Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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BROWER: All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors . . . and I'd rather do something else with that water.

DNA is another matter. This is the miraculous coding, you know, that makes all life possible. It only takes up one-half of one percent of the two half cells from which each of us begins and it's the most condensed information that there is, anywhere. Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time and it is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.

Unfortunately, however, reactors and genes don't mix very well. Radiation can cause genes to mutate at a speed incredibly more rapid than their ordinary, orderly evolvement down through the eons. We have no idea what that can mean.

It's a criminal act of the highest order, then, when the reactor producers and operators now ask us to submit our DNA to the possibly enormous and barely comprehended consequences of radioactive bombardment from their proposed nuclear installations. For our electrical convenience and their profit, they will play reactor roulette with our genes. This is reckless radicalism at its worse.

PLOWBOY: I would assume that the people who are promoting atomic energy have considered this problem and decided that the risk is justified.

BROWER: Look at it this way: You would probably have taken a rather dim view of me if I had picked up a machine gun this afternoon and sprayed the audience at the conference while I said, "Boy! I certainly hope nobody gets hurt."

That's just about what's happening when we allow these guys to play with radioactivity. They simply don't know that much about what they're doing. There isn't enough control. There isn't enough capability in ordinary people to tinker with such a complicated piece of machinery. It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

PLOWBOY: But what about the argument that—like it or not—we have no alternative but to use nuclear power? Bill Cherry, the solar energy expert from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, stated at the conference today that—at best—the sun and other "clean" alternative. energy sources can supply something like only 20% of the power we're going to be using 30 years from now. Do you think he was being realistic?

BROWER: No . . . and "realistic" is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word "realistic" is all bad . When people say, "You're not being realistic," they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.

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