Irrational fight against nuclear power

Time Essay: The Irrational Fight Against Nuclear Power

By http://doc.xuehai.net;PE TE R STOLER Monday, Sept. 25, 1978

Back in the benign 1950s, Americans looked on the atom as a friend, a cheerful Reddy Kilowatt that would provide cheap, abundant electricity to run their factories, power their TV sets and even chill the beer they drank while watching them. Today much of this enthusiasm has not only evaporated but turned into antipathy. Antinuclear activists have slowed construction of power plants from Seabrook, N.H., to Diablo Canyon, Calif. Angry people in Texas, New Mexico and Washington have packed public meetings to protest government plans to use their areas for nuclear-waste disposal and to demand the removal of wastes already stored there. Countless Americans who have never picked up a picket sign are having serious second thoughts about nuclear power, and politicians are responding to these apprehensions. California voters rejected an antinuc lear initiative only two years ago, but the state's legislature subsequently banned new nuclear construction until the problem of waste disposal has been solved. Last month Wisconsin imposed a ten-year moratorium on any new nuclear construction.

This opposition has had quite an impact. Five years ago, industry spokesmen were confidently predicting that the U.S. would have 1,000 reactors producing power by the year 2000, and utilities were ordering 40 new plants annually. But last year utilities ordered only four new nuclear plants and deferred or canceled plans to build seven more. An important reason for the slowdown is that demand for electric power has not risen as rapidly as forecasters anticipated. Yet another major factor is that delays—some necessary, others merely obstructionist—have stretched completion time of a plant to ten to twelve years. The possibility that plants now abuilding may never be allowed to operate has frightened some power companies, which have no desire to be stuck with costly white elephants. By 2000, the Department of Energy predicts, the U.S. will have no more than 500 nuclear-power plants on line; it could have as few as 200, which would generate less than 20% of the country's electricity.

That would be too few. According to conservative predictions, the nation's need for electricity will more than double by that time. Where will the country get the energy to satisfy the need? And do it at a price that will keep its industries competitive with those of other nuclear countries?

Certainly not from oil or natural gas. Despite the current oil glut, the world's known reserves of both petroleum and natural gas are expected to be declining by the end of the century, and it would be folly to burn what remains to generate electricity. They are far too valuable as essential ingredients for plastics, fertilizers and other chemicals and as fuel for cars, trucks and planes.

Solar energy may ultimately do much to heat and cool homes and factories, but its large-scale use for electricity is a long way off. Even a highly—some would say unrealistically—optimistic federal study forecasts that solar, wind and wave power and the conversion of sun-grown organic matter into methane would at best meet 20% of all U.S. energy needs by 2000.

Nuclear fusion, which could exploit an unlimited fuel supply and promises little contamination of the environment, cannot fill the gap either. Researchers at Princeton and other labs have made some progress on fusion, in which atomic nuclei are combined rather than split. But physicists think it will take decades of problem solving before they can even attempt to build commercial reactors.

Nor is coal the answer. Although the U.S. has an abundant supply, coal, like oil, is an exhaustible resource that would be better used in the chemical industry than for power. Deep mining is expensive, and some 100

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