◆ SpookStack

oe rece Ne eh eet ey ee we ee ie a pment cee eee omens oe fee ee ee ete ee A et St en eet ee 6 James J. Wadsworth, head of our delegation to the present conference in Geneva, has said, “Put simply, the difficulty is that at the same time power is produced, fissionable material used in weapons is produced. An atumic power plant is thus a weapons producing plant.” It is easy to make bombs if fissionable material is available. Lack of it has retarded bomb development in France. The Shippingport reactor, located on a great coal deposit in Pennsylvania, can supply 66,000 kilowatts of electricity, enough for a city of 120,- 000. It produces it at 65 mills per kilowatt hour, although it could be generated by using coal for only 5 mills. A power company pay's the govern- ment 8 mills, so that we taxpayers take a loss of 57 mills, or—at a normal capacity—$24 million per year. (Britain gets a more economic sounding fig- ure by charging must of the expense up to weapons production.) However, this large yearly deficit and the or- igina] cost of the plant are not all that is to come out of our pockets. Congress has passed a bill authorizing the government to indemnify a plant up to half a billion dollars for a single reactor accident. This fact helps to underline some of the dangers. Among the risks are those of serious ac- cidents such as occurred at Windscale, England, in October, 1957, when milk from a 200 square mile area had to be dumped at sea. Even enthusiastic officials of companies that are profiting from atomic contracts admit that the disposal of radioactive waste—produced in im- mense quantities in industrial power reactors—is an unsolved problem. They admit that the radio- aclivity will outlive the tanks in which it is buried and dumped al sea. Since this is the case, is it not acting irresponsibly toward the {future {o push in- dustrial power production? Graham Du Shane, editor of Science, in his May 17, 1957, editoria} writes that “the hazard from nuclear reacturs for power production is a greater potential threat than that from atomic weapons [testing}.” Dr. Arthur Squires, who was one of the team who produced the atomic bomb during World War Il, and who Ialcr was engaged in inspecting nuclear installations throughout our country, wrote me recently, “This whole area is one which appals me. 1 mean, the area of radivactive waste disposal from power operations. Anything you can do to arouse the public to this danger will be a real service.”