THERMAL POLLUTION

Not so. The most efficient (i.e. largest) coal-fired plants achieve an efficiency of 41%. The most efficient nuclear plants (high temperature gas reactors) achieve 39%, which is very close. The most common US reactors (light water) have an efficiency of about 31%, but the average US fossil-to-electric conversion only has an efficiency of 32.53% (1974 EEI survey, just in), which is even closer.

There may indeed be problems with waste heat. The average temperature in Manhattan and the Los Angeles basin is about 4 degrees F higher than that of its surroundings. Whether that matters, nobody knows, and the environmentalists lose no sleep over it, for they are interested in fish, not people.

But their concern over fish is misplaced. They deplore the raised temperature in a river near a power plant (by only a few degrees), but the fish love it. What sometimes happens in this "destruction of aquatic life" is that fish of one species move out, but another moves in, because they prefer the warmer water. Oh yes Sierra Clubbers, Epacrats and Audobonners, why would you deny these fish a living?

In the late 1950's, the construction of a nuclear plant on the English river Blackwater was opposed on the grounds that the warm water would endanger the oysters lower down the estuary. But the plant was built, and nothing happened to the oysters until the severe winter of 1962-3, when many of them froze to death and the warm water of thermal "pollution" was unable to save them.

In fact, nuclear plants (with no stack to dissipate the heat into the atmosphere) have shown that fish grow so much faster in warm water that some fish hatcheries in Britain and the US now use thermal "pollution" (sans nuclear plant) to grow bigger and healthier specimens faster.

Dr McKetta (in the paper quoted above) states that the Governor of Ohio introduced a bill to make it unlawful to increase the temperature of Lake Erie by more than l degree F. The sun changes it by more than 40 degress F between winter and summer; but if all the electricity produced in Ohio were exclusively used to heat Lake Erie, it would raise its temperature by less than 0.3 degrees F.

Contrast this with Edwin Newman's quote (NBC, "In which we live," June 1970) "by the end of the decade our rivers may have reached the boiling point; three decades more, and they may evaporate. . . . One of the causes of this thermal pollution is the spread of nuclear plants across the land."

Edwin Newman's expertise is not limited to thermodynamics; he is also an expert on English, and he has recently published a bestseller Strictly Speaking, in which he chides people for using words in the wrong sense. Parameter," quoth he, "[is] a mathematical term now widely misused so that nobody finds himself in the hateful position of having to say boundary or limit."

But that is not what parameter means at all, and the puzzle is not solved until one remembers Newman's depth of expertise. He is confusing parameter with perimeter.