You’re reading a story from Sidelines 100, a project showcasing a century of student storytelling at Middle Tennessee State University. Sidelines 100 plans to highlight 100 stories from the newspaper archives this fall and spring.

This story originally ran in the Jan. 8, 1970, edition of Sidelines. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay on top of all things Sidelines 100.

Editor’s Note: This special section is intended to present all sides of the nuclear power question. The proximity of the proposed nuclear plant in Hartsville places MTSU in the evacuation area in case of a major emergency.

Americans are morally bound to provide future societies with the necessary technology to provide “cheap and abundant energy,” Bernard Cohen, a nuclear physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, told a Nashville audience last week. Debating at Vanderbilt University about “The Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors,” Cohen said America has “robbed” future societies of cheap fossil fuel energy.

“We owe it as a debt to future generations to provide them with a technology for cheap energy,” he declared. Future generations will remember us as “the dirty louses who used up high-grade ores,” Cohen said.

An authority on nuclear structure and reactions, Cohen spent 16 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has been a consultant for the National Science Foundation.

Asserting that he is not an expert on reactor safety, Cohen said delaying the production of nuclear facilities and depending on conventional power plants would be harmful to people.

Pollution from coal-fired plants would be more harmful to people than using nuclear power, and it would be uneconomical to depend on oil-fired plants, he warned.

Turning to another controversial aspect of nuclear power, Cohen explained the nuclear waste disposal procedure and proclaimed, “I would gladly take on the job of watching over wastes.”

The job of watching over buried waste products would be a “part-time job for one person,” he said.

Critics of nuclear waste disposal techniques charge that the procedure is hazardous because ground water might seep into the buried products and carry them into drinking water.

Radioactivity from uranium is taken care of in nuclear power plants, Cohen said, but radioactivity from uranium burned in coal is dispersed throughout the atmosphere and ignored.

People should be “much more concerned” about burning coal, he complained.

Although radioactive waste is buried where ground water is not expected to reach, other precautions also are taken, Cohen said.

The waste is buried 600 meters deep, where ground water can move only one foot per day, Cohen said, but if ground water did rush the waste, it would not travel to the nearest river for a thousand years because of its location.

On reactor accidents, Cohen said periodic inspections of the system, utilizing x-ray, magnetic and ultrasonic techniques, are the first guard against mishaps. Since water is necessary to keep the reactor system from melting down and releasing radioactive products, there are two systems for detecting a water loss, Cohen explained.

Two protective systems are also utilized to detect any increase in airborne radioactivity in the reactor compartment, he added.

Should the reactor melt down and the back-up systems fail, the concrete and steel compartment would keep the radioactive material in the structure, Cohen said.

The compartment is designed to withstand outside assaults on the walls, Cohen explained. “Any airplane smaller than a Boeing 707 would just bounce off the structure.”

If a hole were blasted into the structure and radioactive products were emitted into the air, they would be dispersed so uniformly that there would be no danger to life, Cohen assured.

The only possible danger would be if a temperature inversion kept the nuclear dust close to the earth’s surface, he said.

Responding to questions from the small and often argumentative audience, Cohen said nuclear power plants are insured up to $300 million.

“Countless” generations will have to assume custodial responsibility over radioactive wastes generated in nuclear reactors unless a solution is found, Henry Kendall, spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said last week.

Calling for a delay in the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) plans, Kendall said, “It is not a prudent thing to implement a big nuclear program until we have exploited energy conservation.” Kendall spoke at Vanderbilt University Thursday night as part of a debate on “The Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors.”

Nuclear power is a “basically unforgiving technology that can turn and bite us in a way no other technology can” because of its “unique level of mischief.”

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kendall has researched problems of nuclear structure and has been a “primary testifier” in suits challenging the AEC.

Kendall pointed out five steps the AEC should follow rather than pursuing its goal of 1,000 operating reactors before the year 2000:

• Continued operation at a reduced power rating of the S3 nuclear reactor plants currently operating in the U.S.
• The nuclear plants now under construction should be finished and operated at a lower power rating with a great deal more inspection than now required.
• No more reactor plants should be built until the AEC can prove that the program is safe.
• To meet energy needs, the U.S. should use the three to five centuries of coal it has within air pollution standards. The industry should recover mined land.
• “The burden of proof of nuclear safety should be put where it belongs — on the industry.”

The nuclear industry, he said, is in controversy over every public health and safety aspect. “It’s in trouble. The future of nuclear power is becoming increasingly cloudy.”

The AEC has left unanswered too many questions, Kendall said. “The great unanswered question is, if waste disposal is so easy, why hasn’t it been solved? Why is it still open?”

Kansas state geologists studying a commission plan to bury radioactive wastes in salt mines found the proposal was “badly misrepresented.”

Other agency schemes to dispose of the wastes were “dubious in concept or technically infeasible,” the physicist charged.

Kendall said nuclear reactor wastes contain 96 per cent fission products and 4 per cent elements, including plutonium, which has an enormous half-life and is used to make bombs.

“The nuclear industry has downplayed the importance of all this. It is clear that all of the proposals, either for short-term or long-term disposal, are only in the research stages,” he criticized.

Another problem with the industry is safeguarding against intentional misuse of nuclear power, he warned.

“You can cause one of these bad accidents if you know enough. You can pick the weather, the reactor and other conditions,” Kendall said.

The AEC has conceded, he said, that a small group of people could initiate an accident at a nuclear facility.

Transporting plutonium could be an “attractive target for terrorists,” he warned. With supplies from hardware stores and chemical supply houses, terrorists could assemble a “crude bomb,” Kendall added.

Critics charge that a bomb constructed by terrorists would not be efficient, he said. The atomic bomb used at Hiroshima in 1945 was only 10 per cent efficient, Kendall added.

If a crude bomb were only one tenth of one per cent efficient, it would pack the power of 100 tons of dynamite, he warned.

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