Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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BROWER: Oh no. The Sierra Club is a very good and a very powerful force for conservation and, as a matter of fact, has grown faster since I left than it was growing while I was there! It must be doing something right. Besides, the club has changed and is now into many of the things that its other directors used to fuss at me for.

PLOWBOY: It should be quite obvious to anyone who heard you speak at the conference today that you're very much opposed to the use of atomic energy. Have you always felt this way?

BROWER: Not at all. Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom. When I was heading the campaign to protect Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, I was actually telling people that—by harnessing the atom—we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams. Even as recently as `69, when I was fighting with the Sierra Club about the Diablo Canyon reactor, I was saying, "No, not there . . . put it somewhere else on the California coast." I still had the illusion, you see, that atomic energy could be a safe alternative to damming all our rivers for power.

PLOWBOY: What changed your mind?

BROWER: I began to get a little suspicious in the mid-fifties during a long session I had before the Senate Interior Committee when, once again, I was advocating the use of the atom. At that time a senator who was on the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy said rather quietly, "You know, we're having a little problem with waste these days." I didn't know what he meant then, but I know now.

PLOWBOY: He was referring to nuclear waste.

BROWER: He was, of course, referring to nuclear waste . . . which is lethal and which we have absolutely no way of disposing of. There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place! We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open. We've pumped it into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock. We've put it in Kansas salt mines, only to learn that the mines leak.

Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents . . . but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

Other supposedly rational spokesmen want to drop our radioactive rubbish on the Antarctic and let it melt its way down about a mile and a half into the ice. Still others—in England, interestingly enough—want to dump it into the Irish Sea. Maybe they figure that will end the troubles in Ireland once and for all.

Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun . . . but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field. Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right now somewhere in the Pacific. It's supposed to be bubbling away on the moon, but it's in the Pacific Ocean instead.

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