ANOTHER ANGLE

It is not always easy to distinguish the sincere critic from the demagogue, but here is a criterion that seems to work pretty well: The demagogue will not budge from the absolute risks of nuclear power; he adamantly refuses to compare them to the risks of the alternatives.

Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist, is a nuclear gadfly, but by the above criterion, he is no demagogue. In a recent article, von Hippel prefaces his numerous criticisms of nuclear safety with a comparison of nuclear and fossil risks. As we have often pointed out, the comparison of safety in mining, transportation, pollution, and generation heavily favors nuclear power; even for low probability-high consequence accidents, nuclear appears to have the edge.

In the last category, von Hippel has two intetesting points to make: war and climate change (by excessive carbon dioxide production).

"The United States," he writes, "has been involved in three major wars in the past three decades. The consequences of each of these wars was much worse than any nuclear accident could be. Today one of the major sources of world tension stems from the international oil economy. An important fraction of this oil is used for electrical power generation. It might be fair, therefore, to attribute some significant share of the probability of the next major war to the use of oil for the generation of electricity. . . I think that even a major nuclear accident pales somewhat in comparison with the nightmares of war and famine."