CLEAN AND DIRTY WATER

Last October General Atomic (GA) Inc announced their readi-ness to develop a small High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) to turn ocean water into clean drinking water at a cost competitive with the water now imported to the Los Angeles area.

The highly efficient HGTR [AtE Mar 74, Apr, Jul 76, Jan 81] uses helium and runs on the thorium cycle. GA proposes a small reactor that could produce 140 MW of electric power and 37 million gallons of clean water daily by the usual condensation of steam, acting as a distilling method at the same time. The Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles now imports water from Northern California and from the Colorado River.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found another way of using nuclear energy to clean water. After the TMI accident they went to court to force GPU to discharge only water whose radioactivity was down to drinking water standards (10 picocuries per litre) into the Susquehana River. Since that river is naturally more radioactive than drinking water, Prof. Kendall and his collaborators of com-parable scientific stature achieved a reduction of its radioactivity by dilution. The amount was submicroscopic, the cost astronomic, but the principle unimpeachable.

Now another energy source has led to disaster in Pennsylvania. Unlike TMI, which damaged only its owners, an oil tank collapsed and spilled more than three million gallons of diesel oil into a river near Pittsburgh, killing fish, ducks and other wildlife, disrupting pumping stations and water supplies, and leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without tap water until emergency supplies were brought in by truck and pipeline diversions. As we go to press, some of these scenes are being repeated as the 30-mile oil slick floats down the Ohio River toward the Gulf of Mexico.

But that was just the beginning. Ralph Nader announced "This is the beginning of the end of oil as an energy source." The President appointed a commission including only one oil storage expert. Time and Newsweek came out with cover stories on the "Oil Spill Nightmare," the former declaring that "with one stroke, oil com-pany critics, hitherto regarded as eccentrics, were suddenly proved right." Thousands flocked to Washington, where Jane Fonda used outdated guesses to claim that an oil spill could devastate an area the size of Pennsylvania, and Congress went frantic in special ses-sions; the DoE ordered retrofits of all storage tanks by requiring wall thicknesses and other specifications to be multiplied by arbitrary factors concocted by its regulators; the press kept repeating that the oil industry had always sworn high and low that storage tanks could not possibly have accidents, and ever since reporters have raved about the "near-inferno" at Pittsburgh. . . or am I confusing it all with TMI?

Yes, I am: after a few days, the media lost interest.