ENERGY AND LAND USE

Hubris H. Humphrey releases "startling facts on solar cell potential" in his Notes from the JEC: Solar cells can be produced in the range from 10 to 30 cents per peak watt by 1985. (Certainlv startling also utterly fantastic.)

And if there is anyone in the Senate to outdo HHH in lavishness with taxpayers' money and inflated rhetoric, it must be Sen. Gravel (Alaska) who has been soliciting funds for mailing expenses of his fanatically anti-nuclear "Mike Gravel Energy Newsletter" while dipping into the treasury to pay for mailing it at taxpayers' expense; only after a complaint by the Council on Energy Independence (Box J. Chicago, IL 60690, and we're proud to have them as subscribers) did the Senate Select Committee take action and is now waiting whether he will make restitution. He would consider it, said the Honorable Gravel lifting his head out of the trough; he had not realized that this was prohibited by law.

There is a lot more the great expert on nuclear power does not realize when he plugs solar power and all its boondoggles as if solar and nuclear power were incompatible. For example, that solar power is, in lives lost per unit energy produced, more dangerous than nuclear power.

If solar energy is so benign and easily available, who is stopping the sunworshippers from using it?

The sun is: With its dilute power of 1 kW per square meter (at the best of times), solar energy needs enormous collection areas to produce power in large quantities. A 1,000 MW solar plant would need between 25 and 50 square miles of collection area: Where is the Hon. Mike Gravel going to find it? In his home state, in much of which the sun doesn't rise for 6 months? In the Arizona desert, perhaps; and how is he going to transport the energy to Alaska (or anywhere else)? And if 25 square miles are so easy to come by, why bother putting them on a platform in outer space?

The sunworshippers, of course, are the jesters who are the first to scream about wasteful land use when their ire is aroused by a few feet's right-of-way for a high-voltage transmission line; and the sum total of 25 acres needed for a 1,000 MW nuclear plant (storage facilities, security areas and all) drives them into the drollest fits.

The double standards for land use are not peculiar to solar energy; they are part of the familiar story of how an elite tries to protect itself against mass affluence. B. Bruce-Briggs (see AtE Sep 75 on collective transportation) has another eye-opening article on the Needless Fuss about Land Use in the July issue of the superb monthly The Alternative (Box 877. Bloomington IN 47401; $10/ year).

The Sierra Club agitates to keep motorcycles. a favorite mount of young blue-collar workers. from wilderness areas; but strongly advocates the use of horses in the same areas. (For more on the struggle of recreational-vehicle lovers send SASE to Calif. Outdoor Recreation League 4264 E. Florence Ave., Bell, CA 90201.)

Anyone in need to be disabused of the 'urban sprawl" and "loss of agricultural land" shibboleths is urged to read BBB's article.

The very concept land use is as old as that art societal relevance; and the concept that lurks behind both is that of a society understood not as a collection of individuals, but as amorphous "material" to be moulded into shape by the social engineers who know what is good for you.