Table of Contents

Read this . . . please

This is the shortest Chymist ever because it’s painful to write and will be painful to read. Its thesis is simple. It goes like this:

For years I’ve accepted nuclear energy as a splendid example of what we technologists can do. Now, quite suddenly, it scares the hell out of me!

Several weeks ago, an outfit called KEEP—Keys to Education in Environmental Protection—sponsored a debate in my neighborhood. I went. I expected to find a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes—democracy in action. Instead, I found two informed advocates addressing well over 100 concerned citizens (this, in a town of 25,000). The speaker from the Edison Electric Institute was most assuring in a polished, fatherly way. The other speaker was Larry Bogart, who’s made a “career” of this sort of thing since retiring from the chemical processing industry. He proved to be a fantastic storehouse of knowledge not only about the technology of nuclear power, but also its politics, economics, and sociology. A lot of the concerns he expressed we can handle:

• We can shield against as much steady-state radioactive leakage as we want. 
• We can keep steady-state thermal pollution as low as we want. 
• We can build as much redundancy into safety as we want. 

These are all normal cost–benefit continua. We can plot them, optimize them, put in sound safety factors, and all the rest.

What he told me that I didn’t know—or never had the guts to face—is that superimposed on these quite normal mathematical functions are two that are anything but normal:

• Any event that could disperse a nuclear reactor core has a damage potential beyond any other event that I can imagine. 
• The hazard of fission products persists for a time that is longer than any I can conceive. 

These two concepts take nuclear power right out of the hands of technologists and put it in the sociopolitical sphere. The sad thing is that members of that sphere don’t fully appreciate the responsibility technology has presented to them. Will you—people who appreciate technology, but also people—please help them.

Now, lest you think that your editor has become a garden-variety econut, let me document briefly.

Speaking on CBS-TV August 10, 1970, Edward Teller said, in part, “You can put it in this, perhaps inappropriate, mathematical form. The probability that something will go seriously wrong is real. But the damage that would be caused if it went wrong is infinite. So you have the peculiar problem of multiplying zero by infinity”. If a numerical approximation of Teller’s “infinite” is more comforting, one can find it in a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission document (1).

Nuclear waste that must be stored consists among other things of ⁹⁰Sr, whose half-life is 28 years; ¹³⁷Cs, whose half- life is 30 years; and ²³⁹Pu, half of which will still be around 24,360 years from now. To put that last number into perspective, recall that this is only 1973. That’s some legacy.

By nature we’re not political people, but here, I think we must be. Senator Mike Gravel (D–AK) has introduced a bill to place a federal moratorium on construction of nuclear plants (S1217). It deserves your attention. Wisconsin and Minnesota have similar bills pending in their state houses; seven other states are about to see such bills, and Friends of the Earth is targeting most other states. Where do you live? More important: Where will your children live? And their children on whom will be visited “. . . the iniquities of the fathers . . . unto third and fourth generation . . .” (2).

Lest you think that we have no alternative to nuclear roulette, [see Reference 3], where you’ll meet the concept of the energy forest. It, like so many other good concepts, is having difficulty finding support. Since World War II, nuclear power has received something like 200 times the funding of all other energy sources combined. Should that continue?

Sure, we have a crisis, but John Kennedy long ago pointed out that China’s venerable ideograph for “crisis” is made up of two symbols: One is “danger”; the other “opportunity”.

References

1. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Document 740, Washington, DC, March 1957. 
2. Exodus 20:5. 
3. Kemp, C. C.; Szego, G. C. CHEMTECH 1973, 3, 275–284.