Environment: The Struggle over Nuclear Power

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Radioactive Legacy. A major concern is nuclear wastes, one of which, plutonium, has a half-life of over 24,000 years. Safeguarding wastes alone, says Biologist Barry Commoner, would require the creation of a kind of permanent "nuclear priesthood," to watch over the radioactive legacy each generation of Americans handed down to its successors.

Meanwhile, where and at what price is the U.S. to get the energy it needs? The pro-nuclear argument is a strong one. With oil reserves finite and access to foreign supplies dependent upon OPEC's whims, the U.S. must find alternate sources of power. But the clear and present choices are anything but promising. Harnessing wind and wave power is today and for the near term little more than an engineer's pipedream. Solar energy will probably not become practicable on a large scale for several decades. Coal, which the U.S. has in abundance, does not seem to be the only answer. Deep mining is expensive and dangerous and stripmining scars the land, especially in the semiarid West. Coal-fired plants are also far from clean.

Even with rising construction costs, nuclear power plants, which are clean, are considered by many experts to be the best and most economical answer to the nation's short-term alternate energy needs. That is all the more reason to ensure that they are as safe as human ingenuity and diligence can make them. Critics who can help in that process are welcome regardless of which side of the nuclear argument they are on. Whatever the odds, the reality of a serious nuclear accident would be catastrophic. It might take only one such mishap to force an indefinite shutdown of the entire nuclear power industry. The U.S. needs nuclear plants and can afford the costs of making them safe; what it cannot afford is a major accident.