“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ever since the accident to the nuclear reactor of Unit No. 2 at TMI, 31 months ago, the reactor’s great containment building and an auxiliary structure have been flooded with highly radioactive water. [It grew to be over eight and a half feet deep in the reactor building.] Utility engineers now have in operation a filtering system to decontaminate before storage the nearly one million gallons of water in the two buildings. The job is to take around nine months; the processed water will finally be disposed of in 1983; the filters holding the radioactive material will be trucked to facilities in Idaho and Washington State for testing and storage. Yet to come are the removal of the reactor’s cover, its damaged core, and the decontamination of the buildings themselves.

Because of the opposition of local people and Pennsylvania officials, utility executives have not been allowed to restart Unit No. 1, which was shut down for refueling at the time of the accident. The cleanup at TMI must proceed regardless of whether Unit No. 2 is repaired or decommissioned, or whether the entire plant is closed down. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected the idea of a sealed-up radioactive power plant sitting on its island in the Susquehanna River; the danger of eventual uncontrolled contamination, including seepage into the river, is too great.²

And she does well at times. When she began writing Magical Approach, she even surprised me by occasionally helping me get breakfast, cooking bacon and eggs at the hot plate I’d set up for her some seven months ago on the kitchen table.⁴ Although she could work at the table while sitting down, she’d given up those simple, nurturing acts of food preparation many weeks ago; her fingers weren’t working well enough, she told me at the time; she didn’t trust herself enough to handle hot food—and I admit that when she implied a risk, the chance of an accident, I stopped encouraging her to help me with meals.

There are plenty of more immediate challenges. For example: The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has asked the operators of more than 40 nuclear plants to check for cracks in the walls of the vessels encasing their pressurized-water reactors (which are the kind installed at TMI). Evidence is accumulating that the vessels are becoming embrittled by neutron radiation from the reactors much more quickly than their designers had anticipated. Small cracks have been found, but not all areas are reachable for testing. A rupture of a typical pressure vessel could result in an uncontrollable release of radiation into a containment building not designed to handle such a situation. If the building itself was breached, the escaping radiation could cause some 48,000 deaths, 250,000 nonfatal cancers and injuries, 5,000 first-generation birth defects, render 200 square miles uninhabitable, require decontamination of another 3,200 square miles, and damage other properties worth many billions of dollars. No protection against that kind of accident has ever been required by the NRC. The forces of consciousness at work would seem to be incredible—beyond our grasp.