Editing 79-04-B5 (section)

= Nuclear Power I =

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=== Transcript ===
It takes 12 years to get a nuclear power plant built in America. It only
takes four or five in most other countries. The seven or eight years difference
is not construction time in our country; it is paperwork and the multitudinous
permits required by government. Those permits are largely the result of placard
carrying demonstrators.

I'd like to mention a few things you won't read on one of those placards.
To begin with, the first nuclear power plant began generating electricity in
Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. Today there are 72 such plants in the U.S.
and 151 in other countries. In our country they provide about 12 percent of our
electricity.

The placard bearers base most, if not all, of their protests on safety. Well,
first of all, there is nothing you can do to make the nuclear fuel in a power
plant blow up like a bomb. Second, in normal operation a nuclear power plant
emits less radioactivity than a coal burning plant. Coal contains a small amount
of uranium which goes out the stack with the smoke and soot.

Ah! But what about an accident to a truck carrying radioactive material?
Well, what about it? Highly radioactive materials are transported in special
casks that cost $2 million apiece. They have been tested by crashing them into
solid walls at 80 miles an hour and by hitting them with speeding locomotives.
They didn't break and even if they had, the radioactive material is imbedded in
ceramics.

In 1973 the Atomic Energy Commission organized an elaborate $4 million study
headed by Professor Norman Rasmussen of M.I.T. Two years later the findings were
complete. The worst accident that could possibly happen would be a meltdown of
nuclear fuel, a breaking of the protective shield (which incidentally can withstand
a direct hit by a bomb) and in atmospheric conditions, which would keep the released
radioactive dust in a cloud near the ground and blowing toward a densely populated
area.

The odds on all that happening are once in a billion reactor years. If the
U.S. were getting all its electricity from nuclear power that would be once in
three million years.

A group calling itself the Union of Concerned Scientists presently advising
Ralph Nader, has gotten attention by charging the Rasmussen report is wrong by a
factor or 100. Well, if they are right, then a worst case might happen once in
30,000 years.

Let's analyze these two estimates and see what they mean. Rasmussen's report
would mean a loss of 30 minutes in our average life expectancy. This is equal
to the risk of smoking one cigarette every 20 years. If Nader's group is right,
our life expectancy would be shortened by two days. That is the equivalent of
smoking one cigarette every three months.

Critics of nuclear power raise the issue of waste disposal. A coal burning
plant produces waste billions of times greater in bulk than a nuclear plant. The
waste from one nuclear plant in a year would take less storage space than a dining
room table. That hardly seems to be an insurmountable problem and certainly no
reason for denying ourselves this economical, inexhaustible source of electric
power. 

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>6-Mar[[Radio1979|1979]]</TD></TR>
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<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>No</TD></TR>
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