Today's SSEB traces its origins to the birth of the nuclear age in World War Two's final days. While kept closely within military control initially, nuclear power soon came to represent in the eyes of a number of southern governors of the mid-1950s the promise of boundless and cheap power for regional development. Their insights prompted the Southern Governors Conference to facilitate creation of the Southern Regional Advisory Council on Nuclear Energy in 1957, an act that led ultimately to the drafting and submission to the Congress of a charter for the Southern Interstate Nuclear Board (SINB).
When President John F. Kennedy offered his approval to the SINB charter in July 1962, seven southern states already had agreed to serve as a core group for organizing its programs and activities. Charged with coordination as well as policy and programmatic innovations, rather than operation of nuclear facilities, the organization endeavored to make its mark despite critical funding shortfalls in a region where many states were blessed with energy resources and others were energy poor. Struggles in the nature of its own governance in the late 1960s thereafter coincided with the rise of the Environmental Movement and concerns about nuclear power safety.
By the early 1970s, the leadership of the Southern Governors Conference addressed SINB institutional concerns by opting to revitalize the agency. A new leadership was recruited that commenced a metamorphosis through which the board's purview grew to include energy generally and, ultimately, environmental issues as well. Steps also were taken to continue the organization's tradition of academic leadership while ensuring greater governmental input and sensitivity.
These changes were ratified as the decade drew toward its close by the renaming of SINB as the Southern States Energy Board. Quickly, policy leadership passed to governors and legislators attuned both to the needs of their states and of the financial realities faced within the region.
SSEB acted in the process to provide institutional mechanisms to preserve and bring to the fore all the potential of academic input that the Southern Interstate Nuclear Board previously had enjoyed. The establishment of SSEB marked also the era in which the United States Government began to involve itself in large-scale policy decisions, regulatory initiatives, and research programs aimed at intertwined energy and environmental issues. To an extent thereafter, the organization had to learn to adapt to the dramatically altered patterns of successive presidential administrations and changed congressional control. SSEB pursued its reliable but flexible representation of southern interests, while integrating those efforts with other regional and national organizations and government agencies.
Today, SSEB monitors everything from national security to carbon dioxide, baseload resource allocation to renewables technology. In doing the organization calls upon more than half a century of relationships and expertise across lines of industry, academic, government, and civic involvement to further critical thinking and practical application, always with the broad national picture in mind.
6325 Amherst Court, Norcross, Georgia, 30092 | Tel: (770) 242-7712 | Fax: (770) 242-9956
