By Robert Trigaux, Times Staff Writer
Saturday, April 7, 2012
The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.
The rant of an antinuclear activist?
Hardly. It was the first sentence of an in-depth story in a conservative business magazine, Forbes.
In 1985.
Forbes' point then — that out-of-control costs and poor decisionmaking doomed the nuclear power industry — may prove as relevant in 2012 as it was a generation ago. And it points up a looming question as Tampa Bay faces its own $22.4 billion nuclear project:
Is the U.S. nuclear power industry poised to repeat its own troubled and, at times, inept history?
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Eerie parallels link then and now. Just as today, it was an age that began with great nuclear optimism.
In 1954, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss ...