“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It’s over! The crisis at Three Mile Island has passed — or so the governor of Pennsylvania announced on television this morning. That is, the threat of an “immediate catastrophe” from a meltdown in the plant’s Unit No. 2 nuclear reactor has evidently passed; engineers have dissipated the hydrogen bubble in the reactor’s core, but the core temperature is still considerably above normal, and children and pregnant women are still advised to stay out of the area.

(The challenges — and fears — created at Three Mile Island will last for years, however. Jane and I read that it will take up to four years and many millions of dollars to decontaminate, overhaul, and place the crippled reactor back in operation; the cost is given in incalculable estimates ranging from $40 million to $400 million. Some government officials say that the reactor may never see service again, that it may end up junked, or as a sealed mausoleum, a mute symbol of our nuclear age. [Nor do we know what fate awaits the plant’s undamaged Unit No. 1.] A current fear is that if and when cleanup operations are begun, the small and supposedly harmless amounts of radiation still seeping into the atmosphere may intensify. There’s much debate already about the “cancer deaths” that may show up in the local populace, since no one really knows yet just what a “safe” dose of radiation could be in such a situation. And above all, our energy experts maintain that the United States has traveled too far along the nuclear path to turn back now.

(Regardless of whether the events at Three Mile Island have resulted in any significant radioactive fallout so far, they have generated some disquieting fallout as far as Jane and I are personally concerned. I’ll describe the latest of the many courses of action we’ve found ourselves considering over the years as we work with the Seth material, while trying to keep a balance between the realities we’ve created for ourselves and the possibilities we constantly encounter in the “outside” world.

(Jane was quite upset before the session this evening, and I’m the one who was responsible for her state. Somehow, after supper, we got on the subject of Seth doing a “quick book” about Jonestown and Three Mile Island, something that could be offered to the public very soon, instead of material that would show up in a regular Seth book a couple of years from now. We already had the perfect title for the book, one we’d jokingly originated following last Monday night’s session: Seth on Jonestown and Three Mile Island: Religious and Scientific Cults.

(“Nothing,” I said. “It would just wait until the Jonestown–Three Mile Island thing was done. Maybe we’d have sessions almost every night for a few weeks, or whatever it took. Anyhow, we’d have to check to see whether our publisher is set up to market a book that quickly, or would even want to.”