BUT IS IT WITHOUT WASTES?

These wastes, which must of necessity arise in the manufacture of solar energy facilities, can be of two kinds: voluminous, everlastingly poisonous and unmanageable if they come from fossil fuels; or minuscule, and completely removable from the biosphere until their temporary toxicity has passed, it they are nuclear.

New subscribers sometimes ask us why we don't write more about nuclear waste disposal. The reason is that we are afraid of boring our older subscribers to death. In view at the (utterly unjustified) furor over nuclear waste disposal, we will come back to the point in future issues, but for the time being we will only Say that Prof. B. L. Cohen has just put out another popular paper, A tale of two wastes, available to AtE readers free from the author at Physics Dept., Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. (For faster service write for it on a postcard!). For new subscribers we also repeat our recomendation of Cohen's article "Disposal of radioactive wastes," Scientist Amer. June 1977, obtainable as reprint no. 364 from W.H. Freeman & Co., 660 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94104, 50¢ each (min.order $5).

To return to solar wastes, the energy needed to manfacture the aluminum, concrete and glass alone comes to about 30 trillion BTU for a solar thermal 1,000 MW plant (and to much more if the 1,000 MW are not centralized, but distributed over many small domestic facilities). That energy produces wastes in addition to the wastes arising in the manufacture of the materials themselves. Part of that energy is needed in the form of electricity (particularly for the manufacture ot aluminum) and will produce wastes in roughly the following amounts: a couple of cubic feet if it is nuclear, or 25,000 tons ot solid wastes (plus tens of thousands of tons of gaseous wastes) if it is coal fired.