Environment: The Struggle over Nuclear Power

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The industry has taken pains to respond to the defectors on the safety issue. George Stathakis, vice president and general manager of GE's Nuclear Energy Programs division, told the congressional committee that the charges raised by the former GE engineers were old and had either already been answered or were in the process of being dealt with. Con Edison Spokesman John Conway insisted that the Indian Point plants were safe. Said he: "None of these plants constitutes an unreasonable risk to the health and safety of our own personnel or to the public at large."

From within the Government, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman William Anders said that nothing in the defectors' claims would require his agency to take drastic action. Others insisted that nuclear power risks are reasonable. Said NRC Commissioner Edward Mason: "There is not enough money in the U.S. to raise man's other activities to the safety level already achieved by nuclear power plants."

The nuclear safety record to date is impressive. No member of the public has been injured as a result of a reactor accident since the first U.S. nuclear power plant was brought on line in 1957. The odds against future injury are enormous. A controversial study directed by Nuclear Physicist Norman Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that nuclear plants are thousands of times less apt to produce fatal accidents than fires, non-nuclear explosions, toxic chemical releases, dam failures, airplane crashes and earthquakes. Even with 100 reactors operating (there are now 59 licensed), says Rasmussen, the odds that an individual will be killed by a reactor accident are only 1 in 5 billion per year.

For all these odds and all the safeguards, there has been at least one close call. Last March the world's largest nuclear plant, located at Brown's Ferry, Ala., was well into the chain of events that could lead to a meltdown after human error caused failure of several key safety systems. On a lesser level, a Northeast Utilities plant in Waterford, Conn., spilled radiation outside the plant when a steam condenser ruptured. Other nuclear power plants have had to suspend operations for anywhere from weeks to several months as a result of equipment failures. But most nuclear proponents insist that this record is remarkably good and see no unreasonable hazard in stepping up nuclear power plant construction to meet about a third of U.S. energy needs by 1999.

A study sponsored by the American Physical Society suggests some reservations, however. The report issued last spring concluded that the nuclear power Establishment had underestimated the consequences of nuclear accidents and may well have overestimated the effectiveness of its safety systems. "There is," said the report, "a lack of well-quantified understanding of the performance of some of these special systems under some severe accident conditions." To develop that understanding, the study advised, the reactor safety program should be improved and expanded.

Nuclear plants also raise other questions and fears. One is that expansion of the nuclear power industry would make it easy for terrorists to steal fissionable materials for homemade bombs. That is probably exaggerated. Stringent security can keep nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands.