Scheider replies: William Morse and Wallace Manheimer deal with future energy needs and whether there will really be no better alternative than the nuclear option. While relevant, that is beyond the scope of my original letter, which was about the legacy of the Three Mile Island accident. Scholarly works in 2004 suggest that a better grasp of why people still reflect on TMI some 28 years later might be useful in understanding, for example, Morse’s reference to politicians who closed the nuclear power plant at Shoreham. Undoubtedly, their constituents’ TMI-induced distrust of the industry’s concern for safety outweighed their appreciation of technological fixes implemented since 1979.

Richard Wilson rightly includes the Soviet Union with my observation that the bottom line of nuclear management appears to place greater value on getting it running than on making it safe. At Chernobyl, as at TMI, the frontline crews played roulette, taking risks for the sake of what they took to be their industry superiors’ priorities, to make it go and hope for the best. How else can the public interpret the failure to find the cause of a relief valve’s first observed failure (at TMI) that resulted in its unrecognized failure again in the moment of crisis? One can hope that the new organizations cited by Wilson and new “safety targets and guidelines” will change the industry’s maintenance ethic, but one should not be surprised if the public remains skeptical.

It’s a chump’s choice between the release of toxic fossil-fuel waste and the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Who will give odds on the risk? The best objective hint is the periodic descent of the nuclear lobby upon Congress every time the Price-Anderson legislation by which your taxes insure the industry against liability exceeding $9 billion comes up for renewal.

I deny Wallace Manheimer’s claim that I reject nuclear power. I reject systemic risks of nuclear accidents. I like Carlo Rubbia’s simple and nearly foolproof thorium-fueled, proton-beam-primed reactor. 1 Why is the industry proposing, instead, to mix thorium in conventional reactors where it is primed by excess reactivity of uranium or plutonium? Because the money isn’t there to develop Rubbia’s idea. Nor, equally regrettably, is money flowing to Gerry Wolff’s proposal and others like it.

1.
R. L.
Garwin
,
G.
Charpak
,
Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons
,
Knopf
,
New York
(
2001
), p.
153
. See also the article from the April/May 1995 issue of the CERN Courier, http://einstein.unh.edu/FWHersman/energy_amplifier.html.