Puncturing the Nuclear Power Controversy

READER, MARK

BOOKS Puncturing the Nuclear Power Controversy MARK READER In this original paperback, Unacceptable Risk: The Nuclear Power Controversy, McKinley C. Olson has written a highly needed book on...

...Olson, a journalist who recently edited a special issue of The Nation on nuclear energy and wrote the article, "Nuclear Fuel: The Hot Shuffle," in the April 1975 issue of The Progressive, has rescued the nuclear discussion from the verbal control of technologists and advertising specialists who have made it impossible for ordinary people to understand just how and why nuclear energy threatens their lives...
...It may make even less sense next year...
...Those who were, and continue to be, put off by the Proposition 15 zealots in California and more recently in Oregon, Arizona, and several other Western states where there is a struggle to enact safe energy initiatives in the November elections, may find that Olson's presentation turns them off from what is really a first-rate and honest non-nuclear book...
...the nuclear industry is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the country...
...indeed, much of the book can serve as a "Who's Who" of the anti-nuclear movement...
...In the best tradition of American journalism, Olson, a former editorial writer for the York Gazette and Daily in Pennsylvania, makes the most esoteric nuclear statistics come alive...
...BOOKS Puncturing the Nuclear Power Controversy MARK READER In this original paperback, Unacceptable Risk: The Nuclear Power Controversy, McKinley C. Olson has written a highly needed book on nuclear energy that everyone can understand...
...John Gofman of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility estimates the number of plutonium-induced lung cancers in the world in 1975 at more than 10,000 and links many of them to nuclear programs, any citizen might well be concerned...
...In recent months, Lewis Mumford's perception that human beings cannot live long, or live humanly, with nuclear energy in any of its guises has begun to take hold of the American consciousness...
...In one, Olson describes how scientists, lawyers, doctors, and other concerned citizens have fought the nuclear industry to a standstill in one community after another...
...When he points out that any one of the standard-sized light water nuclear reactors in operation in the United States is producing as much radioactivity a year as from the fallout of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, any reader can understand the threat of a nearby nuclear plant...
...Olson is able to puncture the nuclear balloon further by demonstrating that nuclear power means big profits for some and higher utility rates for all because profit in the industry is based upon rate of investment...
...When Olson recalls hearing David Brower of Friends of the Earth say, "J think we're going to stop nuclear power because it has to be stopped...if we're wrong, we can do something else...
...Mark Reader, a political scientist at Arizona State University, is a political theorist and activist in the non-nuclear movement...
...If they're wrong, we're dead," anyone who values life can agree viscerally as well as intellectually...
...For those who need a basic introduction to the nuclear controversy, the final chapters of Unacceptable Risk may be particularly helpful...
...more jobs for workers would probably be available if the nation switched to more labor-intensive sources of energy and away from nuclear plant construction...
...His final chapter presents readers with a quick rundown of non-nuclear energy alternatives such as conservation, peak-load pricing, judicious use of coal, and the imaginative use of wind, water, and garbage power that are available to the nation...
...Olson succeeds in cutting through the pro-nuclear argument with common sense...
...both may have invested too heavily in a tactic which has confused rather than enlightened the electorate...
...When Olson notes that nuclear advocate Frank Pittman says the problem of disposing of plutonium, the most lethal and long-lasting by-product of nuclear energy generation, is that "you have to do it forever," the implications are chilling...
...A second failing, in my judgment, of this otherwise impeccable book is this: While much of the emotion of nuclear opponents was, and continues to be, expended in the various initiative campaigns in the Western states, something far more hopeful and profound has begun to happen in the nuclear controversy, a change which Olson and others may not have noticed...
...Somehow nuclear power does not make as much sense as it did a year ago...
...To counter government and industrial statistics which claim that nuclear power is safe, Olson takes the reader to the scene of one nuclear accident after another and talks to the participants or points out the environmental legacies of each "incident...
...Moreover, when his book is read in the context of daily events, it makes clear why it is essential to secure an immediate, world-wide moratorium on the sale, construction, and operation of nuclear reactors and related technologies...
...In examining the argument that nuclear energy is economical, Olson interviewed opponents and proponents who agreed that the break-even point is around 54 per cent operating efficiency...
...If this happens, Olson's comprehensive and popular history of the nuclear energy controversy will have helped to turn the tide...
...Here both Olson and the non-nuclear movement seem to have made a serious miscalculation...
...When Olson notes that Dr...
...He is one of the founders of the Committee for a Non-Nuclear Future recently formed in the Tempe-Scottsdale area...
...The United States may find it necessary to become an importer of uranium in 1977 and must soon deal with an already established international energy cartel, which by implication makes a mockery of the argument for "energy independence" through nuclear power...
...The first two, and briefest, chapters of Unacceptable Risk are devoted to the politics of the Nuclear Safeguards Act and the attempt to "sell" it to the voters >af California, where the safe energy initiative (Proposition 15) was defeated in June by a two-to-one margin...
...He then goes on to report that many older nuclear power plants are operating well below that figure and that the costs of nuclear fuels continue to rise...
...And, in scrutinizing the nuclear accident-theft-sabotage equation, Olson describes attempts at nuclear extortion and terrorism that have taken place and expresses the growing concern that people on either side of the nuclear debate have about protecting the nuclear fuel cycle...

Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11


 
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