(5 of 9)
However understandable such environmental crusades may be, and however remiss the utilities may seem in retrospect, the battles hamper power production at the very time of the growing shortage. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, the utilities will have to meet tough air-quality standards by 1975, and the cost of those standards will help to triple the price of electricity by 1990. Nonetheless, the Federal Power Commission predicts that the utilities must build about 300 new power plants generating 910 million kw. to meet the anticipated needs of 1990. The expected cost: $500 billion.
Surveying their problems, the utilities have drawn one inescapable conclusion: they are "going nuclear." The building costs are huge, but operating costs are low, and an adequate U.S. supply of enriched uranium fuel is assured. The Atomic Energy Commission has al ready approved plans for 51 plants, now being built, and 61 more that are ready for construction. Nuclear power today provides only 2% of U.S. needs, but it may well supply more than 50% by 1990. Here too, however, environmental problems are restricting expansion.
So far, numerous lawsuits have blocked nuclear construction, for many Americans still have a visceral fear of an accidental atomic explosion (which is impossible) or of what Alaska Senator Mike Gravel calls "the ultimate pollutant"—lethal, long-lived radiation.
Partly in response to such fears, the AEC has insisted on extensive safety precautions. Before the Portland General Electric Co. could start building its Trojan reactor on the Columbia River, for example, it had to choose a site that would remain safe during an almost inconceivable catastrophe: the simultaneous bursting of the Grand Coulee Dam upstream plus the largest natural flood that had occurred in the area during 10,000 years.
Skeptics, including many distinguished scientists, remain unconvinced that every precaution has been taken. During a reactor's operation, the worst possible contingency is the uncontrolled melting of its nuclear core. To preclude such an occurrence, which the AEC calls "the maximum credible accident," the core is continually bathed in cooling water; the AEC even requires an emergency set of pipes and valves to continue supplying the water if one set is severed. Unfortunately, simulated tests by the AEC itself have shown that the reserve pipes, the "emergency core cooling system" (ECCS), may also fail. What would happen if the cooling system breaks down? M.I.T. Nuclear Physicist Hugh Kendall paints a lurid picture. The nuclear core would become a molten mass, so hot that it could melt through anything guarding it. Subsequent steam explosions could rupture the outer container, releasing a cloud of radioactivity about two miles wide and 60 miles long. Much of the population in that area would be dead within two weeks.
Kendall and other critical scientists are quick to add that there is very little chance of such a catastrophe actually happening, but even the bare possibility makes them oppose going ahead with the nuclear program until the cooling problem is totally solved. Conceding the point, the AEC is holding open hearings on nuclear safety in Bethesda, Md. In the meantime, it has allowed only one new nuclear plant to go into operation in the past 17 months.