It’s Time for Less Perilous Energy Sources

The nuclear reactor disaster now unfolding in the Soviet Union should awaken world leadership to the need to expand research and development on alternate sources of energy.

Over the next few decades the opportunity exists to fulfill our needs through more efficient use of energy and through development of solar and other renewable energy forms. But as research, development and commercial successes of these alternatives continue to mount, most national governments--especially ours--have markedly reduced their support for such ventures while continuing to promote and subsidize nuclear energy.

Leaders in government and industry continue to extol the safety of nuclear energy, a mind set that threatens the world’s security.

Not only Chernobyl, but the fiasco at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the recent tragic failure of the space shuttle Challenger should warn us all how fallible we humans are.

Nuclear energy is super-dangerous and we must face up to this fact.

Why else would we spend a billion or more dollars for safety devices for a single reactor? Why else would we install a containment building with 3- to 4-feet thick steel reinforced walls around the reactor? Why do insurance companies refuse to cover the nuclear industry’s potential liability? And why did the industry refuse to go ahead with the construction of nuclear plants until the federal government drastically limited the amount of damages that the utilities would have to pay out in the event of an accident? Why, after seven years and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, is the damaged reactor at Three Mile Island still not cleaned up? Why do the news media and government leaders cry out hour-by-hour about the great hazards of the Chernobyl accident? Is it because nuclear energy is safe?

The Soviet disaster, which may have killed thousands and incapacitated many more, and which will probably make a substantial part of the Ukraine uninhabitable for decades, is just the current debacle. More will certainly follow.

The world now has 361 nuclear power reactors in operation, with another 144 under construction or on order. Many of the older ones are increasingly susceptible to failure. The serious financial problems of the nuclear industry and the waning interest in technical careers in this field bode ill for adequate staffing and management of the reactors in the future.

Forty years into the nuclear era, the world still doesn’t have the means to dispose of the highly radioactive waste accumulating at nuclear plants. Each year about one-third of the used fuel loaded with highly dangerous fission products is placed in pools of water outside the protection of the containment buildings, waiting for a decision on what to do with it--or for some accident or terrorist act to spread it around the countryside.

The nuclear industry is now calling for the decommissioning of plants after a 25- to 30-year useful life. It has yet to be determined whether these plants will be mothballed and guarded for decades as off-limits to humanity, or will be chopped up with remote-control devices and shipped to some guarded, off-limits burial ground.

The most serious threat from nuclear energy plants--one far beyond another Chernobyl-type disaster--is their production of plutonium, the ingredient of nuclear bombs. It is now becoming an article of international commerce. Little imagination is required to picture a terrorist with a homemade bomb holed up in a rooming house on Capitol Hill in Washington.

It appears essential, then, to provide humanity with alternate choices of energy supply.

When a society reduces its waste of energy or develops the means to use energy more efficiently, such as getting more miles per gallon of gasoline, it reduces the need for building more energy-producing plants. With a modest effort over the last decade, the United States saved more energy than is produced by all our nuclear plants today. With an an all-out effort, we could save an even greater additional amount by the year 2000.

The potential for renewable forms of energy is large enough to fulfill all of our needs over the long run. As demonstrated by the forest-products industry, the burning of wood under proper controls already rivals the energy production of the nuclear industry. And photovoltaic devices that use sunlight to produce electricity stand out as the great hope for the world’s energy future. Clearly a photovoltaic plant would be a much more friendly neighbor than a nuclear power plant.

You don’t need to take my word for this optimistic view of the potential for energy conservation and renewable sources of energy. Ask the electric utilities in California. They believe in it and are making it happen.