Mind, Machines and Evolution Part 17

"You'll be sorry," he called over his shoulder at the sullen group who had gathered to see him on his way down the trail. "It won't do you any good to come chasing after me and telling me you've changed your minds when winter comes. The price to you will have gone out of sight."

"a.s.shole!" Ug shouted back. "I told you you'd blow it."

Over the months that followed, Og traveled the length and breadth of the valley trying to interest the other tribes in his discovery. The Australopithecines were too busy training kangaroos to retrieve boomerangs as a result of not having got their design calculations quite right yet. The tribe of h.o.m.o erectus (famous for their virility) were preoccupied with other matters and didn't listen seriously, while A.

robustus declared that they had no intention of becoming A. combustus by being ignited and becoming extinguished at the same time. And so Og found himself at last in the remote far reaches of the valley where dwelt the H. saps, who were known for their strange ways and whom the other tribes tended to leave to their own devices.

The first Sap that Og found was sitting under a tree, staring thoughtfully at a thin slice of wood sawn from the end of a log that was lying nearby.

"What's that?" Og asked without preamble. The Sap looked up, still wearing a distant expression on his face.

"Haven't thought of a name for it yet," he confessed.

"What is it supposed to do?"

"Not sure of that either. I just had a hunch that it could come in useful . . . maybe for throwing at hyenas." The Sap returned his gaze to the disk of wood and rolled it absently backward and forward in the dust a couple of times. Then he pushed it away and looked up at Og once more. "Anyhow, you're not from this end of the valley. What are you doing on our patch?" Og unslung an armful of sticks from his pack for the umpteenth time and squatted down next to the Sap.

"Man, have I got a deal for you," he said. "You wait till you see this."

They spent the rest of the afternoon wheeling and dealing and ended up agreeing to joint management of both patents. The Sap had got a good deal, so it followed that Og must have got a wheel-which was what they therefore decided to call it. The chief of the Saps agreed that Og's trick with the sticks const.i.tuted a reasonable share-transfer price, and Og was duly installed as a full member of the tribe. He was content to spend the remainder of his days among the Saps and never again ventured from their end of the valley.

The winter turned out to be a long one-over twenty-five thousand years, in fact. When it at last ended and the ice sheets disappeared, only the Saps were left. One day Grog and Throg were exploring far from home near a place where the Neanderthals had once lived, when they came across a large rock standing beside a stream and bearing a row of crudely carved signs.

"What are they?" Grog asked as Throg peered curiously at the signs.

"They're Neanderthal," Throg said.

"Must be old. What do they say?"

Throg frowned with concentration as he ran a finger haltingly along the row.

"They're like the signs you find all over this part of the valley," he announced at last. "They all say the same thing: OG, COME HOME. NAME YOUR OWN PRICE."

Grog scratched his head and puzzled over the revelation for a while. "So what the h.e.l.l was that supposed to mean?" he mused faintly.

"Search me. Must have had something to do with the guys who used to live in the caves behind that terrace up there. Only bears up there now though." Throg shrugged. "It might have had something to do with beans. They were always counting beans, but they were still lousy traders."

"Weirdos, huh? It could have meant anything then."

"Guess so. Anyhow, let's get moving.

They hoisted their spears back onto their shoulders and resumed picking their way through the rocks to follow the side of the stream onward and downward toward the river that glinted through the distant haze.

KNOW NUKES.

Before the 1940's, the future confronting the human race was bleak. With the global population increasing and becoming ever more dependent on energy-dense technologies to sustain its food supplies and rising living standards, there seemed no escape from the catastrophe that would come eventually when the coal and the oil ran out. But few worried unduly. It was only after an escape from the nightmare presented itself-suddenly and unexpectedly, with the harnessing of nuclear power and the prospect of unlimited energy-that people began to worry. People can be very strange.

My own position on this subject is that nuclear power is cheaper, cleaner, and safer than any other source of energy that the human race has so far come up with. To see why, let's set to rest some of the myths that it has become fas.h.i.+onable to repeat, and consider the facts.

The first fact is that there cannot be an absolutely safe energy source. By definition, "energy" is the capacity to do physical work. Whether the results are considered beneficial or otherwise involves only a value judgment, hence, no energy technology can be risk-free. Attempting to judge the acceptability of any particular risk in isolation is meaningless. Society must weigh it against the benefits obtained in return, and compare the result with those obtained with the alternatives.

Despite the hysterical media reactions to Three Mile Island and Chern.o.byl, nuclear power remains the least threatening to human life of all the major energy technologies. The energy yields of processes involving the atomic nucleus are orders of magnitude greater than anything attainable from rearrangements of the outer electron sh.e.l.ls of atoms, which is the basis of all conventional chemical combustion. This means that nuclear fuels are enormously more concentrated, and far smaller quant.i.ties are needed. Over five thousand times as much coal, for example, has to be mined, transported, and processed as uranium to deliver the same amount of energy-two hundred trains per year, each consisting of over a hundred cars, for each one-thousand-megawatt plant, compared to a single carload of uranium oxide-which entails an enormous supporting network of heavy industries with all their attendant risks and hazards.

Two to three hundred fatal accidents happen annually among U.S. coal miners alone, but like automobile accidents they occur in one's and two's spread through the year in different places, and remain largely invisible. Airplane crashes kill far fewer people than automobiles do, but when they happen they are sensationalized. In the Western world, nuclear power generation has never killed anybody.

Chern.o.byl didn't say anything new about nuclear engineering. A plant that is ineptly designed and recklessly operated can be dangerous, as is equally true of bridges, dams, high-rise buildings, or any other kind of heavy engineering. It did say something about a political and economic system run by an incompetent bureaucracy, in which the wishes and safety of the people don't figure into policy-making.

It's difficult to see how the same kind of thing could occur in Western light-water reactors as some critics claim. The accident at Chern.o.byl was due to the graphite core of the reactor catching fire after the cooling system failed. Western models don't possess a graphite core-in fact such a basis for design was expressly rejected by the U.S. in 1950, precisely because of this risk. Furthermore, the cooling water in Western systems is also the "moderator," needed to keep the chain reaction going. Hence, if the coolant flow fails for any reason, the reaction automatically stops, leaving only the residual fission products in the fuel as sources of heat to be disposed of, which represents typically about 5 percent of the reactor's normal output. But with the design used at Chern.o.byl, where the graphite is the moderator, operation continues at full power if the cooling water fails. The two designs are about as comparable to each other as the Hindenburg and the Goodyear blimp. Saying that we should shut down our industry because of what happened at Chern.o.byl makes as much sense as calling for the dismantling of the U.S. farming system because the Soviets have made a mess of theirs.

The facts of Three Mile Island were that no one was killed, no one was hurt, and no member of the public was ever in the slightest danger. TMI did not bring us to the brink of a major catastrophe. Some bizarre circ.u.mstances occurred and there were operator errors in responding to them, which led to loss of coolant and damage to the core that included melting of some fuel. However, the safety systems responded in the way they were supposed to by shutting the system down. The outer layers of containment were never challenged, let alone breached, putting the conditions well within the worst-case design accident that the plant had been built to withstand. For some time there was speculation that an acc.u.mulation of hydrogen gas might explode. But this would have been simply a chemical detonation, certainly nothing of a thermonuclear nature as was suggested by the headline H-BLAST IMMINENT that appeared on at least one newspaper. It was established later that the hydrogen couldn't in fact have exploded since there was no oxygen present; but even if it had, the shock would have been comparable to that imparted by a handheld sledgehammer-hardly enough to damage a reactor-vessel with steel walls twelve inches thick. The engine block of a car absorbs more stress thousands of times per minute.

And even if the vessel had cracked, any radioactive material released would still have had to get through a four-foot concrete s.h.i.+eld and a steel containment sh.e.l.l outside that to reach the environment. Yes, some radioactive gas did fill the containment building and was subsequently vented to the outside. But the dire warnings of the tens of thousands of cancer deaths that we heard would follow as a consequence are ridiculous. The maximum increase in radiation dose that would have been experienced by somebody immediately above the plant was measured by EPA, HEW, and NRC as eight millirems at most in the course of several days; a routine dental X-ray delivers twenty-five millirems in seconds. When a dam bursts, a drilling platform collapses, or a gas storage tank explodes, you don't get three days for the luxury of holding press conferences or to talk about evacuating. To me that makes nuclear-properly respected and implemented-a very benign and forgiving technology.

More people seem to be realizing at last that a nuclear power plant can't explode like an atom bomb.

The mechanism that enables a bomb to detonate has to be built with extreme precision to work at all, and a power plant contains nothing comparable. And besides that, the uranium used in each is quite different.

Natural uranium contains about 0.7 percent of the fissionable 235 isotope, which is enriched to more than 90 percent for bomb-grade material. For the slow release of energy required in power reactors, by contrast, the fuel is enriched only to 3.5 percent. It's simply not an explosive. A power plant is about as close to a bomb as a barrel of damp sawdust without a detonator.

So, what about a meltdown? Even if TMI wasn't one, couldn't next time be? Yes, it could. The chance has been estimated-using the same methods that have worked well in other areas of engineering, where there have been sufficient actual events to verify the procedures-to be about the same as the chance of a major city being hit by a meteorite one mile across. And even if it were to happen, the result wouldn't automatically be the major catastrophe that many people think. Computer simulations suggest that if the fuel did melt its way out of the reactor vessel, it would sputter about and solidify around the ma.s.sive supporting structure rather than continue reacting and burrow its way down through the floor. For over twenty years the British have been testing an experimental reactor in an artificial cave in Scotland and subjecting it to every conceivable failure of the coolant and safety systems. In the end they switched everything off and sat back to see what happened. There was no meltdown, nothing very dramatic. The core quietly cooled itself down, and that was that.

But what if the computer simulations turn out to be flawed, and what if the British experience was a fluke? Then mightn't the core turn into a molten ma.s.s and go down through the floor? Yes, it might. And then what would happen? Nothing much. We'd have a lot of mess down a hole in the ground, which is probably the best place for it. But what if there was a water table near the surface? In that case we'd create a lot of radioactive steam, which would blow back up the hole into the containment building, which again would be the best place for it. But what if some kind of geological or structural failure caused it to come up outside the containment building?

Now we are beginning to see the kinds of improbability chains that have to be constructed to produce disaster scenarios for scaring the public with. Remembering the odds against any major core disintegration in the first place, then if, on top of that, there was a water table below the plant, and if the steam burst through the ground outside the building . . . it would most likely expand high into the sky and dissipate. But beyond that, if there happened to be an atmospheric thermal inversion to hold the cloud down near the ground, and if there was a wind blowing toward an urban area, and if the wind happened to be just strong enough to move the cloud without disrupting the inversion layer, then yes, you could end up killing a lot of people. The statistical predictions worked out at about 400 fatalities per meltdown-perhaps not as bad as you'd guess. And that's if we're talking about deaths that couldn't be attributed to the accident as such, but would materialize only as slight increases in the cancer rate in a large population, over many years, i.e., increasing an individual's risk from something like 20.5 percent to 21 percent. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 10,000 deaths per year in the U.S., for nuclear power to be as dangerous would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks.

But if we are talking about directly detectable deaths-from acute radiation sickness within a couple of months-it would take 500 meltdowns to kill one hundred people. On this basis, even having twenty-five meltdowns every year for 10,000 years would cause fewer deaths than automobiles do annually.

Very well, that puts major accidents more in perspective. But what about the hazards a.s.sociated with normal operation? What about the thing that has become a new fad phobia word: radiation?

Yes, it's true that even an unmelted-down nuke in proper working order releases some radiation into the environment. In the units used to measure radiation dosage, a person sitting on the boundary fence of a large plant for a year would soak up about a tenth of a millirem above what he'd get from the natural background anyway. An average year's TV-watching incurs ten times as much as this, and a coast-to-coast jet flight-because of the increased intensity of cosmic rays at alt.i.tude-fifty times as much in five or six hours.

In fact there's hardly anything in the environment that doesn't emit some radiation. The rocks under our feet, the air we breathe, everything we eat and drink, and even our body tissues all contain traces of radioactive elements, the dose from all of which adds up to several thousand times anything contributed by the nuclear industry. The emission from the granite that Grand Central Station is built from, for example, exceeds the permissible NRC limit for industry. Grand Central Station wouldn't get a license as a nuclear plant.

This is in no way meant to suggest that ma.s.sive doses of radiation aren't dangerous. Napalm bombs and blast furnaces aren't very healthy, either, but it doesn't follow that heat in any amount is therefore harmful-you wouldn't last long at a temperature of absolute zero. The science of toxicology has long recognized the phenomenon of "hormesis"-in which substances that are lethal in high doses turn out to be actually beneficial in small doses, by stimulating the body's defense and repair mechanisms (all medicines become toxic at high enough doses.) In his book Hormesis With Ionizing Radiation, Professor T.D. Luckey of the University of Missouri, an internationally recognized expert on the subject, lists twelve hundred references to experimental evidence acc.u.mulated on organisms of every description, supporting the contention that the effect is true of radiation as well.

Nevertheless, we're constantly hearing that any level of radiation is harmful, however small. A simple prediction from this hypothesis is that cancer rates in areas with higher backgrounds ought to be greater.

But the fact is they're not. Colorado, for example, with double the average radiation, due mainly to alt.i.tude but also because of its soil composition, has a cancer rate only 68 percent the national average.

The correlation remains negative (i.e., the higher the radiation background, the lower the cancer rate) across the country as a whole-with a spectacular -39 percent correlation coefficient. (Judging from their previous statistical manipulations, antinuclear groups wouldn't hesitate to use such a correlation to "prove" that radiation prevents cancer.) And then, of course, there's the waste. Well, after the foregoing heresies about accidents and radiation, would it come as a complete surprise if I suggest that the ease of getting rid of the waste is one of nuclear power's major advantages? This is another consequence of its being so much more concentrated than conventional sources: because the amount of fuel required to release the same amount of energy is so much smaller, so is the amount of waste produced. And the waste that is produced isn't as hazardous as most people imagine. It's considerably less dangerous, in fact, than many other substances that are handled routinely in far greater quant.i.ties with far less care, which we accept as a matter of course.

Over 90 percent of the spent fuel that comes out of a power reactor can be reprocessed into new fuel and put back in (saving in a plant's typical forty-year lifetime the equivalent of four billion dollars worth of oil). Burning it up in this way is the most sensible thing to do with it, and the industry was designed on the a.s.sumption that this would be the case. What's left after reprocessing const.i.tutes the "high-level" waste that needs to be disposed of. A large, one-thousand-megawatt power plant produces about one cubic yard of it-small enough to fit under a dining room table-in the course of a year's operation. A coal plant of equal capacity produced ten tons of waste per minute. (Most of the fuss we read about in the newspapers fails to distinguish between this and low-level waste, consisting of things like used gloves, boots, and tools, which present a negligible hazard.) A facility to reprocess spent fuel in the U.S. was commenced as a joint project by government and industry at Barnwell, South Carolina. But in early 1977 the Carter administration halted further work on Barnwell, essentially for political reasons, and at the same time cut the utilities off from the military reprocessing that had been handling domestic wastes safely for twenty years. Thus 100 percent of what comes out of reactors is having to be treated as if it were high-level waste, to be stored in ways that were never intended, and this is what gets all the publicity-a needlessly manufactured political problem, not a technical one. (The rest of the world is continuing to reprocess its spent fuel, regardless.) We often hear about the "unsolved" problem of the wastes remaining radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Yes, it's true that high-level wastes contain fission products that have long half-lives-and then, so does garden soil. But these don't const.i.tute a problem; they just provide big numbers to frighten people with. For obviously, if the energy release is spread over so long a time, the intensity of it can't be very great. Rusting iron has a long half-life; gunpowder has a short one. The main danger is from the short-lived isotopes, such as iodine 131 with a half-life of eight days. To allow these to burn up, the spent fuel is put into cooling ponds at the reactor site for six months prior to being s.h.i.+pped away for reprocessing.

What then? Well, the current proposal is to reduce the waste to a powder, fuse it into a high-stability gla.s.s, seal the gla.s.s in steel canisters, and bury the canisters in a concrete repository two thousand feet underground. And let's make no bones about the fact that we're talking about a significant concentration of gamma radiation that would have to be confined and handled with great care. If all the electricity generated in the U.S. were produced by nuclear power, the amount of high-level waste produced each year would be enough to kill ten billion people. Sounds scary, doesn't it? But we also produce enough barium to kill one hundred billion people, enough ammonia and hydrogen cyanide to kill six trillion, enough phosgene to kill twenty trillion, and enough chlorine to kill four hundred trillion. There's no doubt enough gasoline around, too, to kill us all several times over, and enough pills and drugs in family medicine closets. But we don't worry unduly, because there's no way in which the population will be evenly exposed to any of those substances-everyone isn't suddenly going to sit down and start eating them. And this is far more true of nuclear wastes, sealed deep underground.

Every foot of s.h.i.+elding rock reduces gamma radiation by a factor of ten, which means there's no hazard to anyone above ground from the waste that remains buried. What hazard there is comes from the risk of some of the waste finding its way inside somebody. To do this, it would have to escape from the repository and be ingested or inhaled. And let's not forget that the toxicity of nuclear wastes decays with time. After ten years of burial nuclear waste would be about as toxic as barium if it were ingested; if it were inhaled, it would be a tenth as toxic as ammonia, and a thousandth as toxic as chlorine. After a hundred years these figures fall to one ten-thousandth, one hundred-thousandth, and one ten-millionth respectively. Nature's biological waste-disposal program dumps a thousand million tons of ammonia into the atmosphere every year, and we use chlorine liberally to clean our bathtubs and swimming pools.

In a year a one-thousand-megawatt coal-fired plant produces 1.5 million tons of ash-thirty thousand truckloads-that contains large amounts of known carcinogens and toxins, and can be highly acidic or alkaline depending on the sulfur content of the coal burned. Getting rid of it is a stupendous task-a real waste-disposal problem-and it ends up being dumped in shallow landfills that are easily leached out by groundwater, or simply being piled up as mountains on any convenient site. And that's only the solid waste. In addition there is the waste that's disposed straight up the smokestack, which includes six hundred pounds of carbon dioxide and ten pounds of sulfur dioxide every second, and the same quant.i.ty of nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles. Various studies have concluded that this is enough to cause twenty-five premature deaths and 60,000 cases of respiratory disease annually-per plant!

A one-thousand-megawatt nuke, by contrast, produces nothing in addition to its cubic yard of high-level waste, because there isn't any chemical combustion-no ash, no gases, no smokestack. Because of the compactness of nuclear processes, nuclear power const.i.tutes the first major technology in history in which it has actually been possible to contain all the wastes produced and isolate them from the environment. The radioactive elements that exist naturally in rocks find their way into water supplies and foodstuffs far more easily than anything from inside the repository ever could. Uranium left to itself releases more radiation into the environment then if it were mined, fissioned inside reactors, and the wastes sealed up deep underground. Thus nuclear energy could be looked upon as a way of cleansing the environment of a lot of potentially harmful radiation, concentrating it in places where it can't harm anyone, and getting some useful work out of it in the process.

Professor Bernard L. Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh has produced a book, Before It's Too Late, which covers all aspects of nuclear-related risks in a very comprehensive, yet understandable manner, and compares them to other kinds of risk that we encounter daily. It turns out that if the U.S. were to go to all-nuclear electricity, the total increase in added health risk-covering everything from uranium mining to final disposal of the wastes-would be equivalent to raising the speed limit by six thousandths of one mile per hour. The risks eliminated would, of course, be far greater.

There have been a lot of suggestions that the spread of nuclear power will make available the resources and materials for politically unstable nations or terrorists to make bombs. The fact is, however, that to whatever degree such possibilities might exist in today's world, domestic nuclear power is irrelevant. Any group that has the determination and funds to make a bomb can do so, and whether or not they have access to civilian generating-technology has nothing to do with it. Expertise is available and can be bought for a price, and with laser separation techniques the materials to produce bomb-grade enriched U-235 exist in the rocks everywhere. There are at least half a dozen ways of producing weapons material that are cheaper, simpler, faster, and less hazardous than going through the enormous complications of trying to make it from new or spent power-plant fuel, which is totally unsuitable. Slowing the introduction of nuclear power among Third World nations does nothing to reduce potential weapons threats. It does, however, r.e.t.a.r.d their economic development and perpetuate the differences in health and living standards which create the tensions that make such threats more likely. (It also delays the appearance of another ten j.a.pans on the planet. Just a thought.) As alternatives, fossil fuels and natural gas are more expensive-when prices aren't distorted by politics-and inferior in terms of health and safety. With solar, the big drawback that advocates overlook is its extreme diluteness. To get an idea of how dilute it is, consider a lump of coal needed to make one kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long would sunlight have to s.h.i.+ne on that piece of coal to deposit the same amount of energy. Well, its shadow-which represents the sunlight intercepted-would have an area of about fifteen square inches. In Arizona, the sun would have to s.h.i.+ne on that area for one thousand hours to deliver one kilowatt-hour of energy, which at twelve hours of suns.h.i.+ne per day is almost three months. For the average location in the U.S., it would be twice that. But if we wanted to get one kilowatt-hour of electricity out of that sunbeam, then, at the 10 percent conversion efficiency typically attainable today, it would take five years-to get the same useful energy that a small piece of coal will yield in minutes! That's how concentrated the energy is in coal, and how dilute it is in suns.h.i.+ne.

The sun's s.h.i.+ning for tens or hundreds of years on forests represents an enormous concentration of energy in time, all done by nature for free. And subsequent compaction by geological processes to form coal or oil adds another dimension of concentration in s.p.a.ce, which man carries a stage farther by the activities of wood-gathering, mining, and transportation. Hydroelectric power is another example of extreme concentration. Solar energy evaporates billions of tons of water from the oceans, which then fall over huge areas of land and drain through natural systems of streams and rivers to strategic points suitable for dams. Again, most of the work, involving enormous concentrations both in time and s.p.a.ce, and stupendous amounts of energy (one hurricane releases as much as one thousand hydrogen bombs) is done by nature for free.

I doubt if the people who talk glibly about attempting to match such feats artificially comprehend the scale of the engineering they're proposing. (It's ironic, too, that these tend to be the same people who spread alarm about irresponsible technologies and the risks of their growing beyond control. The engineers and scientists involved in the energy business understand how puny our human efforts really are, and appreciate all the help they can get.) For a one-thousand-megawatt solar-electric conversion plant, for example-the same size as I used to ill.u.s.trate nuclear-we're talking about covering fifty to a hundred square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of gla.s.s, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and t.i.tanium-one thousand times the materials needed to construct a comparable size nuclear plant. These materials are not cheap, and real estate isn't free. Neither is the labor to keep miles of collector area clean. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hungry industries-to the degree that many studies have concluded that building solar plants would produce a net energy loss-and produce large amounts of waste, roughly 10 percent of which is highly toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power.

When a power engineer talks about a one-thousand-megawatt plant, he means one that can deliver a thousand megawatts on demand, anytime, day or night. A nuclear plant can do this; so can a conventional fossil-fuel plant. But a solar plant can only operate when the sun is s.h.i.+ning, which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50 percent-low enough for a regular plant to be considered prohibitively uneconomical. And then cloudy weather would reduce it below that optimum (I live in northern California, and counted over ten weeks of continual rain one winter). Hence, a solar plant would require some kind of energy storage system, such as pumping water up to a high reservoir, which would be allowed to flow back down to drive turbine generators in the nonproductive periods. At present there is no really satisfactory way of storing large amounts of electrical energy. Furthermore, if we use the industry's standard criterion, a practicable system would need to be capable of recharging at five times the plant's nominal rating. This means that for a "one-thousand-megawatt" solar plant to mean the same as it means for other kinds of plants, it would actually have to have a peak generating capacity of six thousand megawatts, adding vastly more to cost, complexity, and adverse environmental effects.

Decentralizing by putting solar panels on everybody's roofs wouldn't reduce the cost or the amount of materials used, either, but simply spread them out more thinly. In fact, it would require more, for the same reason that McDonald's uses less oil to cook two tons of french fries than eight thousand housewives to who fry half a pound each. The storage problem wouldn't go away, either, but would become each household's own responsibility. In a battery just big enough to start a car, gases can acc.u.mulate that one spark can cause to explode, sometimes with lethal consequences, as some unfortunates have discovered when using jumper leads carelessly.

Imagine the hazard that a bas.e.m.e.nt full of batteries the size of grand pianos would present, which a genuinely all-solar home would need to get it through a bad spell in, say, Minnesota in January. Who would do the maintenance and keep the acid levels topped up? And then there would be the problem of keeping the panels free from snow and wet leaves-not in the summer months, but when the roofs are slippery and frozen. Even today, the second biggest cause of accidental deaths in the country, after automobiles, is falls. If we build all those houses with skating rinks on the roofs and bombs in the bas.e.m.e.nts, we'd better build a lot more hospitals and emergency rooms, too, while we're at it.

I'm certainly in favor of developing outer s.p.a.ce, but for the right reasons. The idea of solar-power satellites has never struck me as one of them. The intensity of solar radiation outside the atmosphere is about six times greater than on the ground, which isn't a lot, really. I don't see how it could justify the huge cost of putting all that technology in orbit (ten thousand shuttle launches to build a satellite capable of powering New York City, by one estimate I've seen-and that excludes the ground equipment) to reconcentrate energy diluted by ninety-three millions miles worth of the inverse square law, when we can produce it at the sun's original density right here.

Now, all this isn't to say that solar doesn't have its uses. It does, and it can be beneficial in remote places far from a power grid. And if somebody who happens to live in the right kind of place finds it a worthwhile way to shave a few dollars from his utility bill, there's nothing wrong with that. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the problem is simply a domestic one of keeping the dining room at 75deg.F and warming the bath water. The real issue is of running the aluminum smelters, steel mills, fertilizer plants, factories, and transportation systems that keep a modern, industrial society functioning. Solar will never make a significant contribution here (which is why people who don't want a modern, industrial society are so much in favor of it, and would like everything else to be forcibly shut down). This is where nuclear energy really emerges in a cla.s.s of its own-not just as the best way of meeting energy needs today, but as the pointer toward doing all kinds of things in much better ways tomorrow.

Some people argue that we don't need nuclear power because we already have other ways to generate electricity. This is rather like somebody in an earlier century telling Faraday that we didn't need electricity because we already had other ways to heat water. But what made electricity so important, of course, was its ability to do things that were totally unprecedented-things unachievable to any degree by existing technologies. Our entire science of electrical engineering and electronics is the result. A similar relations.h.i.+p holds with the ability to manipulate nuclear processes. Our present use of nuclear energy-as a replacement for conventional heat sources to generate electricity by steam turbines-represents merely a tiny first step into a whole new, qualitatively different realm of capability.

From unaided muscle power through to rocket engines and generating plants, the evolution of civilization has reflected the harnessing of progressively more concentrated energy sources. The true significance of nuclear technology in the twentieth century is that it points to the next step in the process, opening up the prospect of entirely new processing methods that will obsolete most of today's c.u.mbersome and polluting industries, much in the same way that the introduction of electricity revolutionized the coal-based methods of the nineteenth century. For example, at the hundred-million-degree temperatures of a nuclear plasma, all atoms are stripped of their electrons and become raw, highly charged nuclei, which means they can be manipulated simply and cheaply by magnetic fields. This give us a method for economically extracting the trace elements that exist in all forms of rock, desert sand, seawater, and construction debris, without requiring geologically concentrated ores to make it worthwhile and hence replacing all of our existing primary metals industries. Also, we have a total recycling method for all forms of waste.

Or consider the chemicals industry. The conventional way of combining reactants into new products is to brew them together in big vats, usually under heat to supply the reaction energy. Heat energy, however, is broadband-it exists over a wide range of wavelengths. This means that energy is available at favorable wavelengths for many different reactions among the molecules involved, and therefore a variety of compounds will be formed. The typical result of this is that only a fraction of the reactants actually go to form the product that was desired, which raises its cost, and the marketing department tries to find profitable applications for the sludge left over. But in laboratories, lasers are now being used to drive chemical reactions with narrowband energy, at just the absorption wavelength of the molecule required.

The result is that all of the reactants involved form useful products, and processes that conventionally need hours, days, or even weeks now take place in milliseconds. Recombining reactants from a tuned plasma state offers the same possibilities on an industrial scale.

Cheap, high-temperature process heat opens the way to new sources of raw materials, and a means of desalinating seawater inexpensively to irrigate enormous areas of currently useless land. Furthermore, at nuclear plasma temperatures seawater cracks thermally into its const.i.tuent atoms, providing a potentially unlimited supply of hydrogen as a base for a whole range of synthetic liquid fuels to replace gasoline. And finally, there's the prospect of putting a permanent end to all materials-shortage problems by trans.m.u.ting elements on a bulk scale. All atoms can be broken down into protons, and the protons built up again into whatever we want-a whole new science of structure-building that stands to nuclei as chemistry today stands to molecules. Eventually, we'll make our materials the way nature does in the stars, with unlimited energy as a by-product. And when we've developed such technologies here on Earth we can s.h.i.+p them up into orbit and to the Moon, and that's how we'll build our colonies and stars.h.i.+ps.

And here, I think, we at last touch upon what the controversy is really all about. The opposition movement doesn't reflect so much an att.i.tude against nuclear power per se, as against the whole notion of continuing worldwide industrial growth and technological progress, and against the energy sources, economic principles, and political inst.i.tutions that make those things possible. It represents an essentially Malthusian ideology that sees a planet with finite resources straining to support an exponentially increasing population until either nature imposes limits through its traditional agencies of famine, disease, and war, or we impose artificial ones by curtailing growth, and accept simpler lifestyles. Anything else will simply produce more people than we can support comfortably, and hasten the day when everything runs out.

Beneath the camouflage, this really aims at preserving the privileges enjoyed by the world's "haves." In any period of history, a society's total wealth-its economy-depends on the level of technology available to support it. No previous economy has ever been able to support more than a privileged minority at reasonable standards of comfort and affluence: either a few privileged families, later an entire cla.s.s, and in recent times a minority of privileged nations. When a privileged group entrenches itself, two things tend to happen: one, a rationale is constructed, based on religion or some other belief system, to justify the existing social order and induce the ma.s.ses to accept their inferior lot, e.g., by promising that they'll get theirs in some hereafter; and two, good reasons are found why the progress that has enabled the privileged to get where they are has gone far enough and should be halted right now, before any more from lower down the pyramid move up to crowd the limited s.p.a.ce at the top. Today we see it as Malthusianism: "finite resources" are the reason why everyone can't be rich, and the inevitability of "limits to growth" means that global industrialization will have to plateau out at its present level. Imposed worldwide, such an ideology would deny hundreds of millions of human beings any chance to enjoy decent standards of health, education, and comfort, or the opportunity to live rewarding, productive lives.

Instead they would be forcibly kept at a subsistence level of existence . . . or worse. It is estimated that holding back the introduction of nuclear technologies to the Third World has already caused more deaths than the n.a.z.is were responsible for during their entire regime-including all the casualties of World War II. Malthus would say it's just as well, since those people would have lived miserable lives anyway-and besides, we don't have the resources to change anything, which in any case are getting smaller. I say we do have the resources, and they're getting bigger.

To apply the observed population dynamics of animal species to human societies is to deny the qualities that set us apart. Unlike animals, who simply consume resources and react to circ.u.mstance with fixed behavior patterns, human beings are capable of creating new resources and adapting their behavior to the new conditions that they bring about. In primitive, labor-intensive, rural societies, with no life insurance, social security, retirement pensions, or machines to do the work, having big families to ensure that at least one or two of the children survive to adulthood to provide for one's old age makes sound economic sense. When long-established customs like this persist for a while alongside industrialization and rising living standards, of course the population is going to increase. It happened in Europe in the eighteenth century, in America in the nineteenth, and now it's happening in the developing nations of the Third World. It's a sign that things are getting better, not worse. Since World War II, improved health and diet had caused a significant increase in the average height of j.a.panese children. But obviously it would be ridiculous to infer from this by simple extrapolation that a hundred years from now they'll be as tall as skysc.r.a.pers. The average height is adjusting to a new equilibrium with changed conditions. It's the same with populations. Our experiences with such advanced societies as those of North America and Western Europe show that when human populations reach sufficiently high levels of well-being and security, att.i.tudes, values, and lifestyles change, and they become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Malthus never dreamed of.

Periodically, the process of evolution pa.s.ses through abrupt phase changes comparable to the ones in physics that given the transitions between solid, liquid, and gas, in which completely new laws come into play and the old limits cease to mean anything. A qualitatively distinct realm opens up, with new resources available suddenly, which are not simple extrapolations of what went before. Usually this results when a revolutionary ability of some kind-a new technology-emerges. Thus, the earliest self-replicating molecules depended on the supply of abiotically produced organic compounds washed down off the land into a few favored environments, and we can imagine some primordial, microscopic Malthus concluding gloomily that life would forever be restricted to thin strips of coastal shallows and tidal pools. But that doomsday prophesy collapsed when the blue-green algae invented the chlorophyll molecule and set up the photosynthesis industry, opening up the entire surface of the oceans as a planet-wide bioma.s.s factory. s.e.xual reproduction and DNA, the patenting of hemoglobin and harnessing of oxygen as a higher-power energy source, all represented breakthroughs into new realms of capability, and eventually the development of the first functioning s.p.a.cesuit in the form of the amphibian egg paved the way for migration into and colonizing of a completely new, initially hostile environment.

What these examples ill.u.s.trate is that new technologies create new resources-and always on a scale dwarfing everything that went before. Human civilization is a continuation of the same evolutionary process, operating at the level of applied intelligence. And the same principle applies, in which new technologies create new resources-for a resource is not a resource and can create no wealth until the knowledge and the means exist for using it. The harnessing of steam, the application of electricity, and the exploitation of oil all opened up eras of wealth creation that were as qualitatively distinct from each other as they were from the economies based on wind, water, and muscle power of the Middle Ages. By the yardsticks that matter, the average Englishman of today enjoys a better standard of living than Queen Victoria did, and most Americans are millionaires by the measures of a century ago. And all the world's peoples want to be living that way a century from now. They could be, too. But when the demand is translated into energy needs-no less than providing a globally stabilized population of, say, ten billion, with energy per person at a rate probably greater than that of the U.S. today-the amount needed is utterly beyond any approaches that are merely variations of what we have. Only a breakthrough into the next realm of energy control could do it. The nuclear-based technologies that we are just glimpsing, with yields and densities orders of magnitude greater than anything attainable from conventional sources, represent such a breakthrough. The so-called alternatives do not.

The tiny pockets of energy that happen to be, fortuitously, trapped around the surface of this planet are merely our starting capital for launching the business. As with any business, it would be silly to suppose that we have to exist on our starting capital forever. The capital must be invested to create the earnings that will enable the business to grow and pay its way as its bills get bigger. Just as the wealth of today's Western world is the payoff from yesterday's investments in coal and steam, so a portion of the return must be invested to provide the global payoff that will be tomorrow's nuclear economy-an economy capable for the first time ever of enabling every child born on the planet to grow up with the expectation of a healthy body and an educated mind, and with the freedom to pursue the opportunity to become the most that he or she is capable.

So, can we make nuclear energy work, safely, cleanly, and efficiently? Sure we can. When we take a long, hard look at the alternatives, we see that we have to. Fortunately for all of us, the Neanderthals who discovered fire saw things the same way.

Afterword, 1996 Nothing has really changed much since the above was written. The same distortions and misinformation continue to appear, the same responses apply, and the industry marks time because of politics.

I'm beginning to think that the opposing activism and lobbying are secondary effects of causes that run deeper. As a result of the ma.s.sive concentration of talent and resources on the Manhattan Project under wartime conditions, the nuclear industry-somewhat like the Apollo Program, perhaps, also for political reasons-happened half a century before it ought to have done. The planetary organism of human culture reacted to something which in various ways it simply wasn't ready for yet.

So the antinuclear phenomenon concerns me less these days than it used to. I have little doubt that it will go away when the time is right, and the industries that will drive the global civilization of the twenty-first century will be powered by energy transitions of the atomic nucleus.

ALL IN A NAME.

There really is no excuse for some of the nonsense dispensed to the public by the ma.s.s media on subjects such as nuclear power. Oscar Wilde once said that, its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that "by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

Perhaps we would have avoided today's (temporary) hysteria over nuclear power if we had stuck to the precedent that we set when we named the first of the artificial transuranic elements "plutonium." Instead of being carried away with highfalutin' names like "californium," "berkelium," and "mendelevium" for the ones that came after, we should have continued in the way we'd begun and called them "mickey-mouseium," "donald-duckium," and so on. I mean, with that kind of nomenclature, who couldn't have loved nuclear power?

Does this mean that the Chern.o.byl reactor was fueled with goofium?

DOWN TO EARTH.

It has always been taught that Sir Isaac Newton was born in the same year that Galileo died, 1642.

However, certain doc.u.ments and diaries recently unearthed in Pisa have revealed not only that the two scientists were contemporaries, but that they actually met. This occurred during a summer vacation that Newton spent touring Italy. The find also shows how Newton's universal law of gravitation was derived from Galileo's studies of falling bodies, and explains the legend of the apple. As far as can be reconstructed, it all went something like this.

SCENE.

A warm sunny day in Pisa. The Leaning Tower stands midstage, surrounded by the town plaza. The door at the base faces the audience. As the CURTAIN rises, Galileo, dressed in the traditional manner of the medieval Italian professional cla.s.s, is sitting in the top gallery of the tower, eating his lunch. Beside him on the bal.u.s.trade is a flagon of Chianti. On his other side is a wooden lunch box and next to it, a bag of apples. Near him on the top story of the tower, is a pile of bricks and rubble left by construction workers. The moon is visible in the sky near the top of the tower. Galileo selects one of the apples, but as he is about to take a bite, he stops and examines it.

GALILEO Oh-oh. Eesa not so good, this one. (He pulls a face and tosses the apple nonchalantly over his shoulder, but in the same movement inadvertently knocks the lunch box off the bal.u.s.trade so that both objects fall together out of sight to the rear. A moment later an indignant shout comes from backstage.) NEWTON Gadzooks!

GALILEO (turning and peering down) Santa Maria! Was accidente. Scusate!