Nuclear Inc.
Hertsgaard, Mark
NUCLEAR INC. by Mark Hertsgaard Pantheon Books. 340 pp. $16.95. The idea of harnessing the atomic force that was first used to destroy whole cities still staggers the imagination. So does the...
...In Nuclear Inc., Hertsgaard effectively emphasizes that the beast can still come alive, and that we had better keep up our defenses...
...The stalemate reached with the reactor builders is only half the battle...
...But Hertsgaard warns that even if its most grandiose dreams have been dashed, the corporate structure behind the Peaceful Atom remains firmly intact...
...But most mind-boggling of all is that despite Three Mile Island and the collapse of new reactor orders, a powerful cadre of atomic executives remains firmly committed to the "nuclear imperative," as if the year were 1953 rather than 1983...
...So, too, was the assumption of an ever-growing demand for reactors, regardless of their price tag...
...Money, it seems, is not the only thing motivating these men...
...After all, the nation's leaders once had plans for 50 per cent dependency on nukes, a vision Richard Nixon upgraded in 1974 with his call for 1,000 reactors in the United States by the year 2000...
...The greed of the companies led to a dangerous spiral in which size and cost outstripped actual technical abilities...
...His new book, "America Born and Reborn," will be published early in 1984...
...Home energy consumption is down a full 20 per cent from a decade ago, an astonishing turnaround when one considers the growth projections of the early 1970s...
...we get twice that from firewood...
...In the face of slumping energy demand and stiff public opposition, however, not even the most wild-eyed reactor builders still harbor such fantasies...
...But while we are doing that, we should consider the magnitude of the changes America has accepted...
...Therefore, it can hang on for a long period of nuclear doldrums...
...And that reactor would sell like hot cakes for about a year, and then the vendor at the bottom of the heap would come out with a new design that was another 5 per cent larger, and he'd sell for the next year and a half...
...To a man (and except for Dixy Lee Ray, they are all men), they seem convinced that nuclear generators represent big profits—and entrepreneurial prowess...
...Hertsgaard conducted face-to-face interviews with a surprising range of top atomic executives...
...Hertsgaard underscores the necessity of developing solar power on a national scale within the decade...
...Such is the time warp one enters when reading Mark Hertsgaard's Nuclear Inc...
...Today, atomic power provides just 4 per cent of our overall energy...
...And its chief officers intend to do just that...
...Harvey Wasserman (Harvey Wasserman is co-author of "Killing Our Own...
...A young researcher affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies, Hertsgaard spent the better part of three years examining the nuts and bolts of the corporate structure behind atomic power...
...That gives opponents of nuclear power a breathing space for now—one in which we must forcefully act...
...Being Number One is, of course, an old American tradition...
...Thus the industry has entered what Hertsgaard calls "a deep and serious coma...
...The last order for a domestic reactor was filed in 1978...
...But as Hertsgaard shows—and here his book is at its strongest—the industry has made some fundamental errors...
...General Electric does $600 million a year in nuclear fuel and hardware business, but its reactor business represents less than one-fortieth of its gross sales...
...The men of the Atomic Brotherhood believe that preparing for the nuclear imperative is the right thing to do, that they are acting in the common good," writes Hertsgaard...
...Few activists have pulled up stakes in the fight against atomic power...
...As far as GE is concerned," said General Electric's Thomas Paine, "it is absolutely necessary to be first in nuclear energy...
...So does the original $800 billion blueprint for making the nation energy-dependent on the Peaceful Atom...
...The price stabilization so often and confidently promised by reactor vendors in the 1960s never occurred," Hertsgaard writes...
...Nuclear Inc...
...By some estimates, our electric generating system is 35 per cent overbuilt...
...Nuclear opponents have argued in various ways that atomic power is dead in the United States and that the antinuclear movement killed it...
...He finds that the bolts are loose, and the nuts still running the show...
...As Richard Van Hollen of Combustion Engineering put it, "A reactor vendor would come out with a new design, and in response to challenges from other people, he would make it about 5 to 7 per cent larger to justify it to the utilities...
...But the assumption that the engineers who built a 100-megawatt reactor could automatically build a 1,000-megawatt reactor turned out to be mistaken...
...Nowhere else in human history has so much corporate and scientific ego been invested in so obvious a technological disaster...
...offers good incentive to pound those stakes in a bit further...
...The real war involves building a renewable energy system that will leave no room for a rebirth of nuclear fantasies, no matter how zealous the Atomic Brotherhood remains...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
