Government officials, nuclear power proponents, and opinion columnists in big business dailies are floating trial balloons to gauge the receptivity to "expand and diversify energy resources" in light of the rolling blackouts and "Stage 3" energy emergencies that have become a regular feature of life here.

Prominent nuclear power advocate Denis Beller spoke to a meeting of the Northern California Section of the American Nuclear Society January 17, which was covered by the Oakland Tribune and several television stations. "Nuclear power is needed: for workers, the public, and environment. It's needed to fight energy poverty," said Beller, a nuclear engineer researcher at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He maintained that the U.S. was entering a "nuclear renaissance" and said, "Nuclear power is safe. That's what we need to say when we talk to the public." California currently has two nuclear power stations on line.

Beller and Richard Rhodes co-authored a feature article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine called "The Need for Nuclear Power." Using selective figures, the two nuclear power industry advocates argue nuclear power is the safest method of producing electricity. The "world needs more energy.... Two billion people lack access to electricity," they wrote. "Development depends on energy, and the alternative to development is suffering: poverty, disease, and death. Such conditions create instability and the potential for widespread violence." Rhodes also testified before a Congressional subcommittee on the question last July in Washington.

Currently 434 nuclear reactors worldwide account for a little over 6 percent of the world's energy production. In the United States most are aging plants and few have been built since widespread protests, spurred on by the partial meltdown in 1979 of the Three Mile Island plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, exposed the radiation dangers inherent in production and processing of uranium and the operation and decommissioning of the nuclear generating facilities.

Trying to undercut the gains made through the protest movement in the 1980s, Beller and Rhodes state in their article, "Physical reality--not arguments about corporate greed, hypothetical risks, radiation exposure, or waste disposal--ought to inform decisions vital to the future of the world.... Despite its outstanding record, [nuclear power] has instead been relegated by its opponents to the same twilight zone of contentious ideological conflict as abortion and evolution. It deserves better."

Following publication of this article, noted syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer applauded its defense of nukes. "Why do oil prices periodically spike?" Krauthammer asked in his column dated March 17, 2000. "No mystery: backsliding on conservation, irrational restrictions on oil exploration, and a nuclear phobia that keeps us from substituting uranium for fossil fuels. OPEC sees all this, watches supplies tightening, [and] seizes the opportunity for a windfall by restricting supply even more."

As the California energy situation worsened, conservative columnist William Safire attacked the "bastion of liberalism" of California where people say "not in my backyard" to power plants as the reason for the crisis. "Environmentalists recoil in horror at suggestions of nuclear power, now a safe and clean source of electricity," continued Safire. "Reducing pollution sensibly is laudable, but clean-air extremists become local heroes without telling constituents the danger of loss of Intel jobs and cheap electricity's household convenience."

U.S. president George Bush added his attack on environmental regulations when he told the Associated Press, "A lot of the harshest critics of a balanced environmental policy are beginning to have rolling blackouts."

Current government policy, as stated in Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) documents, is that "radiation exposure SHALL be held to the absolute minimum or As Low as Reasonably Achievable (ALARA). This is particularly important since it is believed that risk is directly proportional to dose, without any threshold." The NRC states, "There is no dose of radiation so small that it will not have some effect" and that "any dose, no matter how small, produces some risk" of cell mutation and cancer.  
 
New drilling leases
Besides promoting new nuclear power plants, the energy industry is pushing ahead with plans to drill for oil in ecologically sensitive areas. On January 19 designated interior secretary Gale Norton used the energy shortages in California to fortify her arguments that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, now protected by federal law, should be opened for oil drilling.

Meanwhile, the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group representing the domestic offshore gas and oil industry, has urged the federal Minerals Management Service to consider new drilling leases in protected areas off California's coast along Sonoma and Mendocino counties.

Bob Keller works in a meat-processing plant in the East Bay.
 
 
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Workers in Alabama protest rate hike, shutoff of gas heat
 
 
 
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