What is Project Independence? The sources and uses of energy in the United States have changed dramatically in the last several decades. As a result, in just one generation, we have shifted from a position of domestic energy abundance to a substantial and continually growing reliance on foreign energy sources. Project Independence is a wide-ranging program to evaluate this growing dependence on foreign sources of energy, and to develop positive programs to reduce our vulnerability to future oil cut-offs and price increases.

In the decades that followed World War II, cheap and plentiful oil helped to fuel rapid economic growth, ensure political stability, and reinforce the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Yet waves of price increases and the use of the so-called “oil weapon” by a group of Arab oil-producing countries in the early 1970s demonstrated the West’s dependence on this vital resource and its vulnerability to economic volatility and political conflicts. Oil and Sovereignty analyzes the national and international strategies that American and European governments formulated to restructure the world of oil and deal with the era’s disruptions. It shows how a variety of different actors combined diplomacy, knowledge creation, economic restructuring, and public relations in their attempts to impose stability and reassert national sovereignty.

This report contains the final technical analysis of the Project Independence Interagency Nuclear Task Force chaired by the Atomic Energy Commission. The task force was formed in April 1974 to provide estimates for the Project Independence Blueprint of the potential production capabilities of the nuclear industry and the resources necessary to achieve these levels of production. The task force evaluated several alternative strategies which assumed various levels of potential production. The report is organized into three sections. The first two sections consists of the introduction and the findings of the Task Force. The third section consist of topical discussions of the major resources (e.g., financial investments, manpower, and materials and equipment) required to achieve the projected production levels as well as subjects associated with nuclear power generation (e.g., environmental effects, public acceptance, research and development).