Report Card
Fiefer, William Paul
REPORT CARD William Paul Fiefer Strategic University Initiative STAR WARS: Pentagon Invades Academia by William Hartung and Rosy Nimroody Council on Economic Priorities, 30 Irving Place, New...
...REPORT CARD William Paul Fiefer Strategic University Initiative STAR WARS: Pentagon Invades Academia by William Hartung and Rosy Nimroody Council on Economic Priorities, 30 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003...
...universities...
...These constraints, the report continues, affect not only domestic research, but U.S...
...But the dangers don't evaporate when the plants are shut down...
...54 pp...
...Star Wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, hasn't been deployed yet, but it is aggressively invading American campuses...
...Few consumers are interested in owning a chemical laser or particle-beam generator...
...standing in the world intellectual and commercial community...
...Even if all construction of reactors were halted today, more than 500 plants would eventually have to be cleaned and isolated...
...The Department of Defense will spend $ 100 million on the project this year, and despite the objections of fourteen schools—led by the University of Illinois and Cornell—most of that will go toward research at universities...
...The required quarantine period, adds Cynthia Pollock, the author and a researcher at the Institute, may last thousands of years...
...Japan, for example, competes more effectively with American industry because it devotes money to developing high-quality, marketable electronics and computer products rather than creating exotic military hardware with little civilian application...
...Taking full advantage of the learning experience offered by reactors now coming out of service is sometimes viewed as a needless expense," Pollock says...
...The dangers of this trend, say Hartung and Nimroody, are pressing...
...Radioactivity builds up each year the plant operates, and all of the contaminated parts and equipment must be securely isolated from people and the environment...
...The time has arrived for a hard-headed assessment of the problem...
...4.00...
...The free flow of information at universities could be stanched, and schools receiving generous dollops of research money might become boosters for the high-tech space project...
...6pp...
...Pollock advocates the development of a long-term strategy covering both the construction of reactors and the storage of their radioactive remnants...
...Such current ideas as encasing power plants in concrete or submerging their dismantled components beneath the ocean fail to account for the millennia required to exhaust radioactivity...
...DoD university funding in general, and the SDI innovative science program in particular," the authors argue, "threatens the diversity of funding sources and the open research process—essential strengths of scientific research at U.S...
...A decision to accept Star Wars money, say the authors, "would be tantamount to conceding control of our nation's advanced scientific research effort to the Department of Defense...
...But saving millions of dollars today could result in spending billions of extra dollars tomorrow...
...Federal budget cuts this year will put a deeper crimp in the research dollars trickling into universities, and the pressure to consider new cash pipelines, even if a four-star general controls the flow at the other end, will increase...
...The accident at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear reactor refreshed public awareness of the dangers surrounding atomic power...
...Free...
...For the schools, however, the temptation is strong...
...Within the next thirty years, Pollock says, more than 350 reactors will be taken off line and need decommissioning...
...Retiring Reactors DECOMMISSIONING: Nuclear Power's Missing Link by Cynthia Pollock Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036...
...Nearly four decades and 400 power plants into the nuclear age, the question of how to safely and economically dispose of nuclear reactors and their wastes is still largely unanswered," notes this World-watch Institute booklet...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
