Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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Imagine what Con-Ed's Indian Point reactor—which, by the way, has already had a one-million-dollar fuel leak—could do to Manhattan. If they hadn't caught that fuel leak in time and the Indian Point reactor had runaway and the wind had been wrong . . . how many civilians could have escaped Manhattan? Or even known which way to go? Very few. Indian Point could wipe out Manhattan. Just kill 'em all. There's no point in messing with that kind of risk . . . there just isn't that much reward in it.

PLOWBOY: OK. But let's say that the designers and engineers lick the emergency cooling problem. Let's say, in fact, that they design a perfect reactor.

BROWER: Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem. What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon? What happens when a part breaks down somewhere inside that piece of machinery and it isn't perfect anymore?

If you'll look at the records that the AEC has of the little accidents—the lesser disasters—that have already taken place, you'll see that incidents of this nature are almost common. There was one reactor mishap where a whole series of 32 things that "couldn't go wrong" did. One fed the other, fed the other, this wasn't going, that valve wasn't quite ready to work and so on. It is just too much to expect perfection and the risk of anything less is just too enormous.

PLOWBOY: What about the coming breeder reactors that many nuclear scientists are now pushing so strongly?

BROWER: The breeder reactor has all the problems we've just discussed—in spades—and introduces a few brand new ones all its own. The threat, I think, has best been described by the AEC itself which recently pointed out that breeder reactors should not be developed until a safe fission reactor has been built . . . and, of course, that hasn't happened yet.

Over and above the "ordinary" nuclear powerplant dangers, however, you must realize that breeder reactors—which produce plutonium at the same time they generate usable power—would throw us right into the middle of a plutonium economy. This is the same plutonium that must be isolated from all living things for 500,000 years . . . and once the breeders are introduced, we'll soon be shipping it back and forth across the country from one nuclear installation to another by the ton.

Now this is a very dangerous undertaking. First, there's the increased risk of exposing innocent bystanders to that lethal cargo and, second, it practically invites the criminal element to wreak all kinds of havoc by hijacking the material. As Dr. Donald Geesaman of the AEC has documented quite vividly, the transportation system of this country is so heavily infiltrated by the Mafia that they can divert any shipment of anything they want, at any time. (I've just learned that, for exposing this danger and otherwise criticizing lax AEC policies, Dr. Geesaman has been discredited and fired by the Atomic Energy Commission. This is the same action that was taken by the AEC against two other courageous scientists—John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin—who recently spoke out against what they believed to be extremely dangerous nuclear policy. Maybe it's about time for a Watergate-type investigation of the AEC. —MOTHER. )

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