Atom Advocates

U.S. policy draws heavy fire

Representing 80 nations, some 5,000 delegates to the eleventh World Energy Conference jammed Munich's giant Olympia Hall last week to listen to calls for action on developing new energy sources. For background reading, the delegates could peruse no fewer than 164 technical papers on subjects ranging from high-voltage energy transmission to windmill turbine technology. On one subject, however, the participants spoke with a single voice: the U.S. is out of step with the rest of the world in the development of nuclear energy.

Delegates from France, Britain and other countries soundly criticized the Carter Administration for holding back progress on the use of nuclear power. Franz Josef Strauss, who is challenging West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in next month's national elections, was the bluntest. "Whoever fails to take advantage of nuclear energy condemns himself to social backwardness," he said. "The future belongs to those countries that push ahead with nuclear energy."

Since the Three Mile Island accident 18 months ago, U.S. nuclear power development has been virtually shut down. Orders for new facilities, which hit a high of 41 in 1973, have dropped to zero. By comparison, France, which has Europe's most ambitious nuclear program, has 16 reactors in operation, an extra 32 under construction and 13 more in planning. The Soviet Union currently generates 10% of its electricity from nuclear sources, and the present Five-Year Plan calls for construction of ten reactors a year. Pyotr Neporozhny, the Soviet Minister of Electric Power Development and Electrification, announced at the meeting that his country had recently made a major technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion. If the Soviets could construct a successful nuclear fusion reactor, it would deliver about five to ten times the power of a now commonly used fission reactor.

Some of the loudest criticism of the U.S. came from representatives of developing countries. By the year 2020, they will be using as much energy as the developed world now consumes; but they have neither the money nor the resources to pay for expensive oil. Said Carlos Castro Madero, an official of the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission: "Every watt of energy the U.S. fails to produce by nuclear power must be produced by oil. Every barrel of oil burned by the U.S. is a barrel for which we must compete on the market, and this means higher prices."

Conference participants glumly noted that such clean and renewable energy sources as wind, sun and tides will not play a significant role in energy for decades. Meanwhile, nuclear energy and coal remain the only practical answers to an increasingly energy-hungry world. Coal, though, presents enormous investment, transportation and environmental problems. Its real potential is still being questioned. As antinuclear partisans demonstrated outside the hall, Edward Hennelly, former president of the American Nuclear Society, concluded: "I am not unaware of the dangers of nuclear energy, but these concerns are far outweighed by the inevitable international showdowns over energy when the shortage really hits."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.