NUKES, OIL, AND POLITICS
Orr, David W. & Connolly, Peter & Bromwich, David & Howe, Irving & Harrington, Michael
Here is a group of comments on the vexing issues of nuclear power, oil deregulation, energy options, and attendant political issues. These comments represent a range of opinions within and beyond...
...From the mass of contradictory reports, however, it finally emerged that the worst imaginable calamity for a nuclear plant—a "core meltdown," which would release into the air a radioactive cloud, killing tens of thousands and injuring hundreds of thousands more, within a radius of at least 50 miles—had become a not entirely remote possibility...
...1°Frederick Soddy, Cartesian Economics (London: Hendersons, 1922...
...That there is a real danger, that there is every reason to be cautious, that there should at least be a moratorium on nuclear development and 285 a closing of every plant with a discernable significant flaw: this makes sense as an immediate course...
...To read the Nation or to listen to Senators Metzenbaum and Durkin, one would think that our only energy problem is a phony "shortage" devised by the oil companies to make more money...
...Pressed, they present scientific authorities...
...This would mean, according to an estimate in a recent Joint Economic Committee study, the loss of 1,137,000 jobs, 644,000 of them employing people operating and supplying facilities based on non-renewable fuels, 493,000 of them in powerplant manufacture and construction...
...It is not nearly that simple, and to pretend that it is exacerbates a split that already exists between the antinuclear movement and this crucial section of labor...
...While Carter issued his message of reassurance to Pennsylvanians, the chairman of the NRC, Joseph Hendrie, was describing himself as a blind man staggering to find his way, and it now appears that Carter himself was ignorant of the risk he took in going to Middletown...
...THE POLITICS OF OIL reflect a similarly uncertain "fit" between reality and the needs of ideology...
...In a brilliant series in the April 23 and 30 issues of 277 the New Yorker, Barry Commoner points the way toward the solar future...
...Within the energy sector, for example, the selection of goals and technologies has been dominated by a small corporate and governmental elite described by Robert Engler as the "private government of energy...
...Although expanding energy use motivated cultural development, it also, according to White, leads inevitably to the concentration of political power and international conflict...
...Energy policy is regarded as a lever to move society toward a more environmentally sustainable, if materially less extravagant, basis while enhancing equity and involvement...
...And yet, the left's reaction to Carter's program has been fundamentally inadequate...
...The transition to a new energy supply system raises old questions presumably settled a long time ago...
...Those specific contentions are probably in large part correct...
...and the quality of political leadership...
...Yet, as we debate how to store radioactive wastes for geologic ages, or how to harness the fusion process of the sun, one finds no plan and little philosophy, only momentum...
...The FDA, it was reported, shipped 250,000 bottles of medicine to Pennsylvania, to counteract the effects of radioactive iodine: work on the medicine had begun as soon as the first radiation leaks were heard of...
...The Republicans support decontrol and will work to weaken any excess profits tax by promoting "plowback," that is, allowing excess profits to be retained by the oil companies provided they are invested in energy research and development...
...and what we have begun to learn of its past conduct is in perfect keeping with what we saw...
...The decision about whether to develop breeder reactors, fusion power, space satellites, or decentralized, renewable energy systems ought to be made in accord with political and social purposes, not the reverse...
...Each of these options also entails different environmental and societal risks including economic dislocation, nuclear proliferation, reactor accidents, and global climate change...
...or the postponement of such an evacuation, with a vote of confidence for the utility and the concomitant risk of thousands of lives...
...Allowing the oil companies to charge the world price for their products would make non-OPEC oil instantly as valuable to them as OPEC oil and would thus do more to break the cartel than any other single event, because it would remove the oil companies' incentive to merely follow in OPEC's price wake...
...The future health of all Western economies depends on the ability of the United States to achieve a rational energy policy...
...These risks, however, are avoidable through conservation and technical fixes, and need 282 not entail long-term economic or social constraints...
...3 The Energy Syndrome, Leon Lindberg, ed...
...As for those who had no cars, or got flat tires on the way, or ran out of gas (gas stations were shut down, to save every last drop for the exodus)— well, in the words of a Civil Defense official long after the crisis had passed, "They'd die of course...
...Such intervention could lead to an energy system on a human scale—with farmers creating methane from biomass and photovoltaic cells providing an energy source available to single families and small communities...
...Fred Cottrell, Energy and Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 2. 12Leslie A. White, "Energy and the Evolution of Culture," in White, The Science of Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1949), p. 388...
...What, then, if our luck had been a little poorer...
...The important variables in the transition include the amount of available lead time to create and disseminate alternative energy-conversion technologies...
...On the Democratic side of the field, things are more interesting...
...and this, of course, is my own comment, not Business Week's), in order to be sure that any solar technology of the future will be centralized and bureaucratized under their dominion...
...We owe it to ourselves to pause a moment over the nightmare, before allowing it to fade into the day's routine of unfinished business...
...The truth is, we know what it would feel like...
...Many of those living in areas near the site would be likely not to comply with an order to evacuate, because many of them did not know how much they had to fear...
...Proponents of the third approach believe that government must be the catalyst for an appropriate energy policy...
...Now that Three Mile Island will clearly force more Reprinted, with permission, from the May 1979 issue of Democratic Left and slightly abbreviated here...
...If successful, we could "make a direct attack on entropy...
...But they and the carpenters and the sheet metal workers are also genuinely concerned about the energy crisis and its impact on the living standards of all workers...
...To quote Senator Gary Hart: "We were lucky...
...Since the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, however, this exclusiveness has been increasingly challenged...
...In adding a delay of its own to that of Metropolitan Edison, the NRC appears to have been actuated by the same motive: the smaller the fuss over the accident, the less considerable the danger would seem in retrospect...
...even so they have detected thousands of violations and yet seldom resulted in anything beyond minimal fines...
...Second, I will examine the three dominant perspectives on energy policy and compare the political assumptions of each...
...But in contrast to the first and second perspectives, they emphasize the importance of wide public involvement in policy making and policy implementation...
...Nobody in Congress has, to my knowledge, yet argued that they should simply be shut down en masse...
...Won't they line up for whatever program will put the most construction workers on the site...
...Disagreements over values and goals pose more intractable problems...
...Presidential candidates Crane, Connally, Reagan, Baker, and Bush have taken the usual position of their party, which is that anything generated by private enterprise, however noxious, must be either praised or explained away...
...The other liberal approach, still not quite respectable, calls for a moratorium on further nuclear development...
...We have been witnessing a crime 30 years long, against the people of the United States, by a government that serves one master at election time but deserts it ever after for another, whose payments are more visible and more constant...
...We do not know exactly what caused the hydrogen bubble to form, and what brought it down was guesswork...
...The present energy crisis, therefore, is more than a problem of inadequate supply or inefficiency...
...Geopolitics is not a subject that appeals to a generation rightly disillusioned by Vietnam...
...That, not so incidentally, might prove to be an enormous boon to the Third World, which is blessed with an abundance of one good: sunlight...
...But in the debate over nuclear energy its ignorance has been deepened by the systematic evasion and systematic fraud of its supposed benefactors...
...Every day we have to consider more stories of radiation leaks, cancer dangers, and the inability of nuclear wastes to find a home...
...How much energy do we need...
...A challenge to nuclear power requires an assault upon the basic corporate priorities that undergird the entire economy...
...The varying reactions to Three Mile Island and to the impending decontrol of the price of domestically produced oil illuminate the shifting fault lines of American politics and provide a glimpse of what the '80s are likely to offer in the way of ideological conflict...
...13 When organizational maintenance costs rise beyond this point, the system declines...
...bureaucratic and centralized...
...Most Americans drive because they have to, and they will do so no matter what the cost...
...Overlooked amidst the ideological sound and fury is the decisive factor in the entire controversy: because of political reasons, nuclear power is rapidly becoming a moribund technology...
...Starting on the right, the hierarchy of the Republican party has reaffirmed its commitment to better living through plutonium ingestion...
...energy policy...
...I think we ought to be moving people" (New York Times, April 14...
...This view represents not so much a repudiation of expertise as a disagreement over the nature of the issues...
...He has the courage of his convictions—his conduct at this level is not in question—and why should he not risk his own life while risking thousands of others...
...164-87...
...Washington, D.C...
...This picture, to those of us who can imagine it—this, and the knowledge of what fallout did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for months after the bombs were dropped—makes the comparisons with floods, air disasters, and the like seem a display of unresisting idiocy, when it is not conscious deception...
...And West Europeans find it difficult to understand a policy that encourages the consumption of foreign oil by providing that Saudis and Venezuelans will be paid three times as much for a barrel of `old" oil as will Texans...
...But it will take time to get there and, in the interim, I see no plausible alternatives to detente with the oil companies, who will continue to perform an indispensable marketing function...
...According to the National Journal, as of April 14, 1979, the current average delivered cost of all imported oil is approximately $18 a barrel...
...And where the oil companies are unwilling to assist non-OPEC Third World countries with development of their oil reserves out of fear for their profit margins or because of potential political turmoil, our government should back ongoing efforts by the United Nations and the World Bank to do so...
...Similar themes appear in the work of anthropologist Leslie White, who argued in an essay in 1949 that cultural evolution depended upon energy use per capita and the efficiency with which a society harnessed it...
...The problems raised here are urgent and complex...
...Most useful, perhaps, for the United States would be a "phased withdrawal" from nuclear power, accompanied by a minimum of moralizing about weakening national fiber on the one hand or the superiority of "organic" life on the other...
...Roger Mattson, on the other hand—director of the commission's division of safety—felt the misgivings we all wished could have a voice: "I'm not sure why you are not moving people...
...7 Conservation, in the words of the NEP, is "the cleanest and cheapest source of new energy" and is essential if we are to avoid both the hazards of dependence on foreign sources and energy wars...
...so IT is at least possible that the current crisis—and the demand to end capital-intensive nuclear power generation—could be made a part of a national full-employment plan...
...THE BEGINNING of wisdom about the energy problem is to recognize that we are up against not a phony and manipulated "crisis" but a real and agonizing dilemma...
...Yet the transcripts of the NRC's meetings revealed stark differences within the commission...
...Where the oil companies are helping to increase supply, they should be encouraged...
...In the 1978-2000 period, they propose a combination of conservation and greater reliance on nuclear power and coal...
...What this, partly, may mean in practice is some financial encouragement to oil producers to pump and refine every barrel of domestic oil they can locate while the government spends whatever it takes to develop alternative sources of energy...
...Senators like Sam Nunn of Georgia, Lawton Chiles of Florida, and Dale Bumpers of Arkansas are intelligent men who hold the respect of their colleagues...
...The conference came out in favor of continuing nuclear power in the United States...
...We need, finally, to stop assuming that what is better is the same thing as what is cheaper, next week, next month, or next year...
...only afew people would even claim to be absolutely certain about solutions...
...But leaving 276 aside the problem of how the government could possibly force such a reactionary and cantankerous group of individualists to produce more oil without giving them a higher price, this lack of virtue pales into insignificance in the face of the real problem, which is the long-term political and economic consequences of excessive dependence on OPEC oil...
...LIKE THE VIETNAM intervention, nuclear power appears to be one of those issues on which the Democratic party's Southern contingent will quietly follow their President over a cliff...
...THAT GOAL is clear enough now, but let me just summarize a few of the reasons for committing oneself to it...
...In response to soaring costs of oil, they favor the development of all energy sources...
...it is fundamentally a social and cultural crisis...
...The third perspective, however, would take us toward a decentralized, participatory, solar-based society...
...After some monetary wavering, the Henry Jackson/ George Meany/Pat Moynihan wing of the party has remained in the pronuclear camp, along with the bulk of organized labor...
...Liberals should make a top priority the fight for subsidies to protect the poor and elderly from future price increases of home heating oil...
...But questions about the costs and benefits of large-scale technologies and social goals do not appear directly in either...
...Adopting the conservation ethic, however, does not entail changes in life-styles beyond those described as "cosmetic...
...What the left's implicit program amounts to in reality is merely a continuation of the process by which we have become ever more dependent on foreign oil...
...Perhaps a wiser head has an answer...
...IT WAS NECESSARY not to warn us about the possibility of an evacuation from contaminated areas, because to do so would make us think twice about allowing the reactors to be built...
...Some have argued that, all things considered, Faustian bargains are the lesser of several evils...
...Thornburgh and Carter agreed on the second course of action and, when their luck held out, were duly congratulated for their cool-headedness...
...National energy politics would give way to community politics and local self-sufficiency...
...but now we have all seen with a terrible vividness how any corporation tends to act in obedience to laws as clear and distinct as those that govern physics...
...People on the democratic left ought to support the various schemes for nuclear moratoriums, some of them introduced recently in Congress...
...and John Seiberling (D.-Ohio) argue for reexamination of the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the total liability for any nuclear accident to $560 million...
...Approximately 50 percent of this consumption represents imported oil...
...Briefly stated, the present energy crisis in the United States is attributable to the fact that the production of oil and natural gas has been declining since 1970 while consumption continues to rise...
...Plumbers, laborers, electricians and other crafts have been employed building nuclear plants and, in part, they favor nuclear power to save and expand those jobs...
...but at least some instructive negative examples can be borne in mind...
...The result would be the democratization of energy policy and the replacement of tens, or at most hundreds, of major policy decisions with millions of private choices...
...As a matter of domestic social policy, in aggregate, the most optimistically estimated gains from decontrol probably are not worth the costs of inflation and social injustice...
...The first of these, the supply argument, holds that we must produce our way out of the crisis, because "the country that runs on energy can't afford to run §hort...
...Bob Carr (D-Mich...
...To this end it is essential to eliminate waste and utilize technical innovations and price incentives to maximize the productivity of energy...
...Got to say it...
...Opposition to expert-ordained nuclear energy and the burgeoning grass-roots interest in solar energy are only the most visible parts of the challenge...
...THERE MUST BE a transition to new, and renewable, forms of energy...
...There would be a loss of 1,137,000 jobs and a potential increase (from conservation and solar energy investments) of 7,870,000 jobs...
...And if this sounds like Jerry Brown's issue, then so much the worse for us—he is a demagogue, a child-demagogue, to whom nothing is real except the next vote—and we had better take the issue away from him quickly...
...Third, as Komanoff has documented, the soaring costs of nuclear energy have been rising 17 percent faster than the general rate of inflation...
...A Saudi Khomeini, backed by militant oilfield "komitehs" greatly concerned about infidel Israel's control of East Jerusalem, and covertly assisted in planning an embargo by the ever-helpful Soviet Union, could soon plunge the Western world into a shattering crisis...
...Nor do the technological goals of the conservation approach, evidenced by the Department of Energy's research and development expenditures, differ from those of the first perspective...
...Like the Northern Unionists who praised the therapeutic value of the smell of gunpowder for spineless youth at the beginning of the Civil War, spokesmen for presentday conservatism greeted Three Mile Island's "plume" of radioactive smoke with a fierce joy, as symoblizing the unavoidable and unpleasant realities that make life worth living...
...Their efforts having proved an utter failure, they reported the accident several hours late to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which in turn allowed two days to pass before dispatching a team of experts to the site...
...That, as Commoner demonstrated in his New Yorker articles, is economically feasible if—but only if—there is government intervention overriding current energy industry priorities...
...4) the likely exclusivity and irreversibility of the choices...
...and we know that these laws demand profits first and profits above all, even at the sacrifice of human life, Metropolitan Edison strove to keep its public image in good repair, and therefore was obliged to suppress information and imperil its neighbors and customers, to the verge of disaster...
...The technological innovations that created high-energy civilization have been those that produced surplus energy, which could then be used to create more energy converters...
...There will be more hearings, more briefs, more interventions, and more appeals...
...For what purposes...
...The alternative to continually increasing energy supply is in Hans Bethe's words "unemployment and recession, if not worse...
...And those within the government tend to share basic orientations with colleagues in industry and the universities...
...The remaining 50 percent of our stupendous daily consumption is of domestic oil...
...Antinuclear activists may ask if this is not just one more example of the narrow job consciousness of the building trades...
...By what criteria do we decide technological issues involving many unknowns, high consequence risks, "soft" variables, and large social effects...
...The President proposes to devote the windfallprofits tax proceeds to subsidies to low-income families staggered by increased energy costs, to mass transit, and to the establishment of an "energy security fund," to be used to develop alternative energy sources such as coal, solar, gasohol, oil shale, and hydroelectric power...
...This prescription does not provide the emotional satisfactions of populist attitudinizing, and adherence to it would deprive liberals of the pleasure of being, for once, in phase with popular prejudice...
...Home heating oil use will not decline unless winters suddenly grow warmer...
...The matching up would not come from the workings of the invisible hand of Adam Smith...
...The consequences were as follows...
...For the advocates of the supply position, the principal actors in energy policy are in order of importance: corporations, government officials, and university experts...
...but, alas, the other side has its authorities too...
...On Three Mile Island, a moment came when one of two things had to be done: either the ordering of a serious evacuation—as far out at least as Harrisburg, with its half a million inhabitants—to protect as many lives as possible while risking a vote of no confidence for the utility...
...THE CURRENT PRICE-CONTROL law allows the President the option of ending existing controls before the law itself expires in 1981...
...they have allowed corners to be cut, and Three Mile Island was one of the corners...
...With contempt dripping for the no-nukers, the simplifiers who are "anti-technology," Will came out happily, aggressively for the virtues of nuclear power...
...On the House side, such foes of nuclear power as Representatives Ted Weiss (D.-N.Y...
...The public is naturally ignorant, and does nothing to change its condition...
...Sweden, by contrast, uses slightly more than half as much energy per capita as the United States, and Switzerland only a third as much...
...The one indisputable strength of the protesters is the argument that the danger is real enough to warrant extreme measures of caution right now: indeed, that the burden of proof for continuing nuclear power must rest with its defenders...
...Of course, the oil companies may be holding back some oil products, waiting for a better price...
...Thus, in nature and human affairs, systems that are more energy efficient will be more stable and will survive longer...
...Concern for that fact was clearly manifested at the annual legislative conference of the Building Trades Department of the AFL-CIO in April...
...we will be glad to print others in future issues...
...Decontrol may well be intolerable, but so is its opposite...
...The price of about one-third of this oil, including Alaskan oil 275 and oil from wells yielding less than 10 barrels of oil per day ("stripper wells"), is essentially uncontrolled...
...The passions animating the Clamshell, Abalone, and related "alliances" had little authentic appeal to most urban radical intellectuals or liberal professionals, let alone to progrowth leaders of organized labor...
...When a meltdown began to seem possible in the first week of April, a single incident brought out the contrast between the ideas of regulation entertained by the NRC and by a well-established and genuinely conscientious agency...
...But for those of us who believe in democracy, not just as a formal system of procedures but as an active engagement of the people, this is a painfully difficult problem...
...Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1977), p. 334...
...The majesty of science, indeed...
...Perspectives and Prescriptions EACH OF THE THREE POSITIONS offers a different diagnosis of the crisis and different prescriptions for its resolution...
...It will harm the poor and elderly and will unconscionably enrich the oil companies...
...That leaves the liberals...
...The first is the administrative-law approach...
...How do we know whether nuclear power should be expanded, contracted, or cut off entirely...
...They generate 13 percent of our electricity and 4 percent of our total energy...
...Energy policy has customarily been regarded as a highly technical subject requiring expertise in nuclear physics and other recondite disciplines...
...After facilitating the process, there would be little for government to do in the energy sector but (dare one say it) to wither away...
...These comments represent a range of opinions within and beyond Dissent...
...Therefore, the antinuclear movement must adopt a more complex program than the one it now articulates...
...Technology is commonly regarded as a means, and therefore neutral regarding ends...
...Barry Commoner's two-part series in the New Yorker showed how a shift to solar energy would require structural changes in the way energy decisions are made in this country...
...Given the limits to each of the four major energy sources of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium, it is clear that the energy base of the mid-21st century will be markedly different from that of the present...
...The remainder, $6 billion, would be retained by the oil companies...
...Beneath it is a growing body of opinion crystallized in Amory Lovins's "soft energy path," suggesting that the issues of energy policy are not primarily technical but political, social, and ethical...
...It may be far-fetched to warn, as some have, of an "energy dictatorship," but, with increasing reliance on expertise and large organizations, technical considerations tend to preempt political processes...
...Sterling Brubaker, In Command of Tomorrow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 5. 6 Herman Kahn, William Brown, Leon Martel, The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976...
...on an uninterrupted flow of cheap energy...
...2) the foreseeable exhaustion of easily exploitable supplies of oil and natural gas...
...More to the point, however, the energy transition confronts us with very different macro images of the future, while we are prepared to make only micro choices, in a fragmented, incremental way...
...The challenge facing the antinuclear movement in this respect is to convince building trades workers and other citizens that a non-nuclear future can provide a better quality of life...
...If, for example, the antinuclear movement demands a shutdown of all nuclear facilities, but does not acknowledge the employment and economic effects of such a move, once again a middle-class and college-educated constituency could be pitted against blue-collar workers...
...And if evacuations were unthinkable to begin with, how could we be trained to carry them out sensibly and humanely...
...1, Jack M. Hollander, ed...
...15 Robert A. Dahl, "On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in The United States, " Dissent, Summer 1978...
...oil to rise to the world price by June 1981...
...Such a transition can involve great turmoil and lead to social and political disintegration...
...There certainly is room for reasoned disagreement...
...This is a difficult art and instruction in it may be hard to come by...
...The more absolutist of the protesters assert that they know...
...PERHAPS, AFTER ALL, imagination is the hidden issue of the debate...
...A second and related assumption is that the process of energy conversion is limited by entropy as defined by the second law of thermodynamics...
...How, in a democracy, are such matters to be decided...
...It is no longer satisfactory to resign ourselves to any and all technological developments in the Darwinian faith that, by definition, they epitomize progressive evolution...
...The rate at which nonrenewable fossil fuels decline, hence the time available for the transition, will vary, with recoverable supplies of oil and natural gas declining much more rapidly than those of coal...
...What technological risks are worth what benefits...
...The plants cost a lot to build, and take a long time, and plenty of jobs can be filled in the interim...
...Americans are used to a certain standard, and many of them expect it to rise throughout their lives...
...What is the appropriate mix of social and political centralization and decentralization...
...The basic proposition is not simply: end nuclear energy for all of the obvious reasons...
...The NRC team on arriving at the site found something approaching total chaos...
...At present, the United States consumes about 18 million barrels of oil per day...
...4 The goal for the advocates of this perspective is to achieve an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy based initially on increasing current production of fossil fuels and eventually the breeder reactor and nuclear fusion...
...According to an article in the Spring 1979 issue of Foreign Affairs by Daniel Yergin and Robert Stobaugh, by the late '80s that outflow may amount to $110 billion a year in constant dollars (it is now $50 billion...
...I don't know what we are protecting at this point...
...Senator Kennedy urges a separate federal agency to investigate nuclear accidents...
...But on some crucial matters, I confess to uncertainty...
...The key proposition is that the United States wastes 30 to 50 percent of its total energy budget...
...It is the difficulty of laymen who have to depend, not entirely but largely, on expert opinion...
...Nuclear power, once heralded as the means to produce electricity "too cheap to meter," is faced with rising capital and fuel costs, unanswered (and possibly unanswerable) questions about safety, waste storage, vulnerability to terrorism, and its effects on the proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...Value questions are easily disguised beneath the rhetoric of necessity and cost efficiency...
...Until Three Mile Island, root-and-branch opposition to the development of nuclear power had largely been confined to that left fringe of American politics where lingering countercultural anticorporatism reinforced a small-is-beautiful reverence for an unspoiled ecosystem...
...3Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1971), p. 231...
...Societies, like natural systems, can be mapped as energy flows, and they are subject to the same constraints described in the laws of thermodynamics...
...When not offering diversions of this sort, he kept himself busy concealing from Thornburgh any information that might have a disheartening sound...
...He tries to reason, he doesn't often rant, he looks good by comparison to William Buckley (a modest enough test...
...But advocates of each agree that 283 the situation is unprecedented for at least five reasons: (I) the great dependence of the U.S...
...Senator Jackson has gone so far as to reaffirm his support for a doomed bill to "streamline" and speed up the 274 licensing of nuclear plants, which he had the singular bad luck to propose a week before Three Mile Island...
...Similarly, conservation does not entail change in the values of economic growth or mass consumption...
...On April 10, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admitted that the sequence of events that led to the neartragedy at Three Mile Island had not even been considered in the various safety analyses it made...
...Assuming that we ask the right questions, scientific research can eventually resolve most factual disputes...
...The May 6 Washington Post contains an excellent story by J. P. Smith detailing the extent of untapped supplies in developing nations...
...If the standard of living means a town in Utah slowly dying of the cancer induced by old H-bomb tests, or Karen Silkwood dying in a mysterious auto accident before she can tell reporters about the danger of contamination at Kerr-McGee, then we need to give it up...
...However, he is unlikely to use the issue against Carter, since the fiscal conservatives whom he hopes to mobilize in such states as New Hampshire tend to be pronuclear...
...Finally, I will suggest that the energy crisis poses at least as much of a challenge to our political inventiveness as to our technical genius...
...But the line between desirable inventory maintenance and undesirable hoarding is difficult to draw and rendered all the more difficult by the constant threat of foreign embargoes or cutbacks in production...
...We're only worried about the survivors...
...But the struggle for the world has not adjourned while the United States has attempted to recover its moral equilibrium...
...Their patron saints include Jefferson, Kropotkin, and E. F. Schumacher...
...petroleum, or coal, or oil, or nuclear men...
...As reported in the New York Times, his plan called for the evacuation of as many as 600,000 persons...
...His rationality and complexity of mind did not keep him from minimizing grave dangers to future generations, nor from sneering at those who had publicly raised an outcry about those dangers...
...4Chauncey Starr, Richard Rudman, Chris Whipple, "Philosophical Basis For Risk Analysis," Annual Review of Energy, vol...
...Fine...
...And we 273 dispose of the waste material in containers that are sure to last 40 years, and after 40 years a single pound of plutonium will still be enough to give 200 million persons cancer...
...But none has been forthcoming...
...to provide consumer incentives for conservation (e.g., tax credits, extension programs, low-interest loans...
...And virtually no prominent liberal or radical betrays any awareness of why this is so dangerous...
...So, the article concludes, General Electric and its friends are going into solar energy on a hedge basis, i.e...
...In the recent crisis, nothing illustrated this so plainly as the conduct of the NRC...
...So do hearings conducted by Senator Kennedy last year, which showed that investment in solar and renewable energy resources would create more jobs than following the present course...
...We were thus to understand that he required a two-day advance warning from Three Mile Island...
...or even reach for the alchemist's dream of elemental transmutation...
...The appropriate question then is not whether to strive for a steady-state, but how best to prolong a declining one...
...How many other such surprises are in store...
...That is why they countenance a gamble with hundreds of thousands of lives, to preserve the faith in a politician's consistency—for a little while, on one issue, anyway—and to sustain the unexamined belief in a company's right to continued existence and undiminished profits...
...But as Jacques Ellul and others have argued, technology can also affect or preempt ends...
...the degree of societal adaptability...
...Where they do not, they should be bypassed...
...Despite varying estimates about the price elasticity of energy demand, they all assume that an increase in the price of energy combined with the removal of institutional barriers will reduce energy demand and lead to the emergence of an energy-efficient and more laborintensive economy...
...The basic assumption of this third perspective, that society is subject to the same energy laws as are natural systems, dates at least to the work of the British chemist turned economist, Frederick Soddy...
...Or George Will, announcing the infallibility of nuclear energy the day before the accident, pursuing his campaign a week later with unabated severity for his opponents—and for himself an indulgent smile and a debonair complacency for which it would be hard to find any precedent, even in the columnist's trade...
...It currently takes 8 to 12 years to get a nuclear power plant licensed and operating...
...To this end it is time, as Robert Dahl has suggested, for a thorough reappraisal of our system of government.' 5 Notes 'Earl Cook...
...First, there is the issue of safety...
...Nuclear energy is big corporate energy: concentrated...
...But the rise of an energyintensive society also creates a variety of costs including the concentration of political power, the consequent decline of democracy, and a greater possibility of international conflict...
...Despite disagreements, the goal of advocates of the energetics approach is the creation of a solarbased, decentralized, egalitarian, and participatory society...
...Energy policy, accordingly, has been decided on the basis of technical feasibility, efficiency, and profit, and not on the basis of its social, political, and environmental effects...
...As nonrenewable fuels become more scarce and expensive they must be replaced by renewable and inexhaustible energy sources requiring the development of new technologies including decentralized solar energy, breeder reactors, fusion, and solar power beamed to earth from space satellites...
...We treat them with respect...
...Government intervention is necessary to insure that energy is priced at its replacement level...
...In this view government cannot intervene on the demand side of the energy equation without abridging fundamental rights and undermining the free enterprise system...
...For some time now, the Newsweek columnist George Will has been praised as a civilized conservative...
...The principal assumption of those emphasizing conservation is that the historic tie between energy consumption and economic growth can be broken and that this need not exact a penalty in reduced economic growth...
...Perspectives 1. SUPPLY...
...So far, they have evolved two approaches to the issue...
...New discoveries and North Slope Alaskan oil (amounting to less than two years of present consumption) can delay but will not appreciably alter the trend...
...On the "life-and-death questions," the government acts not as a picked body of representatives belonging to the people, but as a pragmatic outwork of the corporations themselves...
...Whether their proposals are right or wrong, their outcries mattered...
...As an educational proposal—educational, since there is no chance of its being immediately adopted—Mike Harrington's idea that there should be created a publicly owned energy corporation to compete with the private companies is a good one...
...The uncertainty extends beyond the decisions themselves, and to the still more important question of how to make the decisions...
...A very large number of these slots, it should be noted, would put building trades people to work...
...In contrast to the emphasis on corporate initiatives in the first approach, the catalyst for energy efficiency is the federal government...
...The present energy transition is only one of a growing number of issues concerning the purposes and governance of technology...
...It must be: end nuclear energy through a fullemployment program that will produce an alternate technology of human scale...
...All of these men have exhibited a fondness for theory and an immunity to evidence that ought to be enough to get them drummed out of their jobs...
...3) the long lead time necessary to create an alternative energy supply system...
...And in general, there is every reason to keep pressing the case for public control and decision in this area, since it affects the life of the entire people and since the profit-grabbing of the oil corporations should not be allowed to shape decisions...
...With hundreds of experts coming to the rescue of Metropolitan Edison, the likelihood of a meltdown was in a week reduced to almost nothing, and the evacuees were told by their Governor to come home...
...We have entered a qualitatively new era in which technology has given us the power to radically alter the conditions of life and our tenure as a species...
...Tracing the logic of the situation to its first premise, we would doubtless arrive at this: most people do not know what radioactive fallout is, or what it can do...
...The consequences of what we do may appear to us slight...
...Thornburgh's plan depended largely on the use of private vehicles along the public highways—and this, with a population that had received no prior instruction about what to do in an emergency like the one they might face...
...Oil from wells that were producing in 1973 sells for about $6 a barrel, and oil from post1973 wells sells for an average of $13 a barrel...
...President Carter, for example, has stated that the NEP is an "insurance policy" requiring only "small premiums...
...More important, the industry's 10,000 independent "wildcatters" who dig the small wells that generate approximately 50 percent of our domestic production are openly waiting for a better price before they dig many more new wells...
...As Roland W. Schmitt, a GE vice president, put it...
...W. Donham Crawford, past president of Edison Electric Institute (an association of privately owned utilities), has said, "If the nuclear option in the United States is not already dead, it is surely in precarious health" (National Journal, April 28, 1979...
...It will be settled by political power and requires that the antinuclear movement be willing to take on giant corporations...
...This percentage has risen inexorably throughout the '70s, and it will continue to rise, especially as nuclear power becomes a less and less viable source of energy...
...The price of the remaining two-thirds of domestically produced oil has been controlled since 1973...
...The greater the dependence on nonrenewable energy sources (e.g., fossil fuels) and the greater the demand for energy, the more difficult the transition is likely to be...
...The tenor of his attack is suggested by its subtitle: "There is more cancer risk in sitting next to a smoker than next to a nuclear power plant...
...Any policy that increases the worldwide supply of oil is in our interest...
...I will here first briefly describe the energy "crisis" or, more accurately, the energy transition...
...There are some things that we can be reasonably sure about...
...Nuclear plants in operation are going to be far more closely supervised than they have been in the past...
...The horrifying ineptness of this plan, and apparently of all such plans, where they exist at all, is the final consequence of a nuclear energy policy committed at every step of its development to the suppression of facts...
...The articles already mentioned by Commoner and by Komanoff provide guidance in that respect...
...The NRC on the contrary looks on the nuclear industry with all the sly solicitude of a lawyer contriving "breaks" for his wealthiest client: the public is the potential antagonist from whom the client must be sheltered...
...a skeptical statement about nuclear power from any of them would matter...
...And it focuses on the fact that the movement will be radical or else it will fail—that is, that a resolution of the current nuclear crisis requires a defeat of the corporate power that has dominated American energy policy from the beginning...
...It is likely that many additional plants will have to close for one reason or another and that many of the plants under construction will never be completed...
...But beyond that...
...On March 28, the water used to cool a "containment vessel" in the atomic plant at Three Mile Island, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, grew dangerously hot and gave every sign of growing hotter...
...Suppose, however, as seems likely, the scientists differ sharply: what then...
...Eqs...
...But it may have some appeal to that saving remnant whose first allegiance is to the recognition of reality...
...the real key is that the government is willing to spend a lot...
...Administration analysts also believe that increased prices will reduce consumption by 110,000 barrels per day by 1981, and by 250,000 barrels per day by 1985...
...The April 1979 Joint Economic Committee study clearly supports Winpisinger's basic point...
...Despite the fact that technological choices may entail large political consequences they seldom, if ever, appear as such on the political agenda...
...As the scale, complexity, and centralization of the energy sector has grown, so also has the energy dependence of industrial society...
...3 The exclusion of the public from policy making is an extension of the belief that citizens cannot understand complex issues...
...7Lee Schipper and Allan J. Lichtenberg, "Efficient Energy Use and Well-Being: The Swedish Example," Science, December 3, 1976, pp...
...But the NRC may recover something of its proper authority if it takes the course suggested by those of its members who can imagine the results of a lastditch evacuation—the lines at gas stations, the jammed freeways, the sporadic or contagious violence, the old and the bewildered and the immovable left behind, and the fatal cloud all the while advancing at its own speed...
...The "problem" of energy is the challenge of creating an energy supply system that is compatible with democratic values while conforming to the laws of thermodynamics...
...This is what Carter has chosen to do...
...How much participation is necessary for democracy to function...
...To be sure, some have begun to confront the economic and social issues at stake...
...The largest single building trades union, the carpenters, would be only peripherally involved in nuclear plant construction, and the sheet metal workers have a tradeunion interest in maximizing solar energy...
...All have a strong supply of orientation, a common faith in technology, and an "engineering mentality...
...The use of coal is problematic because of its effects on human health, ecology, climate, and the high capital costs of converting it to more acceptable forms...
...The President proposes that Congress tax away approximately $3.3 billion of this increased revenue in "windfall profits" taxes...
...M. H. Ross and R. H. Williams, Energy and Economic Growth (U.S...
...A second view of the energy crisis was described in the "technical-fix" scenario of the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project and later in the Carter administration's National Energy Plan (NEP...
...To continue on our present course would be to increase the number of "time bombs"—like the chemical wastes at the Love Canal in Buffalo, N.Y.—that could affect generations yet unborn...
...When the public does 281 get involved it will `usually result in a misallocation of resources" because the public "simply does not have the information to relate perception to reality...
...Senator George McGovern has submitted legislation calling for such a moratorium...
...Beyond 2000, they propose more exotic technologies including coal gasification, the breeder reactor, and nuclear fusion...
...The standard of living is the watchword of a society ready to consume everything including itself...
...One of the witnesses at those hearings was William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists and a vice chair of DSOC...
...It is probable that decontrol will become a reality and that some form of excess profits tax will be enacted, though the amount of money such a tax will recapture is now impossible to predict...
...It leads straight to the headline for a New York Times story of May 7: "Most Unions' Leaders Still Favor Building Atom Plants to Get Jobs...
...At the risk of some distortion we can distinguish three dominant perspectives on these questions in the current debate over U.S...
...Writing in 1922, Soddy argued that energy flows were causally linked to social and economic development.'0 Fred Cottrell later expanded this theme, arguing that "the energy available to man limits what he can do and influences what he will do...
...I think it's necessary to suggest that a responsible body of scientists and non-scientists be created to recommend policy on nuclear power...
...The goal of the conservation approach is an energy-efficient society in the near term, in order to gain time to build a more secure energy base for the long term...
...However, the Harrisburg hydrogen bubble, while failing to escape its containment vessel, nonetheless did manage to melt down the prior indifference of mainstream left-liberalism, thus establishing the nuclear power issue as one upon which it is now obligatory to have a viewpoint...
...Because of the high capital costs of the renewable energy options, they are to a large extent mutually exclusive...
...The risks they wish to avoid include large-scale technological accidents, irreversible ecological damage resource exhaustion, and the implicit threat to democracy posed by centralized institutions...
...280 The Energy Transition THE PRESENT ENERGY "CRISIS" involves the early stages of a transition from a declining energy base to another, more abundant one...
...Energy demand is further presumed to be highly inelastic and tightly linked to economic growth and thus to social progress...
...yet disasters have a way of coming unannounced, with very sketchy credentials: those who knew about meltdowns said we would be lucky to get 12 hours for our escape...
...Governor Thornburgh, President Carter, and the NRC conducted themselves from beginning to end as if they were acting on behalf of Metropolitan Edison...
...What should be encouraged over the next few years (assuming that we can remain in favor with Allah) are energy policies that diminish our reliance on physically dangerous nuclear power and on politically, morally, and economically perilous Middle Eastern oil...
...Technologically advanced societies are portrayed as so inflexible that any leveling or reduction in energy consumption would cause disaster...
...9Demand and Conservation Panel for the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, "U.S...
...In the wake of Three Mile Island, eight plants are "temporarily" closing for repairs...
...Yet, these same societies are portrayed as flexible enough to withstand the acknowledged certainty of periodic catastrophes including large oil spills, nuclear melt downs, liquid natural gas explosions, and global climate change .6 2. CONSERVATION...
...In Amory Lovins's words, "some action by central and local government is...
...It allows the antinuclear movement to reach out to the unions, much as groups like Environmentalists for Full Employment have begun to do...
...14Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977), p. 152...
...Carter's plan orginally received support from a majority of members of Congress although opposition to it has increased, particularly among House Democrats as tempers grow shorter in gasstation lines...
...The Administration maintains that ending controls will yield 330,000 barrels a day in increased domestic production by 1981 and up to 800,000 barrels a day by 1985...
...These and other crucial considerations, it seems to me, have not been examined by many people in the movement...
...Clearly, the most likely result of all these legislative initiatives will be to make the regulatory obstacle course for prospective nuclear plants even more lengthy and arduous than it is at present...
...Social systems accordingly ought to be patterned after natural systems in order to stress decentralization, diversity, and redundancy...
...But how do they know...
...More important, especially in the Senate, the President has retained the backing of much of the Democratic party center and right, e.g., Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long...
...If this was tolerable in the past, it is markedly less so in an era of high technology...
...The danger of politics as usual lies in the neglect of the larger questions...
...necessary to get the ball rolling, but then it's mostly downhill...
...This sort of behavior certainly is not up to the elevated moral standards of university faculties, public-interest law firms, or Congress...
...Energy Demand: Some Low Energy Futures," Science, April 14, 1978, p. 151...
...Beneath these, however, are more important disagreements about goals and values...
...What place should we accord natural objects that stand in our way and have no instrumental value...
...This makes them great lookers-out for the main chance, but, in the long run, enemies of their own survival...
...Decontrol, it is argued, will not increase production or reduce consumption...
...Whether that will happen is not, however, an academic question...
...Will's self-advertised rationality and complexity of mind could not keep him from writing like any other right-wing ideologue prepared to entrust the future of the human race to private energy corporations and their friends in government who are supposed to regulate them...
...At an especially tense moment Hendrie wanted to know how fast he could print up business cards...
...The present debate over energy policy is not merely about which technologies we shall develop, but also about what kind of society we shall become...
...And the demon's name is, The Standard of Living...
...About $5.5 billion more would go to the federal government in normal corporate income taxes, and the state would receive an additional $1 billion in taxes...
...If we relax now and listen to the money, our standard of living will be the last testament of a society murmuring, to all who read between the lines: "I want to die...
...But it cannot be done: two of them are professors of moral philosophy, the third a seasoned adept of the "think tank...
...The price of imported oil is, obviously, controlled only by the limits on OPEC's avarice...
...As the public came to know its ignorance of nuclear physics it was also acquiring a new knowledge of the realities of corporate survival, Whether that knowledge will ever be converted into action remains uncertain...
...However, one suspects that many participants in the growing antinuclear movement, including some who consider themselves to be the most militant, have not faced up to the truly radical implications of shutting down this life-threatening industry...
...And this has to happen, wherever politicians are as 271 much committed to corporate life as corporations are to the life of profit-making...
...and we can imagine nothing worse, short of nuclear war...
...About this time, Hendrie (a Carter appointee) was asking which amendment in the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of the press—and cursing it, whichever one it was...
...1001-13...
...To choose one is to foreclose the others...
...Drawing from a diverse array of thinkers, we can outline a third perspective, which begins by describing a causal relation between the energy basis of a society and its social, political, and economic structures...
...In the words of the NEP "the energy problem can be effectively addressed only by a government that accepts responsibility for dealing with it comprehensively...
...Jobs are certainly central to the construction unions' concern in this area, but it is fantasy to presume that building trades leaders are planning to put all their members to work by constructing more nuclear plants...
...They were alerting us to genuine dangers that everyone in a position of authority was trying to minimize...
...Previous transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil have taken earlier and simpler societies no less than half a century...
...It could impede the fulfillment of the goal that has become paramount since the events at Three Mile Island: ending nuclear power in the United States...
...On a less apocalyptic level, Helmut Schmidt, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, and the recently defeated James Callaghan have watched with justified concern the increasing outflow of inflated and devalued petrodollars...
...So we should be grateful to them—and tell the George Wills of this world to open up their minds a little...
...We can try not to be like President Carter, the unembarrassed personification of technological optimism, a "tough-minded" pragmatist of the sort not to be imposed on by facts, reciting to himself and for us to overhear: "I was a nuclear engineer...
...It makes Joseph Califano's toying with numbers—one cancer in so many years, ten in so many years, "the estimates may keep rising"—something worse than callousness, something a little like depravity...
...Once the public has been educated, it must still be told: imagine what this would feel like...
...Still, had he known more about the odds, he would undoubtedly have acted as he did...
...II Cottrell developed the idea that the control of surplus energy (net energy) is the key to an understanding of social and cultural evolution...
...After all, these people supported the war in Vietnam...
...There are now 71 nuclear plants operating in the United States and 94 under construction...
...capital intensive...
...Marc Ross and Robert Williams, for instance, argue that we can reach zero energy growth by 1985, while maintaining comfortable rates of economic growth thereafter.' Another recent study concluded that "it will be technically feasible in 2010 to use roughly a total amount of energy as low as that used today and still provide a higher level of amenities, even with a total population increasing 35...
...By 1982, as a result of decontrol, the Administration estimates the oil companies will receive $15.4 billion in increased revenues...
...Such a split was one of the reasons why the war in Vietnam dragged on with murderous consequences...
...Anyone who thinks that industry will stand by and allow those public investments to be used for a technology scaled to the common good of America and the Third World is naive...
...But on the other end they create fewer jobs than any other form of energy: a functioning plant needs only technicians in the control room and maintenance workers for the reactors...
...The prospect of larger energy crises in the future bring strong temptations, under the guise of realism, to enter into "Faustian bargains" whereby we trade our hard-won political birthright to anyone who can supply us with a mess of wattage...
...The left-wing reaction to impending decontrol has been an explosion of rage directed against the oil companies, Department of Energy Secretary Schlesinger, and Carter who is portrayed as their compliant tool...
...4 He and others assume that once energy is priced at its replacement cost and institutional barriers are removed, the public will adopt solar technologies for both economic and political reasons...
...Congress: Joint Economic Committee, August 31, 1977...
...We must cultivate, since our lives depend on it, what only the specialists of the imagination are supposed to have, "a disposition to be affected by absent things as if they were present...
...Thornburgh told us of a plan for last-minute evacuation, which he was prepared to implement only in the event of a disaster...
...Jerry Brown could make nuclear power an issue in presidential politics, given his characteristically erratic but on the whole antinuclear record...
...Nevertheless, the overall trend is clear, even if the timing is not...
...12 Energy determinism is even more pronounced in the work of Howard Odum, who maintains that the source of energy and its rate of flow determine social values and the superstructure of economic and political institutions...
...What is the nature and extent of obligations, if any, that we owe to future generations...
...2 Conservation would only reduce the standard of living and damage the nation's economy...
...Given his sympathy for the interests associated with nuclear energy, asking him to do otherwise would be like asking water to run uphill...
...Most important, investors are fleeing from the risk and uncertainties of nuclear power...
...This presents us with a curious paradox...
...Traditionally, social goals have been determined indirectly by elections and markets...
...Instead of a futile struggle to control the price of an ever-shrinking percentage of our oil supply, congressional liberals would more profitably devote their efforts to passing legislation requiring that windfall profits be invested in increasing the supply of energy...
...3 If we fail in the quest for an inexhaustible energy supply, the future they depict differs in no appreciable way from that commonly attributed to the "neo-Malthusians...
...Now they're supporting nuclear power...
...This is taken to be an irrational and self-defeating policy and so it is...
...The first two perspectives are similar to the extent that they would move us in the direction of a fossil fuel/light water energy system and ultimately to a breeder/fusion economy...
...In 1977 and 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not grant a single new nuclear plant license...
...Man, Energy, Society (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976), pp...
...278 rigorous standards on existing plants, the industry will further price itself out of business...
...3. ENERGETICS...
...This attitude may be generated as much by cultural hostility to bandana-wearers with a fondness for being carried into police vans as by any rational assessment of risks, costs, and benefits...
...Gasoline prices have risen spectacularly since 1973 and consumption has not fallen, though its rate of increase has been markedly slowed...
...The company that owned the plant, Metropolitan Edison, did everything it could to solve the problem quietly, and in the process released large quantities of radioactive material into the air and water surrounding the plant...
...I The causes of the transitions are complex and include the depletion of one resource base and/or the development of the technological means to exploit another...
...BUT BEYOND THAT, we find ourselves in serious difficulty...
...In this respect, the debate may foreshadow other issues on the horizon that concern the allocation of scarce resources, adaptation to or extension of environmental limits, and the management of technology...
...Controls will be lifted gradually, allowing the price charged for U.S...
...they will appear to our children significant...
...The goal, therefore, is so vital that it requires us to court risks of technological catastrophes, the effects of which would be comparable to what Bethe describes as "minor wars...
...Governor Thornburgh ordered the evacuation of children and pregnant mothers within a five-mile radius, and President Carter went on television urging the residents of nearby areas not to panic...
...It would require careful planning and a serious full-employment policy, i.e., the very measures that the American labor movement, in all of its wings, has been advocating for some time...
...Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, chairman of the Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation of the Environment and Public Works Committee, wants more federal control over reactor licensing and operation, which will certainly mean a lengthening of this time period...
...When politicians and environmental leaders associated with the antinuclear cause talk about "the era of limits" and the need for Americans to "lower their expectations," building trades workers rightly fear a decline in the living standards of workers and the poor...
...Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, Inc., 1976), p. 635...
...Such a formulation points in the direction of two basic considerations...
...The mechanisms by which individual barrels of oil are priced are insanely complicated and entail the nonproductive employment of legions of bureaucrats, accountants, and lawyers...
...Charles Komanoffs analysis in the New York Review of Books demonstrated that nuclear energy is not only apocalyptically dangerous but also inefficient and costly...
...They will continue to determine our policies, and hold our lives in the balance, until we rid ourselves of the demon that makes them strong...
...and they have kept us confused...
...Carter is at least trying, perhaps misguidedly, to increase domestic energy production, reduce consumption, and increase the amount we spend on alternative energy research and development...
...It turns out that the "simplistic" protesters, the "anti-technology" freaks and "simple-lifers," were at least serving a valuable function through their protests...
...Nothing surprises me...
...These sages also emphasized the stunning insights that life is complicated and that sometimes mutually exclusive choices must be made...
...Advocates of a moratorium tend to skirt the issue of what is to be done with existing nuclear plants...
...These issues indeed will confront us with an extraordinary array of risks and challenges, for our political institutions were designed to deal with simpler problems...
...But he remains a conservative ideologue, and what that entails can be seen in a column he wrote early in April attacking the movie The China Syndrome...
...As the deaths from the Nevada tests in the '50s demonstrate, there can be a 20-year interval between a lethal event and the premature death it causes...
...The energy crisis is thus defined not as a problem of scarcity, but as one of maintaining a growing supply of cheap energy in the belief that there are vast stores of oil still to be discovered at the right price...
...To speed the pace of economic development is to hasten the creation of high entropy or disorder...
...if it were different, it would cease to be a public...
...Accordingly, energy policy was largely restricted to the technical aspects of conversion, transmission, and the arcana of pricing, and was dominated by a narrow group of experts...
...Yet this is unlikely to occur, especially if the "Ban the Bomb" movement can be revived by tapping into "No Nukes" fervor...
...In addition, a growing energy supply is regarded as necessary to alleviate poverty and clean up the environment...
...Other regulatory agencies have served to dramatize the abuses of corporate license in America, by bringing the offenders to the bar of justice, or at least to the headlines...
...I have been saying it down here...
...The political players have lined up in predictable positions...
...NRC inspections have been far from thorough, by the standards we ought 272 to apply to a regulatory agency responsible for death-dealing instruments...
...Many building trades workers fear that antinuclear advocates and environmentalists adhere to "no growth" economics...
...and to conduct research on energy technologies not otherwise developed in the private sector...
...Winpisinger made the essential point that the transition to new and benign forms of energy could, and must, be part of a full-employment program that would have a net effect of reducing joblessness in the United States...
...That problem is compounded by the corporate interest in glossing over problems and cutting costs, a factor that was plainly at work in the construction of the Three Mile Island plant and in the initial response to the accident...
...Still, that doesn't mean the protesters are necessarily right in their demands—especially those who insist that nuclear energy be scrapped entirely...
...The disagreement between the first two and the third perspective is partly over questions of fact such as the relation between energy use and economic growth, estimates of cost, forecasts of recoverable oil and natural gas reserves, climate thresholds for heat and carbon dioxide, and the feasibility and side effects of new technologies...
...In October 1978, Business Week printed a revealing article entitled "General Electric Hedges Its Bets," which notes that, while 279 the energy corporations do not see solar power as an immediate threat, they do fear a solar future, because it might disperse the generation of energy by putting collectors on every roof top...
...Second, there is no waste disposal system now known that can deal with the deadly detritus of the nuclear industry...
...284 2Hans Bethe, "The Necessity of Fission Power," Scientific American, January 1976, p. 31...
...In addition to the risks of economic dislocation caused by interruption of energy supplies, proponents of conservation warn of the impending exhaustion of oil reserves, huge balance-ofpayments problems, dependence on unreliable foreign suppliers, and of the related possibility of energy wars...
...This is not simply an intellectual failure...
...9 The NEP was not as optimistic but nevertheless aimed to maintain high rates of economic growth while reducing the annual increase in energy demand to less than 2 percent...
...They differ on the roles of private enterprise and the federal government, and to a lesser extent on the relative stress each would place on efficiency...
...Or James Schlesinger, welcoming the accident as a new and unlooked-for opportunity to retrieve information about the behavior of molecules in times of crisis...
...It is appropriate, nonetheless, for the government to intervene on the supply side with direct and indirect subsidies in the form of grants, depletion allowances, tax breaks, and research funding...
...This largely corresponds to the elite that has controlled energy policy in the recent past, which has been described by one analyst as a small, stable and closed circle of...
...All one can say is, sensible people will tilt heavily toward caution...
...All shall be well...
...This was all very well, except for a slight mishap—a few days later came Three Mile Island...
...The answer to Mattson's question—Whom are we protecting?—was in fact implied in Hendrie's question about printing up business cards...
...Natural systems, and by implication social systems, develop until their "maintenance and organization costs equal their energy budgets...
...I would guess that when Ted Kennedy and Russell Long conclude their press-release war over the terms of the tax, the compromise result will look a good deal like the President's original proposal...
...What balance should we seek between expertise and democratic participation...
...and (5) the large-scale risks to the environment, the economy, and future generations entailed in the decision...
...Keep them confused," said President Eisenhower...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
