DEUTSHE PEANUTS

Unless, of course, one warmed it up. And that is exactly what is now being done in one of the most dramatic research projects of recent years, a project called "Agrotherm", run by a number of West German power companies and coordinated (also largely financed) by the West German government.

There is not enough river water in the Federal Republic to cool - the planned electric generating capacity - nuclear alone will amount to more than thirty 1,300 MW plants by 1985 - and cooling towers are out of favor. They waste energy, lose a lot of water if they are "wet", cost a furtune if they are "dry" and in either case make a target for the knights of Umwelt-schultz (environmental protection).

But the waste heat must be rejected to some place, and if it can't go into the air or water, said German engineers, let it go into the earth. And not as waste heat, either; but as useful heat that will make things grow. The cooling water (which cools the condensers, where the steam coming out of the turbines condensers to the water going back into the boilers) is pumped through pipes about 30 inches below the surface of farmland and spaced about 3 feet apart.

Several Agrotherm experimental stations have been running for 3 years now; one near Essen, another near the nuclear plant at Grundremmingen. The (coal-fired) 2,100 MW plant in Neurath, Bavaria, for example, pumps more than 10,000 cubic feet of water per hour through 43 miles of piping under a 17 acre field, raising the soil temperature by 14 degrees above normal. The research stations use strips of heated land next to unheated strips (for comparison) and are intended to yield, among other data, the optimum depth and spacing of the pipes.

As th cooling water gives up its heat to the soil, its temperature drops without the energy losses in the cooling towers, without the loss of water by evaporation in "wet" towers or the expense of "dry" towers. Project Agrotherm has been running for 3 years at a fraction of what "dry" cooling towers would cost. Those were the prime reasons for the idea. But what about the soil?

Thermal pollution (as the sham-environmentalists call it) makes fish and lobster grow faster to bigger specimens; hark now, ye Friends of the Earth, what it does to the soil:

Corn grows about 3 feet taller; potatoes can be harvested 4 weeks earlier, and their acre yeild is 69% higher;; the sugarbeet crop is 70% up; soybeans (which cannot normally be grown in Germany at all) yield 2.2 tons per acre, compared with an average of 0.8 tons in US natural soybeangrowing areas. Cottonl, peanuts and eggplants, crops entirely foreign to Germany, sprout in the Agrotherm experimental stations. Even pineapple is being tried.

'I'he mlanagers of' Agrotherm (according to Rhine-Ruhr Resort,Dusesseldorf) regard the agricultural gain as a pure bonus; the prospective gain in the power plant efficiency alone justifies the effort.

But the results are stunning beyond that. cotton in Germany! (Cotton near Essen. and them that plants it ist nicht vergessen,. as Alt Mann River, mitout waste heat, er keept on rollin' along.) It brings to mind Barry Commoner! whose Marxist economics are outdone only by his thermodynamic abracadabra. ''Nuclear reactors have a particularly low Carnot efficiency writes Barry the blunderer in one of his false statements and he blunders on: "Waste heat should be distributed to heat or cool buildings. Because nuclear plants. . . have been exiled from the cities, this kind of energy conserving arrangement is impossible."

The engineers at Grundremmingen know better.