Word: reactor
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Despite the compromises, the Reagan Administration was ebullient. "This is landmark legislation," crowed newly confirmed Energy Secretary Donald Hodel. The bill also cheered up the flagging nuclear-power industry, which has not had a new reactor order since 1978. Seven states in the past seven years, including California, have banned further construction of nuclear-power plants pending a legislated solution to the waste problem...
...Funding for the $3.6 billion Clinch River breeder reactor in Tennessee has long been a symbol of federal waste and environmental abuse. The House last week deleted funds for it and some other controversial projects, partly in retaliation against Congressmen who had led the fight against pay increases. But Clinch River has one invaluable patron in the Senate, Howard Baker. He told his staff that he had to reach deep into his pocket of lOUs in order to save the project, which he did on a 49-to-48 vote...
...problems almost from the first. After the exciting breakthroughs of the Manhatten Project, which developed the atomic bomb, the task of working out the details of nuclear power plants was relatively mundane. As Ford writes, "Nobel prizes are not given to people who do plumbing, even for a nuclear reactor's cooling system." The result was that many of those most talented in nuclear physics returned to the ivory tower or took on positions in weapons development...
...pressure on the A.E.C. to prove the potential of nuclear power led it to ignore many important safety concerns. As early as 1953, physicist Edward Teller, the leading nuclear weapons expert at the time, told a congressional committee that "We have been extremely fortunate in that accidents in nuclear reactors have not caused any fatalities. With expanding applications of nuclear reactions and nuclear power, it cannot be expected that this unbroken record will be maintained." Yet Teller's warnings that "a release of [radioactive materials from a reactor] in a city or densely populated area would lead to disastrous results...
...thirty years of ignorance and mismanagement was the accident at Three Mile Island in March, 1979. Yet Ford well knows that, relative to what might happen. Three Mile Island was only a minor mishap. In one incident in 1961 that the A.E.C. did not "take seriously," an entire reactor at the Commission's Idaho test station exploded when a workman, possibly bent on murder-suicide, precipitously removed a safety rod from the core of the reactor. Were this to happen in a major nuclear plant the results would be catastrophic; as Ford optimistically writes. "The forecast accident, if it occurs...