A POTENTIAL HISTORIC RELIC

The report may eventually be acclaimed as one of the great works of American humor; but for now, it was offered to the country a week before the first anniversary of January 17, 1977, when disaster threatened half the US population in the deep freeze, and massive loss of life was averted in the nick of time only by pumping in nuclear power from New England, New York and Illinois to the vast stretch of country from Michigan to Virginia and Florida. The power was running out because the coal piles had frozen and the oil barges lay immobilized in the ice of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The fact that nuclear power, 'unsafe, unreliable, uneconomic and unnecessary," had saved the country from imminent and massive disaster was dutifully and strictly censored by the electronic media, the wire services, and all others who fear that nuclear power might abridge civil rights such as the freedom of the press.

This year, the winter has so far been less severe, and a mere 20 deaths there blamed on the weather the day after the EAF report was published. On that day (Jan. 10), demand soared, forcing widespread cutbacks of electric power from Michigan to the Carolinas, and a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission spokesman announced "There's not enough capacity to go round'. The week before, the Edison Electric Institute had announced that the highest peak of electric consumption ever had been achieved last summer with 394,900 MW, and that total outptlt for 1977 was 5% higher than in the previous year, in spite of the severe cutbacks in hydroelectric power in the Pacific states. Most experts are now sure that regardless of the weather, severe cutbacks, and possibly crippling shortages, of electric power due to lack of capacity must set in by the early 1980's.

Enter the jesters of Environmental Action. Though utterly worthless now the report might eventually become historically valuable as a curiosity something like the immortal exclamation by a British general in a speech given in March 1940: 'Come on, Hitler, we're ready for you!"