THE GOOD GUY AND THE BAD GUY

It is becoming increasingly evident that the longterm energy solution looking ahead 3 decades or so is twofold: nuclear and solar. Which has led many agitators to promote solar energy as the good guy and to condemn nuclear energy as the villain.

'Do you want a sunshine future for your children," ask the ads of an outfit called Environmental Action, "or a radioactive one?" And Congress, whose members' one overriding concern is to get reselected, has been quick to use this non-issue in bidding for some myopic votes. It has of late been singularly tight-fisted where nuclear energy is concerned, but the House has just passed a bill (S 3234) calling for a minimum of $1 billion to be spent on solar energy and more bureaucracies to be established for it. The Senate may well go along with this call for justice, motherhood and solar energy.

But the solar-nuclear dichotomy is pure bunk, for there is no reason why the two should not exist side by side. once solar energy becomes economically competitive. Both have advantages and disadvantages. and the choice of one or the other will depend on the geography economics. land use, and a host of other considerations in each individual case.

But make no mistake about one point: If safety were the only consideration. nuclear energy would win as the safer of the two.

There is a very good underlying reason why 55,000 Americans are slaughtered annually on the highways and why not a single life has ever been lost in reactor-related accidents in the power industry The reason is not just that nuclear safety standards are extraordinarily high. but above all. that thes are extraordinarily easy to enforce. because the danger points are highly concentrated and therefore east to guard.

Solar energy lacks this characteristic. in fact. its not more than a few hundred watts per square meter can ever be captured, which means square miles of collectors of one type or another for each land-based large-scale facility: furnaces, reflectors, storage involving square miles of hot, molten metal, and the like. Dangers diluted over a large area are very difficult to guard against. Moreover, such "diluted" dangers, even if small individually, are known to be large killers: 15,000 Americans die annually in accidental falls; 1,500 are killed by falling objects. Both of these dangers, among others, will have to be guarded against in the tall structures used for collecting solar energy. It takes more than 2 square miles to collect the solar energy that can be generated on a single acre in a nuclear plant. The probability of a fatal accident in a solar energy facility is, of course, very small; but for a nuclear plant it is several orders smaller still.

This is not to say that the superstitious zealots have goaded us into an anti-solar position. To us, nuclear and solar energy are both good guys; the bad guys are the instant experts who sport "Go Solar" buttons and are more interested in antinuclear propaganda than in protecting human lives.