What's a few more widows?

The Review Group praised the report as "a substantial advance over previous attempts to estimate the risks of the nuclear option. . It provides the most complete single picture of the accident probabilities associated with nuclear reactors. The faulttree,'event-tree approach coupled with an adequate data base is the best available tool with which to quantify these probabilities."

The group did criticize the "Executive Summary," a summary meant to convey some of the results to laymen and the press in simple language; it also criticized some procedures in the peer review process and certain individual calculations. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission withdrew its support from this Executive Summary, not from the report as a whole; it accepted the findings of the Review Group and, subject to the reservations expressed by it, explicitly "supports the extended use of probabilistic risk assessment [of the Rasmussen type] in regulatory decision making.'

Anyone still under the delusion that the CBS-NBC-ABC monopoly will give even vaguely truthful information on nuclear matters should look up the NRC News Releases vol.5, no.4, release 79-19 of January 19 (pp.1-3).

But there is no need to theorize. The unchallenged gist of the Rasmussen Report is that per unit energy produced, nuclear power is incomparably safer than any other method of generating electricity.

In the three years since the report was published, the data base for nuclear power has just about doubled. In those three years, thousands have died in converting and transporting energy only one month ago, 50 people died when the oil tanker Betelgeuse exploded at an Irish terminal, and 76 workmen died in the explosion of the tanker Spyros in Singapore in October. Yet in those three years the almost incredible record of the nuclear power industry has still held up: Not a single reactorrelated fatality.

If, then, Prof. Henry Kendall and his misnamed Union of Concerned Scientists demands the shutdown of 16 nuclear plants representing 20% of US electric capacity, it means that the power must come from other sources; and there is no source in the US that can provide the power as safely as any one of these 16 plants. For no other source has a multiple defense in depth, and every one of these 16 plants does have one.

Prof. Kendall is, in effect, asking for the following average price of substitution (applies to coal-generated powers per year): In the coal mines, 72 deaths by black lung, plus 13 deaths by accident, plus 103,000 disability days by injuries (in all cases, this is the excess over the toll in uranium mines). For the public, some 360 premature deaths by lung and heart diseases due to air pollution; plus the numerous accidents due to transporting 600,000 rail cars of coal rather than 100 truckloads of nuclear fuel, not to mention the 5,000,000 tons of coal ash instead of 20 cubic meters of nuclear wastes.

Prof. Kendall knows this price, of course. He is not, like Lovins, a simplistic college drop-out touted as a genius by the Sunday supplements; he is an M.l.T. physics professor. That forecloses the defense of ignorance. He knows, because when this writer asked him in a public debate which power is safer than nuclear, he started stuttering. He knows, and yet he is willing to disregard this price and withhold it from the public; the news correspondents whom he buttonholed didn't ask, did they?

No scientist is infallible and every scientist is entitled to his errors. But when he omits crucial facts in order to influence laymen, he does not become a dishonest scientist, he ceases to be a scientist.

And what Henry Kendall has omitted is not guesswork; it is the well established toll of the crippled, the diseased, and the dead.