“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our region is supposed to be outside the danger zone — yet we see conflicting newspaper reports about whether the prevailing wind currents would make us vulnerable to the after-effects of a meltdown. Even now, local civil defense officials monitor the air several times daily with radiological survey meters — equipment similar to Geiger counters. Jonestown was far away, remote in another land, I said to Jane, but the potential mass tragedy at Three Mile Island hovers at the edges of our personal worlds. The whole affair has a sense of unreal immediacy, because there’s nothing to see, and because I don’t think most people really understand the probabilities involved. It would be hardly a coincidence, I added, that the mass events at Jonestown and Three Mile Island took place within less than six months of each other, and that they represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present main belief systems: religion and science.

Look at your nuclear-reactor troubles at the plant by Harrisburg (Three Mile Island). The entire idea of nuclear power was first a dream — an act of the imagination on the part of private individuals — and then through fiction and the arts, a dream on the part of many people. Instantly, probabilities spun out from that dream in all directions, vast potentials and dangers.

Fundamentalists think of nuclear power as a force that God might use, say, to destroy the world. That event in Harrisburg means one thing to them. Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature because they are “smarter than” nature is — smarter than nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. The probabilities are still surging, of course, and in private and mass dreams people try out all kinds of endings for that particular story.