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Editorial: Nuclear plants and nuclear weapons
EDITORIAL
Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Weapons merican foreign policy has always insisted that foreign governments over which we have influence keep separate the military and civilian applications of nuclear power, as we have generally done with ourselves. We have resisted converting to tritium production the mothbailed but mostly completed WNP-1 power reactor of the Washington Public Power Supply System, for example, even though the U.S. has a serious and acknowledged tritium shortage, and though it would apparently be quicker and more cost-effective to pursue conversion than other alternatives. Unless more urgent circumstances than w e have yet seen force us to change, we will try to maintain the "lead curtain" between civilian and military uses of the atom. ut even if we do keep the applications separate, that is not to say the military atom does not affect this country's moribund nuclear power program. It does. And the mess the federal government has made of the nuclear weapons program seems likely to affect the ailing nuclear power program for years to come. A decade ago, before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, one of this country's foremost proponents of responsible nuclear energy development, proposed something that seemed to make sense.
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His suggestion was aimed at reversing low public confidence in the safety of civilian nuclear power, aad at the fact that the French and the Japanese were able to site, license and build nuclear plants far faster than we were, and at lower cost. Perhaps, Weinberg suggested, the federal government should build public confidence in nuclear power by ensuring that utility nuclear plants are run and their materials handled by a cadre of centrally (probably federally) trained operators, rather than being left to each utility plant licensee. The utilities, Weinberg argued, may be too diverse in their capability and have too little nuclear experience to warrant entrusting nudear technology to them unaided. Little came from Weinberg's suggestion. Now, whatever its merits, its time may have passed. Today the federal government's own carelessness with nuclear facilities and materials is being exposed in the media with shocking and relentless regularity. Every week, it seems, we read revelations of cracks in military reactor cooling systems that have gone unreported, of leaks of nudear materials that have gone und i s c l o s e d - n o t by "Monopolated Edison" (as Richard Wright called the fictional utility in his novel, Native Son)--but by the United
States Govemment and its agents. Our own government, it seems, has been treating nuclear materials in a manner we would disdain as worthy of a banana republic. 'n view of these recent dis.closures, it is unlikely the American people would be quickly assured by news that the federal government was taking over operation of the civilian reactor program. The military and civilian atom may be strangers to one another, but the poor safety images they enjoy, deserved or not, are close cousins. What is to be done? If we have any nuclear future in the near term, say the next ten years, it will come about as a response to the threat of global warming--a problem that will remain with us even if the next summer or two are cooler, as some predict. Only some exigent environmental crisis of a compelling dimension, it seems to us, can provide nuclear power the necessary breath of life. But even then, if the nuclear power industry is to be revived, it will take a new and much clearer vision than the dreamy, Sunday supplement image of safe, plentiful, too-cheap-to-meter atomic energy that kicked off the peacetime atom three decades ago. It may even take dare w e say it?--a plan.
The Electricity Journal
Nuclear Plants and Nuclear Weapons merican foreign policy has always insisted that foreign governments over which we have influence keep separate the military and civilian applications of nuclear power, as we have generally done with ourselves. We have resisted converting to tritium production the mothbailed but mostly completed WNP-1 power reactor of the Washington Public Power Supply System, for example, even though the U.S. has a serious and acknowledged tritium shortage, and though it would apparently be quicker and more cost-effective to pursue conversion than other alternatives. Unless more urgent circumstances than w e have yet seen force us to change, we will try to maintain the "lead curtain" between civilian and military uses of the atom. ut even if we do keep the applications separate, that is not to say the military atom does not affect this country's moribund nuclear power program. It does. And the mess the federal government has made of the nuclear weapons program seems likely to affect the ailing nuclear power program for years to come. A decade ago, before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, one of this country's foremost proponents of responsible nuclear energy development, proposed something that seemed to make sense.
A
B
48
His suggestion was aimed at reversing low public confidence in the safety of civilian nuclear power, aad at the fact that the French and the Japanese were able to site, license and build nuclear plants far faster than we were, and at lower cost. Perhaps, Weinberg suggested, the federal government should build public confidence in nuclear power by ensuring that utility nuclear plants are run and their materials handled by a cadre of centrally (probably federally) trained operators, rather than being left to each utility plant licensee. The utilities, Weinberg argued, may be too diverse in their capability and have too little nuclear experience to warrant entrusting nudear technology to them unaided. Little came from Weinberg's suggestion. Now, whatever its merits, its time may have passed. Today the federal government's own carelessness with nuclear facilities and materials is being exposed in the media with shocking and relentless regularity. Every week, it seems, we read revelations of cracks in military reactor cooling systems that have gone unreported, of leaks of nudear materials that have gone und i s c l o s e d - n o t by "Monopolated Edison" (as Richard Wright called the fictional utility in his novel, Native Son)--but by the United
States Govemment and its agents. Our own government, it seems, has been treating nuclear materials in a manner we would disdain as worthy of a banana republic. 'n view of these recent dis.closures, it is unlikely the American people would be quickly assured by news that the federal government was taking over operation of the civilian reactor program. The military and civilian atom may be strangers to one another, but the poor safety images they enjoy, deserved or not, are close cousins. What is to be done? If we have any nuclear future in the near term, say the next ten years, it will come about as a response to the threat of global warming--a problem that will remain with us even if the next summer or two are cooler, as some predict. Only some exigent environmental crisis of a compelling dimension, it seems to us, can provide nuclear power the necessary breath of life. But even then, if the nuclear power industry is to be revived, it will take a new and much clearer vision than the dreamy, Sunday supplement image of safe, plentiful, too-cheap-to-meter atomic energy that kicked off the peacetime atom three decades ago. It may even take dare w e say it?--a plan.
The Electricity Journal