“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Early last Wednesday an ominous development began unfolding at Three Mile Island, the nuclear-power-plant located on an island in the Susquehanna River below Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It seems that through a combination of mechanical failures and human error, unit 2, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors, overheated and discharged radioactive water into the river, and began releasing small amounts of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere. [The entire plant is idle, since unit 1 had already been shut down for refueling.] By now the situation is much more serious, however: There’s a chance of a catastrophic “meltdown” of the uranium fuel rods in the damaged reactor’s core—the worst possible accident that can occur in such circumstances, short of an explosion, and a kind that proponents of nuclear power have long maintained “almost certainly cannot happen.” If the meltdown takes place, spewing great clouds of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, several hundred thousand people could ultimately become casualties in one form or another.

(Now there’s talk of evacuating up to a million people who live in the counties surrounding Three Mile Island. Some refugees have already reached the Elmira area, where we live, and upon checking a map Jane and I were surprised to see that we’re only about 130 airline miles north of Harrisburg. We’ve driven the much longer road distance comfortably enough in one day. “Strange,” I mused to Jane, “that of all the nuclear power plants in the world, we end up living that close to the one that goes wrong….”

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 with vast potentials and dangers.

(The movie is The China Syndrome, of course, with Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, which opened to rave reviews perhaps two weeks or so ago. The short story referred to above was reported on a TV program about Three Mile Island: Jane and I caught a glimpse of, I believe, a local newspaper or magazine in the Harrisburg area that had printed a short story about a nuclear accident at that plant, on the same day that the troubles began at Three Mile Island. We hadn’t heard of the story. If I’m in error and the story was printed in a national magazine, for instance, we still haven’t heard of it. Nor have we heard or read about this amazing “coincidence” since seeing that one mention of it on that TV newscast.

(I might as well use this opportunity to point up what I think is an obvious connection between the nuclear mishaps at Three Mile Island, and the mass suicide at Guyana [Jonestown] earlier this year. It could hardly be a coincidence, I remarked to Jane this noon that both mass events had taken place this year, and represented the two poles, or extremes, of mankind’s present belief systems: religion and science. Then this afternoon Sue Watkins called Jane from Dundee—and proceeded to tell Jane about the “obvious connections” between Guyana and Harrisburg....)

Nuclear power stands for power, plain and simple. Is it good or bad? It stands in man’s dreams as belonging to God: the power of the universe (intently). Man has always considered himself, in your terms, as set apart from nature, so he must feel set apart from nature’s power—and there must be a great division in his dreams between the two.

Nuclear energy in fact, then, comes as a dream symbol, and emerges into the world as something to be dealt with.

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.

(4:45. “I’ve learned something this afternoon,” Jane said during a brief unannounced break. “I’ve thought of it before, but finally I’m getting it through my head that the sessions are much better when I don’t have any concern—and when I feel concern, I find it harder to get into it. I began to get cautious toward the end there, in some fashion… I think we’d have gotten more on the nuclear thing otherwise.”