Author note:

The Case for Common Sense

Although I do not favor the proliferation of nuclear power generation, I am not for proposition. I feel it is an unfortunate mistake to divide up those who favor nuclear energy and those who do not through such an amendment. First of all, the nuclear plant issue in Colorado is moot. So far as I know, there are no plans to build additional nuclear facilities in Colorado.

Second, the controversy over amendment has created an adversary relationship between pro and con groups who must work together, if our nation's energy needs are to be met, now and in the future. Instead of fighting among ourselves we should be molding a coalition of all peoples and all interests, so an all out energy effort can be made under the guidance of a comprehensive energy program.

For now, and into the immediate future, nuclear, is a fact of life. The New England area gets about 20% of its total electric energy needs from nuclear plants. We must hope these plants operate safely and effectively until a better method of electric generation is found and becomes a fact.

The time and resources being spent on this issue are being wasted. We are wasting vital political, economic, human and energy resources on the wrong issue.

A better issue, a more sensible question than whether we should restrict nuclear developmental it seems to me is whether the central, generation of electric power by any means (water, coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, or solar) is desirable from an economic, a political or a common sense standpoint. It's my thesis that it is not.

What I want to do first is to briefly outline the case against central station electric power generation. Then, I'll turn my attention directly on the reasons why nuclear electric power generation is an approach particularly lacking in common sense. Finally, I'll indicate a sensible alternative.

Central power generation is Inefficient. If all costs are taken into account, and they never are, central power generation is about 5% efficient. That's a pretty dismal level of efficiency by any sensible standard.

Why is the net energy delivered to the consumer so low? 1) There are exploration costs. The raw "material" for energy generation, whether it is the right site for a dam, an oil field, or a uranium deposit must first be located. All of the cheap, readily available resources, have been discovered. Discovery takes more and more time, money, effort, and energy.

2) Extraction of energy resources, once these are located, consumes enormous resources. Wells must be dug, mines opened, pipelines built all at taxpayers' expense, in terms of energy. Look at the Alaska pipeline as an example. Billions of dollars will be spent, millions of man hours invested, monumental amounts of energy consumed before the first drop of oil is transported through the pipeline. All of the convenient and relatively cheap energy reserves - as we commonly think of these - have been developed. The road ahead will be one of decreasing net energy returns. The "yield" will go lower.

3) Transportation of energy uses up energy. The Alaska pipeline is a case in point. So are the monster oil tankers now being used to transport the oil. They use a lot of energy. Fossil fuel generating plants are only about 20 to 30% efficient, at best. This means that after spending a, great deal of energy to locate, to develop and to transport the raw energy, only a 20 to 30% return is realized. And, all of the previously used energy must also be subtracted from the 20-30% realized in electric generation. Our net energy figure is shrinking rapidly.

5) Further losses in power, and thus, further reductions in the net energy occur when/electric power is fed into and transported through the power grid.Long-line transmission is very inefficient. It takes power to transmit power. Significant amounts of the power being transmitted is lost into the environment. If this were not bad enough, there is a rapidly accumulating body of evidence to suggest that 'living things' near high power lines may be subjected to, as yet, unappreciated health hazards.

If these hazards are proven and their extent assessed, this will be yet another cost which must be subtracted from the overall efficiency of central power generation and distribution.

6) The pollution costs associated with electric power generation have never been adequately assessed, or included as a cost factor. It costs energy to avoid or to clean up after this environmental pollution. Pollution damage includes that done to the natural environment, to the man-made environment and to living things.

7) Finally, those artifacts (light bulbs, electric motors of all kinds, stoves, electric heaters, and so on) have varying degrees of efficiency.

Now, It is easy to see how the 5% efficiency figure for central power electric generation and use is reasonably accurate.

There is another side to the central power electric generation and distribution coin. Enormous amounts of money are needed to build and maintain such systems. Power companies must band together to finance power plants and power grid networks. Just as energy corporations must band together for exploration, development and transportation, of the raw energy. The economics of present and probable future energy development suggests even greater economic concentration by fewer and fewer companies.

Quite naturally, as the economic power of the energy industry grows and becomes more concentrated, the political clout of such special interests will grow. Disproportionate political influence represents a danger to a democratic political system, just as surely as continued economic concentration threatens free enterprise.

I believe in. a democratic society and in a truly "free" free enterprise system. Already, we have witnessed in the lifetime of each of us, serious erosions of both of these fundamental ingredients in our cultural system. With further erosion, both are doomed.

Having made these more general comments on the limitations of central power generation, I would like to turn now to a more detailed consideration of the limitations of electric power generation by the use of nuclear reactors.

In utilizing nuclear power for electric power generation, I recognize four critical dangers and three important limitations. First, let's consider the dangers: 1) The enriched fuel necessary to operate the reactors which produce electric power is dangerous to transport. Amounts of this dangerous material must be routinely transported, some of it through densely populated areas.

Accidents to nuclear material carriers have already occurred. A recent incident involving a truck loaded with nuclear materials represents a case in point. The truck was involved in a traffic accident in the New York City area. Nuclear contamination of this heavily populated area was averted only by the fact that the accident was a minor one.

Can we continue to take such risks? Is it moral to subject unsuspecting people to unrealized dangers? I submit that it is not. The people potentially affected should be allowed to decide whether and how much risk they will permit themselves to be under. There is no known safe way to transport nuclear materials. Nor has substantive promise of safe transportation been put forth.

2) Nuclear plant reliability is open to serious questions. Near- catastrophic accidents have occurred at a number of plants. Many other plants have been closed down, for varying periods of time because their operation was deemed a hazard by those entities operating the plants or by federal officials.

This is an aspect of nuclear power that must not be minimized. A failure to assess the prospects and consequences of a major nuclear plant accident could result in a nightmare of unthinkable proportions.

The critical danger in nuclear plant operational reliability is the prospects for a core meltdown. Nuclear reaction processes, as you probably know generate enormous amounts of heat. In a nuclear generating plant this heat must be controlled or the nuclear/material will become so hot it will melt its way through the containment structure.

The heat is controlled in two ways. One is by limiting the amount of fissionable material available for reaction. The second is by cooling the reactor with water, or some other substance, much like the way your automobile's engine is kept from overheating. If too much nuclear material or too little coolant is supplied, the reaction processes "runs away" with itself and a meltdown occurs. The most probable accident would be the loss of coolant accident, a LOGA.

Partial LOGA's have occurred but a full melt down in each case was averted, sometimes with only seconds to spare. A meltdown which would result in the breach of containment structure by the "run-away" nuclear pile has been termed a "China Syndrome" because the nuclear material with its extreme heat would start burning its way through the earth towards China.

Once the containment structure was breached, it would probably take several weeks for the nuclear mass to "burn itself out." Meanwhile, amounts of radioactive material would be released into the biosphere. And, the material would have tunneled into the earth, perhaps for several hundred feet.

I don't think I need to describe what would happened in the area surrounding the disaster. Suffice it to say that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people would die either at once or in a tragic, lingering fashion and that many, many square miles of land would be rendered uninhabitable.

A core meltdown and the attendant China syndrome is virtually assured if nuclear plants are constructed in large numbers or if current plants, continue to operate.

3) There is no safe way to store nuclear waste materials. These materials eat through, in time, any container they are stored in. Some of these nuclear wastes are the most deadly substances known to man. Some of them will be dangerous to man an therefore must be stored in someway, however unsafe - for up to 400,000 years.

Think of it. Every few years this mass of nuclear waste material, which will of sufficient volume to create a six-lane highway from New York to Los Angeles in a few years, must be taken out of storage containers and placed in new containers. The exchange must be timed to occur before the material has completely eaten through the old container.

This is the Faustian bargain the nuclear proponents are asking to accept as part of the price we must pay for the use of nuclear energy to produce electricity. What civilization has existed which could adequately care for such materials for 200 years, much less 400,000? What sort of "Fascist priesthood" would be needed to guard the waste material, some of which could be used to clandestinely produce illicit nuclear weapons?

Oh, yes. We hear that ways will someday be available to safely, conveniently and quickly dispose of nuclear wastes. There is no hard data, to support such optimistic "pie-in-the-sky" claims.

4) Finally, we come to the matter of terrorist acts against nuclear plants. Recently, a government survey concluded that a small band (as few as three) dedicated terrorists could be assured of successfully raiding and assuming control of the majority of nuclear plants now in existence.

Once in control of the plant, the terrorists could demand ransom under the threat of triggering a China syndrome. Or, the terrorists could trigger a China syndrome as an anarchist act. Or, they could commandeer nuclear material, remove it from the premises, and, at a later time, construct a nuclear device.

The lead time problem means that nuclear energy cannot be the answer to our future energy needs, at least not in this century. The cost of nuclear plants and of nuclear electric power are skyrocketing. A variety of factors are combining to cause these enormous cost increases. The long planning arid construction time element, the increasing size and complexity of nuclear plants, the present and projected cost of nuclear fuel, the legal battles, and the general picture of inflation throughout the world, are but a few of the factors causing the increases.

Electric power from nuclear plants is already expensive. It will become prohibitive, if nuclear energy is "forced" to become our primary source of electric power generation.

Finally, there is a nuclear fuels shortage just ahead. Nuclear fuel supply companies no longer guarantee fuel for new nuclear plants. Even some existing plants face the prospect of being cutoff from their supply of nuclear fuel materials. The situation will grow worse if more and more plants are built and demand more and more fuel. Some experts predict the exhaustion of the world supply of nuclear fuel by the year 2000.

It is true that if fast breeder reactors become a reality, the nuclear fuel supply might last for 1000 years. But, fast breeder reactors have yet to prove themselves reliable, safe and economically viable.

We are an energy intensive society. Without adequate energy our culture as we know it would undergo radical and rapid transformations, or it might disintegrate in anarchistic chaos. No sensible person wants either of these prospects to become reality.

If there were not sensible alternatives to central electric power generation with nuclear power, I would favor nuclear development in spite of all of the dangers, problems arid shortcomings on the theory that however bad nuclear is, running out of energy would be worse. Fortunately, there is a sensible, realistic, attainable set of alternatives.

First, there is conservation. Americans absolutely waste at least 50%of the energy they consume. This waste takes the form of large gas-guzzling automobiles, over-large houses which are poorly insulated and which are over-heated in winter and over-cooled in summer, unnecessary auto mileage (particularly single occupant mileage), unneeded energy using gadgets, and so forth.

A national commitment to conservation backed up by national energy conservation campaigns and programs could reduce energy consumption by nearly one-half.

However, the sense of urgency is not there. The leadership is not there. The commitment does not exist, nor is it soon likely to come into being.

Conservation is a sensible, and in some sense, a realistic alternative to nuclear generating plant proliferation. There are renewable sources of energy. Sources that, if they were developed and tapped, could provide essentially limitless supplies of energy. Basically, all of these alternative, renewable energy sources are solar energy in some form.

First, there is the direct use of the sun's energy. Standing in the sun represents the simplest use of the sun. Using windows to produce electricity by way of solar cells. The use of windmills to produce electricity is yet another. And, so it goes, the list grows.

If solar energy were given the number one priority for development as a total energy alternative, its development time could be shorter than the time needed to develop nuclear. Solar energy utilization could be the most economically viable energy alternative. And, it could be utilized in a decentralized way, thus rescuing democracy and free enterprise from the dangers of centralization of economic and political power. Solar would be more efficient.

Efficiencies approaching 10% are already being reached in the generation of electric power. Solar heating and cooling efficiencies of 25 to 60% are being attained. Further development and, improvement could raise these efficiencies even higher.

The decentralization obtained through individual adaptations of solar energy utilization could reawaken a self-sufficiency ethic in our culture. Such an ethic would strengthen, rather then, erode our democratic political system and the free enterprise notion.

Truly, solar energy utilization, more than any other energy option, IS common sense.