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Breeders. Despite the unknown risks, the Government and the utilities are clearly betting on nuclear power for decades to come, and Congress last month voted to give the builders of nuclear plants an 18-month exemption from having to make environmental reports on the plants' effects. Looking ahead. President Nixon has committed the U.S. to developing a new and still untried generation of nuclear reactors, now receiving the bulk of the U.S. energy research budget ($260 million). Nixon told Congress last year: "Our best hope today for meeting the nation's growing demand for clean energy lies with the fast-breeder reactor."
The fast breeder seems to be a miraculous machine indeed. It produces slightly more fuel than it consumes, thus extending fuel supplies for centuries.* It wastes less heat energy than any other kind of power plant available today, and it seems technically feasible (though the biggest prototype partially melted in 1966). The AEC aims to have a $500 million demonstration plant operating by 1980, probably in the Tennessee Valley Authority's network. Says AEC Chairman James Schlesinger, who took over the agency a year ago: "If we don't have breeder technology in the 1990s, the regrets could be very great indeed." But he admits that there are still "uncertainties" to be worked out.
"The breeder is a monster," says David Comey, environmental director for Chicago's Businessmen in the Public Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept "dangerous and unproved." Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years. At present, the AEC plans to store them in large concrete containers at an as yet unspecified location. Then they must be watched (and watched). "We are committing future generations," reported a British commission last month, "to a problem that we do not know how to handle."
Given the drawbacks to each type of energy, scientists, politicians and conservationists are all seeking alternative sources for the power needed in the next century. Some possibilities:
FUSION. The ideal solution is to reproduce the sun's own process of joining atomic nuclei to produce clean, safe energy. The process, which also powers the hydrogen bomb, releases so much energy, and the hydrogen used as fuel is so abundant in sea water, that fusion could fill the world's electricity needs for millions of years. But the practical difficulties of confining nuclear particles in "bottles" of magnetic energy (at temperatures approaching 60 million degrees F.) are such that most experts do not foresee fusion working before 1990 at the earliest.