NUCLEAR POWER'S SMALLER BROTHER

There is much opposition to refuse processing plants, which have a serious shortcoming: they are invariably near its neighbors instead of somewhere else. As soon as plans are announced, the inevitable "Citizens for..." spring up, file suit and start obstructing. It took close to 20 years to overcome all the hurdles in New York's Westchester County before a refuse-to-energy plant was built, and that is longer than the record for a nuclear plant (16 years).

There are other parallels with nuclear power. Politicians make hay by protecting their constituents from the terrible threats of refuse reprocessing just as they do in protecting them from nuclear power, and they put up further obstructions, waving sham reports such as that by Commoner & Co to protect the health of the widows and orphans. Westchester County, among the two or-three US counties with the highest average income, was until recently represented in Congress by the notorious Ottinger, a rabid antinuke, as behooves the better people. Why can't a refuse-to-energy plant be built where the riff-raff lives? That, after all, is the natural place, for they don't usually have the clout to stop it; it is unconscionable to build it among the better people who subscribe to the New Yorker and drink mineral waters imported from France.

If such plants are built after all, it is because the educational process has finally succeeded. But education by words and logic is slow and rarely effective; the real education is by experience. That is, refuse-processing plants get built when people drown in garbage, and nuclear plants will be built when they run out of power.