Harrisburg: A loss of innocence

Press, 20 April 1979, Page 15

Harrisburg: A loss of innocence

NIGEL HAWKES,

the "Observer’s”

science correspondent, and ROBERT CHESSHYRE, the newspaper’s staff correspondent in H ashington, report on the causes and effects of the Harrisburg nuclear accident.

Days and nights of fear and feverish activity in Pennsylvania have left the people of Harrisburg with a billion dollars worth of useless nuclear plant and everybody with a problem or two to ponder. The world’s most frightening nuclear accident has caused no deaths but must have given the nuclear industry intimations of mortality. The spokesmen who have declared so often and so loudly that nothing of the sort would ever happen couid easily spend the rest of this year eating their words and then still have some left over. The future of nuclear power after the accident is more clouded than ever. A first instinct may be to assume that with the most cherished myth of the industry shattered it should simply wither miserably away. That is certainly the expectation of some of the nuclear opponents who see the accident, quite rightly, as an event they had long predicted. But it is also possible to argue that -the events at Harrisburg were a painful and necessary precondition to the success and expansion of nuclear power. Nuclear power supporters in the United States — who included, before the accident, the political establishment and the press

— are already rallying to its defence.

The chairman of one electrical utility which operates nuclear plant was one of the few bold enough to stick his head above the parapet: "When the need is looked at with the alternative, nuclear power will remain an important part of our future.” His statement sums up the industry’s view that in due course the Three Mile Island accident will be seen in what it regards as perspective. Nuclear power has friends at court in the United States, including the Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, who predicted last week that since the accident appeared to be an error of operation rather than design, the Administration would still push ahead with its Bill designed to halve the 10 to 12 year licensing period now required for a nuclear plant.

•But the recovery of the industry will depend on more than the favours of Schlesinger, the utilities, and a few newspaper editors. It depends first of all on the right conclusions being drawn from what happened at Harrisburg; and evidence so far is not wholly encouraging. Ever since the magnitude of the accident be-

came clear — some several days after it actually happened — the air in Britain has been loud with the smug sound of people jumping to the wrong conclusions. The Energy Secretary Tony Benn and the Friends of the Earth group are united in self-con-gratulation that between them they prevented Britain from building a pressurised water reactor of the same type as the Harrisburg plant.

And certainly Britain has not suffered an accident as serious as Three Mile Island —- not, at least, since 1957, when a reactor at Windscale caught fire and burned merrily away for some time before anybody noticed.

But the right lesson to be learned from the American accident is not that British designs are safer than the United States type of reactor, for there is absolutely no evidence in favour of this contention. The right lesson to be learned is that nuclear reactors, being in essence immensely complicated pieces of mechanical engineering, will inevitably go wrong. And that nuclear reactor operators, being human beings, will inevitably

make mistakes. It is true that the British style of reactor, cooled by gas rather than by water, could not have suffered exactly the same accident as the Pennsylvania plant. But there are many other types of accident it could suffer. It is also probably .true that European utilities in general .are better staffed and have a higher general level of competence than their American opposite numbers. But these are differences of degree, not of kind. The truth is that reactors, like other huge machines, will always be liable to breakdowns. Some may have a greater intrinsic margin of safety than others, and it is a margin well worth striving for. But there is really no evidence to justify the claim that one type of reactor is criminally dangerous while another is completely safe.

The United States has 72 reactors in operation, so it need hardly be a source of wonder that it is leading the way in nuclear accidents. Western Europe, excluding the United Kingdom, has 74 operating reactors, almost all of

them of American design. Europe’s record so far is good, which demonstrates that American plants can be operated just as safely as Britain’s gas-cooled plants. The reactions to the Harrisburg accident in Europe have been cautious, but most governments are now too committed to the atom to go back. ‘-‘lt is impossible to renounce the use of nuclear energy,” the Italian Nuclear Energy Commission said in a statement. And Guido Brunner, the Common Market Commissioner for Energy, while conceding that the Harrisburg accident would be a set-back and would delay existing programmes, said that "a delay doesn’t mean we cannot proceed, or catch up.” The first priority, he added, was to ensure that safety • procedures were as foolproof as possible. Then the issue must be properly put befbre the public. "Until the public is convinced, we shall not be able to go much further.” The key question, of course, is what the public should be convinced of. It cannot now he convinced that accidents of the Harrisburg type are impossible, or so unlikely as to

be not worth worrying about. But it may still be possible to • ’ convince people that the risks — including the risk of another Harrisburg — are acceptable in exchange for an energy source which can bridge the gap between cheap oil and some other, as yet undefined, future source.

If this is to be done it will need a new and more open-minded approach by the industry and its friends, and an acceptance by the public that just as aircraft crash and kill hundreds of people, nuclear plants may sometimes go wrong. Given the magnitude of the Harrisburg accident, it was noteworthy that nobody was killed, and that at least is to the industry’s credit. The moderates’ defence of the atom is to acknowledge realistically that all technology has its risks, and that those risks are the price society pays for the overwhelming benefit of such new technology. Nuclear power is yet to have been proved to have killed anyone, as against 55,000 people slaughtered each year on American roads, and it is cheap and

potentially plentiful. ■ Rival fuels cannot compare. Coal kills miners and fills the air with sulphurous fumes far more harmful than anything emitted by nuclear stations during normal operations; oil is devilishly expensive. and dependence on it could prove economically destabilising in the event of another oil embargo. If we panic now. we may set back for years the development of a mu c h-n eed e d power source. This might best be described as a holding position. while the full extent of the bungling at Three Mile Island continues to seep out rather like lowlevel radiation. The most damning evidence came when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that the operating company, Metropolitan Edison, had actually violated federal regulations by shutting down auxiliary pumps while the reactor was in operation, so contributing in a major way to the incident. The maximum penalty for each offence is a derisory $5OOO, though the N.R.C. had asked Congress to increase it to $lOO,OOO last May. Appreciation of the crisis at Three Mile Island developed slowly. For the first two days, major papers gave the incident modest down-page coverage, and the soothing statements by Metropolitan Edison were generally taken at face value. Suddenly, when it was realised that there was a genuine danger of a core melt-down or an explosion, the penny dropped. Watchdogs woke and barked loudly. Rival investigations were demanded by Senators and Congressmen. Senator George McGovern is introducing a Bill which would halt all further nuclear plant construction, while the Union of Concerned Scientists demanded the resignation of Dr Joseph Hendrie. chairman of the N.R.C., and issued documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to try to show that he had been party to cover-ups of dangers in the past.

President Carter, who visited Three Mile Island,

announced a Presidential inquiry. The nuclear industry has been m the doldrums for several years, with order books shrinking It has now suffered <ive major reverses in as mans weeks: 1. five power stations were closed because new calculations had shown they might not withstand earthquakes. 2. A Carter-appointe.i committee announced after a year’s study that finding technically’ sat ■ and politicially acceptable methods of storing wa e would prove more difticu t than previously thought. 3. The conclusions of another government <ummittee, headed by Professor Norman Rasmuss -n. that nuclear risks «vere negligible were partly disowned by the N.R.C. 4. Further evidence was produced on the dangers of radiation. 5. Then came Harrisburg. It is certainly no fun io be an executive in a nuclear company these days. And yet the industry is certainly indispensable, at least in the short and medium term. Perhaps the visions it once nursed of a world dotted with nuclear plants have now faded from sight, and no bad thing; but the developed world certainly could not now turn its back on nuclear power without serious social and economic disruption. So the easy recipes of nuclear moratoria espoused by some are unlikely to be acceptable, except in nations not yet so committed to the atom. (Austria has already voted against nuclear power, and Sweden is to hold a referendum.)

The Harrisburg accident was shocking, but it was only the shock of reality introducing into the myth of perfect safety which has been fostered so carefully for so long. In that sense it marks the end of an era, a long-delayed Joss of innocence. Whether the new reality can be made the basis of a more solidly-based contract between nuclear power and the public — or whether it is so shocking that it spells the end of the "peaceful atom” — cannot yet be discerned. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.

"‘The air in Britain has been loud with the smug sound of people jumping to the wrong conclusions.**