“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

2. Jane and I try to understand both the advocates of nuclear power and those who are against it. At the moment we’re sure of but one thing: A nuclear reactor meltdown, like that threatened at Three Mile Island, is just not acceptable in our society under any circumstances. The devastation for many years of a large portion of a state like Pennsylvania, say, should not be risked because of economics, fuel shortages, convenience, apathy, or any other reason. Jane and I passionately believe that instead of concentrating primarily upon nuclear power the United States should be making massive efforts to utilize many other sources of energy — at least until the risks and technologies involved with generating nuclear power are understood much more thoroughly. And there are numerous other sources of energy that can be developed. Among them are: cogeneration, the use of waste heat from manufacturing processes to generate electricity; solar radiation; ocean waves; new, more sophisticated methods of burning coal so that it’s much less polluting; subterranean heat; the production, from municipal solid wastes, of ethanol (alcohol) as an excellent substitute for gasoline; the burning of biomass — waste materials from the home and farm; various methods of deriving energy from the vast oil shale deposits in our western states; the establishment of “energy farms” of trees and hydrocarbon-generating plants; energy reservoirs of pumped water. We think such alternate sources should be pursued even if they cost more in economic terms than nuclear power, either initially or continually, for surely none of them could produce the horrendous results — and enormous costs — that would follow even one massive failure at a nuclear power plant.

Coupled with our reservations about the uncertain state of the art concerning nuclear power, Jane and I deeply mourn the shameful fact that for some 30 years now our country’s government and industry have neglected to develop safe methods for the transportation and permanent storage of radioactive waste materials; some of these will remain highly toxic for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus pose potential threats to many many generations. As of now there are no solutions in sight for these extremely vexing scientific and political challenges. There may never be, and failure in these areas alone could ultimately dictate the demise of the entire nuclear endeavor for any peaceful (or even military) use at all.

“In the same way the scientific community speaks of grandiose ideals, of man’s triumph over the planet and nature. At the same time these ideals further divorce the scientists from daily practical experience with their fellowman; and since they see animals as objects, they’re bound to see human life in somewhat the same fashion. The sacrifice of, say, thousands of lives in a nuclear accident almost becomes justified in their minds if it is a means toward the grandiose goal of learning how to ‘triumph over nature.’ Again, this intent automatically turns them into mechanics.