979, Chernobyl 1986, Fukushima 2011), radioactive waste storage challenges, and catastrophic failure modes. The 'too cheap to meter' quote was taken out of context but reflected genuine 1950s–60s optimism.
What changed?
The phrase had an elegant precision: energy "too cheap to meter." Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, used it in a 1954 speech to science writers, describing atomic power's transformative potential in terms that bordered on utopia. No matter that he was speaking generally rather than making a specific engineering promise; the phrase traveled, and by the late 1950s and into the 1960s, nuclear power had acquired an almost redemptive character in American popular and educational culture. Clean. Limitless. A second chance after the bombers.
The physics was real. A small amount of uranium produces an enormous amount of heat through fission, millions of times more energy per unit mass than coal. The first commercial nuclear power plant, at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, came online in December 1957. By 1967, nuclear plants were operating across the United States and Western Europe, and their output was expanding. The economic promise wasn't fabricated; fuel costs were genuinely minimal compared to fossil fuels.
What the optimism elided were the engineering realities. Reactor design required managing enormous energy densities in systems where failure modes could be catastrophic. Radioactive waste decayed over geological timescales and had no safe long-term storage solution. And in March 1979, the cooling system at Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Pennsylvania failed. Operators, facing confusing instrumentation and inadequate training, made decisions that allowed the reactor core to partially melt down. No one died immediately, but radioactive gases were released and 140,000 people evacuated the surrounding area. The accident that was supposed to be impossible had happened.
Then in April 1986, Chernobyl Unit 4 exploded. Together, the two accidents killed the era of American nuclear expansion. No new nuclear plant ordered after 1978 was completed in the United States. The "too cheap to meter" era had lasted roughly two decades, long enough to become curriculum, too short to survive contact with the engineering problems it had underestimated.