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Despite all those woes, there still is a case for keeping nuclear plants in operation and finishing those now abuilding, while rethinking how many more the nation needs in the long run. Until such power sources as solar energy and thermonuclear fusion become commercially feasible, nuclear plants are indispensable. mainly because the alternatives are worse.
Oil has risen so high in price that the costs of burning it to produce electricity make even the costs of atomic power pale.
Relying on imported oil opens the U.S. to economic and political blackmail. Coal can replace uranium as a power-plant fuel, but only at the price of severe environmental damage: a steady, though undramatic, toll of respiratory ailments among the people who breathe the air near a coal-fired plant, and the long-range possibility of a ''greenhouse effect'' in the atmosphere that could cause an irreversible change in the earth's climate.
If nuclear power is to retain any future at all, however, the plants must be made safe and the public convinced that the industry and its regulators have learned the lessons of T.M.I. The Kemeny commission report is especially disturbing. Beyond its specific criticisms, it suggests that the trouble with nuclear power is people:
the fallible humans who operate a very unforgiving technology, and who are harder to change than machines.
The recommendations for better training and closer supervision of reactor operators are worthy, but some experts imply that they do not go far enough.
Physicist Alvin Weinberg, one of the developers of commercial nuclear power, believes that the U.S. should establish a ''nuclear priesthood'' of superbly trained reactor technicians and free them from the supervision of power-company executives. These technicians could shut down a reactor any time the gauges misbehave, without thinking about costs. Weinberg also suggests that the nation investigate whether some types of reactors—the graphite-moderated, gas-cooled kind used in Britain, or Canada's ''Candu,'' cooled by liquid sodium—might be safer than the pressurized-water reactors built by the U.S. industry.
On the other hand, nothing in the Kemeny commission's conclusions suggests that the problems of safety are insurmountable, and the scorching tone of its criticisms ought to convince a public grown justifiably suspicious of nuclear reassurance that this report is no industry whitewash.
Indeed, the Three Mile Island accident has prompted some finger pointing that nonetheless indicates salutary soul searching. Says the NRC, in a report of its own: ''Everyone connected with nuclear power technology must accept as a fact that accidents can happen. Operations personnel in particular must not have a mind-set that future accidents are impossible. The experience of Three Mile Island has not been sufficient to eradicate that mind-set in all quarters, and the effects of that experience will fade with time. We have no easy answer to suggest, but attitudes must be changed.'' If Three Mile Island was not enough to change them, the Kemeny report ought to further the cause,