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NUCLEAR NEWS:
THE HOT ATOMIC CONTROVERSY

The "nuke" battle is heating up as quickly as a runaway reactor especially in California, where voters will decide in June on a nuclear safeguards initiative. If passed, the measure won't necessarily ban atomic-based power (even though industry spokesmen are making claims to the contrary), but it will require that the state legislature determine ( whether or not nuclear plants are safe, and ( if the existing limits on liability insurance should be continued or abolished. (If a serious reactor accident were to occur today, victims would recover only pennies on every dollar's worth of loss and a good many people want that situation changed.) Petition drives for similar nuclear postponement measures are now underway in the states of Maine and Oregon.

San Diego's General Atomic (a reactor manufacturing subsidiary of Gulf Oil) recently bowed out of the nuclear picture "for the time being". The corporation's ill-fated business ventures have apparently lost around $500 million most of which was spent on the company's commercially unsuccessful HTGR's (high-temperature gas-cooled reactors). The power plants GA did manage to buildPeach Bottom 1 (in Peach Bottom. Pennsylvania and Fort St. Vrain (in Platteville, Colorado) have been plagued with costly delays and pesky operation troubles. Adios, General Atomic.

The utilities industry is beginning to realize that uraniumwhich is the fuel that feeds all nuclear reactors today-is a very limited resource. Ralph Lapp, a well-known spokesman for the corporate "powers that be", recently warned that no new ore-producing areas have been discovered in the past 17 years which means, in effect, that we'll soon be running out of the radioactive material. One consulting geologist has said that "potential supply from known reserves of uranium is insufficient to satisfy project demand in the Western world as a whole beyond 1979", and that " very large shortfalls in supply may be anticipated in the first half of the 1980's". From all indications, electric power companies aren't going to be able to keep their reactors running unless they find nine new producing regions equal in size to the entire Colorado Plateau (which occupies an area of several thousand miles).

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