1 result for (book:nome AND session:845 AND stemmed:inde)
[... 1 paragraph ...]
(Right now, a week after it began to manifest itself, the situation at the crippled nuclear power plant near Harrisburg is still very tense. Small amounts of radiation continue to leak into the atmosphere. Federal nuclear safety advisors call the dilemma “stable,” and today the President visited Three Mile Island in an effort to reassure people — yet the chance of a meltdown of the overheated reactor core of Unit No. 2 still exists. We’re told that a radioactive and potentially explosive bubble of hydrogen gas, which has been preventing cooling water from reaching the upper portions of the control rods within the reactor’s fuel assembly, is now being very slowly and carefully vented into the atmosphere; this is a first step in the bubble’s planned dissolution. On March 31, children and pregnant women were advised to evacuate an area within five miles of the plant, and today city and county civil defense directors in eastern Pennsylvania were given plans for a precautionary evacuation of everyone within a 25-mile radius of Three Mile Island. Protection is being planned against looting, which, it is estimated, would begin “two to three hours after the evacuees are gone.” Local milk supplies are safe to drink, since dairy cattle are eating corn and hay that’s been stored for months, but no one really knows the effects of radiation on the unborn calves being carried by many cows in the plant area. And so the entire country — indeed, the whole world — waits to see what will happen at Three Mile Island,2 a place not far at all south of where I comfortably sit writing these notes.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
You are indeed correct, of course, and you are also dealing with the behavior of cults in both circumstances, each concerned with a closed system of belief, rigid attitudes, intense emotionally-charged states, and also with what amounts to compulsive behavior.
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
“Man is therefore set against his nature in his own mind, and he thinks he must control it. The fact is that man’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. But he himself has largely closed the door of comprehension, so that he only identifies with what he thinks of as his rational mind, and tries to forget as best he can those spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
Ideas about conservation enter in as a result of my comments about alternate sources of energy, of course, and these are related to a number of deep desires that Jane and I have. We want our nation to embark upon programs to cut, and eventually eliminate for all practical purposes, its continually growing dependence upon foreign oil, for we see great risks in an overreliance upon that course of action; we think those hazards should be obvious to everyone since the oil embargo declared against us in 1973 by the countries of the Middle East. This excessive dependence can be done away with eventually, but at considerable sacrifice. Jane and I are more than ready to make those sacrifices; indeed, we live very conservatively even now. We can’t conceive of anything more worthwhile than to achieve an independence of spirit that’s based upon an independence of means, whether on a personal or national scale. But once it’s largely self-sufficient, the United States could really begin to fulfill its role of leadership in the world.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]