Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we "keep" our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This "solution", I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations . . . we must let them sit in judgment on the madness—or immorality—of the idea. Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?

PLOWBOY: Twenty thousand generations is a rather powerful span of time. Just how long is nuclear garbage dangerous anyway?

BROWER: It depends. There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.

Pluonium's half-life is 24,000 years. This means that, after 24,000 years, it's only half as dangerous as it was when you started out. But this is still so bad that you've got to stretch its sequestering clear on out to 500,000 years . . . which is about five times as long into the future as Neanderthal man is in the past. And I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.

The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should not be expected to accept it or to project it into the future . . . in order for manufacturers and utilities to make a dollar killing now.

PLOWBOY: Agreed. And, as you and other ecologists have pointed out, that isn't the half of it. Nuclear power installations present even more immediate and horrifying dangers.

BROWER: Yes. To name just one, there's the problem of cooling the plants. If a reactor loses its cool, it can quickly go out of control . . . even if it's shut down promptly. Every reactor absolutely must have an effective emergency cooling system and the Atomic Energy Commission has made this requirement quite clear. But a year's hearing in 1972—before the AEC's safety and licensing board—revealed a most alarming incompetence in emergency core cooling systems, engineering and testing.

In the face of this revelation, it is certainly odd that the AEC board has ruled "irrelevant" the questions addressed to the AEC's regulatory staff about present reactor safety criteria. Well, the AEC may wish to think that such questions are irrelevant . . . but the public had better not dare think so.

Do you know what a runaway reactor can do? It can produce a radioactive cloud that extends 100 miles downwind and kills everything—that could include anywhere from 10,000 to one million people—in two weeks flat. The fallout from the accident, of course, can cause major injury and damage even cause further away than that.

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