Nuclear Cover-up

...by Mark Reader Daniel Ford's book, The Cult of the Atom, documents what critics of nuclear power have long maintained: Atomic energy and democracy are inimical, and an economy based on uranium and plutonium will simply hasten the end of the human race...

...Norman C. Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who "had never published any technical papers on any aspect of nuclear-power reactor safety" and who "had a number of ties to the nuclear industry," was appointed to head up a key nuclear reactor safety study which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the AEC's administrative descendant) was quietly to repudiate after it had been used to legitimate the nuMark Reader, a political scientist at Arizona State University, is a leading critic of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the first unit of which is scheduled to open forty-five miles upwind from Phoenix later this year...

...Throughout AEC's history, Ford shows us, the Federal agency engaged in covering up the nuclear industry's faults, incessantly sacrificing public safety concerns to the economic demands of a private sector of the economy...

...Rather than simply retrenching, as Ford suggests, would it not be more prudent and just to shut down an unsafe industry that is gearing up to spend an additional $40 million in advertising to persuade the nation of the virtues of nuclear power...

...The images are sharply drawn...

...By demystifying both the technologies and the decision-making process at work in the nation's commercial nuclear reactor program, The Cult of the Atom should convince any fair-minded person that atomic energy is an idea whose time has come— and gone...

...When told of safety problems in the design of the critical emergency core cooling systems at the nation's atomic plants, the AEC staff, according to Ford, failed to admit "that it had blundered and had permitted dozens of plants to be constructed but was now unsure that they could be operated safely...

...Thus, with 100 plants in operation in the United States during the next ten years, Ford reports two members of the NRC Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards as concluding "that there is at least a 50 per cent chance during this decade that one of them will have a meltdown or some other form of major accident...

...Every bureaucratic tendency operated against making such an admission of incompetence," Ford continues...

...Throughout The Cult of the Atom one is reminded that many of the same pressures that undermined the AEC are now at work on the current industry watchdog, the NRC, and that the prospect of a serious nuclear meltdown at one of the nation's seventy-two operating nuclear reactors is greater than at any time in the past...

...As such, the book will be particularly welcomed by all serious students and concerned citizens interested in raising informed questions about the safety of their neighborhood nuclear reactors...

...In these pages we see Glenn Seaborg, maker of plutonium and chairman of the AEC from 1961 to 1971, promoting his "dream of atomic-powered plenty" even as the destructive potential of nuclear reactors was becoming known...

...clear industry's reckless construction program...

...As executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Ford conducted a ten-year investigation of nuclear safety...

...Using materials derived from a successful Freedom of Information Act request, Ford tells the story of a Federal agency preoccupied by industry interests and consumed by its own hubris and deceit...

...Physicist Edward Teller told a Congressional subcommittee in 1953 that an accident at a nuclear plant could release dangerous concentrations of radiation for distances as great as 100 miles but that the risks were worth taking nevertheless...

...But it is not history alone that Ford is interested in rescuing...

...If Ford is right in concluding that the nation's atomic energy program was conceived in greed and executed in fraud, to what extent are any of us now obliged to support it...

...The remedy, as seen by Ford and the Union of Concerned Scientists, is retrenchment in the nation's nuclear program, a mild prescription considering the risks involved in keeping the program going...

...If a lesson emerges from Ford's detailed account of decision-making at the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which both promoted and regulated America's nuclear power program through 1975, it is of a people now put at risk by a bureaucratic, technological elite's ability to monopolize and manipulate vital information...