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Show Tom Wicker The Salt Lake Tribune, Saturday, October 1. 1977 A 23 Nuclear Disposal Nears Crisis New York Times Service WASHINGTON When an experi- mental nuclear facility at E'k River, Minn., was dis- ( " mantled, the cost f r? to $6.2 mill-- " ion although the plant had cost only about to $6 million build. At Oyster Creek, N.J., a 1 nuclear plant be could safely dismantled for an estimated $100 million; but thats more than 150 per cent of the original $65 million cost. As much as $600 million may be needed to decommission and decontaminate a privately owned nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at West Valley, N.Y. At the moment, the state of New York apparently is stuck with the bill but is asking the federal government for help. All tills and enough more to set off a mushroom cloud over the Sam Rayburn Building was learned in recent hearings by the House government operations subcommittee on environment, energy and natural resources. Nuclear waste disposal and plant decommissioning were pictured as twin horns of a back-en- d crisis in the a crisis American nuclear program that if not solved threatens the public safety, raises the possibility of wildly escalating costs and could put an end to nuclear energy production. Changing Technology Decommissioning is a problem whose time is about to come, since changing technology makes it uneconomical or impractical for most existing plants to seek renewal of their original licenses. But the General Accounting Office and many of the experts who testified to the House subcommittee have made it plain that the problem has scarcely been thought about, much less solved. In the first place, the necessary information and technology has not been completely developed for protection involved in dismantling. There is, for example, no imentory by size, type and usage of particle accelerators, by far the most numerous of nuclear facilities. There are no government standards for releasing materials that contain induced radiation, so it's not known how if any much valuable copper, steel and other materials might safely be recycled. If the historical trend for surface radiation standards continues, present rules to govern decontamination might be found in years to come to have been inadequate. And an Atomic Industrial Forum study found that a nuclear reactor probably would have to be buried underground for 65 to 110 in the reactor years before cobalt-avessel would decay sufficiently to permit manual dismantling. Lack of Information The lack of information compounds the problem of estimating decommissioning costs for nearly 1,500 existing nunlear facilities, but it doesnt conceal the likelihood that theyll be very high. The Energy Research and Development Administration has reported, for example, that it has 300 excess (obsolete or no longer needed) nuclear facilities, and will have 100 more by 1981. ERDA estimated that it would take $25 to $30 million annually for 100 to $2.5 to $3.5 billion years decommission these facilities alone. And the GAO thinks this estimate is too low. Whatever the cost, who pays? No private utility is setting aside a fund for ultimate decommissioning costs. Current rates to consumers do not reflect whatever decommissioning will cost. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency does not require owners of nuclear facilities to develop specific plans or make financial provision for decommiss- ioning. Massive Bills Therefore, as has already happened at West Valley, federal and state governments probably will have to pick up massive bills that ought to be paid by Bernstein on Words By Theodore M. Bernstein singular problem. "Is it freshman seminars or freshmen seminars? asks Marian L. Blanchard, associate editor of The Colgate Scene, Colgate University. When Time magazine used journeymen writers she wrote to ask about it, and a Time editor, after defending the use of the plural adjective, conceded that the singular was perfectly safe. His concession was justified. More often than not the singular adjective in such compounds is proper. You wouldnt speak of sophomores seminars, for example, any more than " you would speak of robbers barons. Something close to a rule might be this When the noun in such combinations is . composed of people who are the same as those indicated by the adjective make the adjective singular (journeyman writers). WTien the noun is something different from the adjective make the adjective plural (judges robes). Halve the haves. A newspaper article quoted a lawyer as saying, If I would notice have given the tenants a y before closing, I would have run the risk of the sale having defaulted and then Id be stuck with all my tenants F.B. Fike or Oracle, moving out. Arizona, questions that opening phrase and asks if I would have given whether there is any reason not to use "if I had given. There is none. In a subjunctive sentence like that the clause expressing a condition (the if clause, which is called the protasis) A 30-da- Now should be in the simple past tense I had given without any perfect-tens- e If and the conclusion clause, have called apodosis, does take a have. The repetition of have in conditional sentences of that kind is a common syntactical error. Its as bad as saying If I would have been king instead of the simple If I were king or If I had been king. Perverted inverted comma. The headline on a story about DES, a female hormone, said: DES Has Its Day in Court. One question that head raises immediately is why the apostrophe in Its? Ordinary nouns do take the apostrophe plus s in their possessive form, but personal pronouns do not since they have their own possessive forms. You wouldnt use s in his or hers or theirs and you shouldnt use it in its. Its use is a common error, however, probably because of the existence of the contraction its, meaning it is, in which the apostrophe replaces the missing letter L. In using the word it just remember that its wrong to undermine its structure as was done in that headline. Mangier dangler. What she calls my favorite dangling participle is sent this way by Anita Monsees of Fayetteville, N.Y. It is becoming one of my favorites, too. As printed in a newspaper article it went like this: Spread out on her coffee table, she displayed her Indian trinkets. all-tim- e those who benefitted. In effect, future will have to pay for current industry profits and relatively consumer rates. clear Its enough why the costs and technology of decommissioning, like those for the disposal of nuclear w astes, have been paid so little attention. For three decades, instead, the government has moved precipitously ahead on the assumption that nuclear power was the great resource of the future, committing itself to that assumption to the exclusion of alternative energy pra grams as well as a proper concern for consequences now, inevitably, at hand. Nor has government policy changed, even now. President Carter seeks to restrain the use of breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing but calls for more light water reactors. And the 1978 research budget for ERDA includes almost $1.7 billion for nuclear energy, but only $421 million for solar and an imbalance of geothermal energy priorities that calls for another article. taxpayers t IKEMift mm wwsRCtwstf wao.iur b'WDTi&lfK' MMW (Copyright) Charles B. Seib Novelist Questions News Addiction The Washington Post With the downfall of Bert Lance, the news business has - WASHINGTON been credited with another victory." It is the kind of credit that makes those of us in the business uneasy. If we think it is justified, we say that we have more power than we want. If we dent think it is justified, we are that disturbed other people do. We are, we say plaintively, reporters, not ac- tivists; the watchdog, not the arresting officer. But even as we agonize w experience a not unpleasant awareness of our own importance. Credit aside, the role of the vigilant, militant free press has are necesagain been confirmed, sary and useful. That is heady stuff, which is why I commend to my colleagues a timely antidote. It is an article in a new periodical, the Washington Journalism Review, by Larry McMurtry, a novelist. I dont agree with McMurtry. In faset I am infuriated by his article because it questions the very basis of what I believe about the role of the press in a free society. But the infuriating can be and the stimulating is . stimulating, always valuable. ' Since few outside the news business are likely to see McMurtrys article, let me, to the extent that space permits, give him his say. Heavy News Diet He raises two big questions. Is the heavy news diet being fed the American public necessary or even desirable? And does the press have the power and influence it thinks it has? You cant strike closer to the jugular than that. The news industry assumes, says McMurtry, that the public needs its product, just as Detroit assumes that the public needs its cars. That is an assumption he questions. He correctly identifies its basis, as advanced by news people:. An informed citizenry is the surest safeguard of good government and humane society. But he calls that a weak, if not ludicrous, rationale. The human propensity for flying in the face of fact rages completely unchecked" despite the best efforts of the press, he declares. He cites Richard Nixons two presidential election victories after two decades of judiciously damning words from the press as evidence, and suggests: It is conceivable that news, like poetry, makes nothing happen. Like many people, including some journalists, McMurtry sees an irritating arrogance in the press. But beneath it he detects an insecurity bom of the ephemeral nature of the product and the press own importence. The press, he says, is haunted by the recognition that the influence it claims may be a hallucination. Power Not Quite Real Certainly jouralists have excellent reasons for suspecting that their power By Daniel S. Greenberg Special to The Washington Post WASHINGTON It used to be said often and confidently that if we could build the bomb and land men on the moon, there was no reason why we couldnt cure cancer, end urban disintegration, solve the energy crisis and so forth. But now science and technology are rarely invoked as ultimate - problem-solver- s. have fact, the last brought a new era of realism in political attitudes toward the problem-solvin- g power of research, so that what was once optimistically referred to as the research is now endless frontier regarded as a highly limited frontier. The change has come slowly and In without lew-year- s official proclamations. Nevertheless, it is now a powerful reality in the intimate relationship between the federal government and this nations vast research enterprise. Thus, in contrast to the extravagant hopes that accompanied the declarawar on cancer in tion of the 1971, it is now widely acknowledged that the expenditure of additional billions on cancer research has had a negligible effect on cancer survival rates. Rings Down Curtain Just recently, Donald Frederickson,' director of the National Institutes of Health, rang down the curtain on the war approach by declaring, There is no longer much question that the maximum utilizable funds are being devoted to research on cancer. Thats an unusual admission for an administrator whose brethren have traditionally argued that research money can buy results. In the energy field, little credence is that to tnj proposition jow given promising national energy pumped vast new sums into energy research. ; Such research is, of course, a part of solution. But in the era of the long-terthe new realism, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and his associates routinely caution against expectations that research will provide a quick fix for the nation's energy problems. Their message, quite simply, is that there are no rabbits in the hat and, in an ironic way, this is confirmed by the crumbling fortunes of nuclear power and the Carter administrations reluctant return to a dirty, ancient fuel : coal. by 1980 - m el full-scal- it possible that the stimuli educated and culturally active, and even to perform their duties as citizens intelligently and responsibly with no recourse whatever to the AP and the UPI, the Washington Post or the New York Times, or Time or Newsweek, or ABC, CBS, and NBC. While he sees little danger that this will kick the nation of habit, he asserts that doing so can produce a sense of creeping peacefulness and the minds return to a condition of almost Wordsworthian freshness. McMurtry raises some provocative news-junki- zed? How Much Is Enough How much news is enough, how much is too much, how much is a surfeit and how much a disaster? Does news do any harm, does it do any good, is it really an agent of culture or merely one Well, you can understand why McMurtrys article is likely to make a journalist see red. Nevertheless, his questions are worth pondering once the fluch of indigantion fades. We Pay for Civil Rights, But Is It a F air Price? By Will Bernard American Bar Assn. the right to appeal a verdict by slowing the pace and raising the cost of justice. If a civil right cost a hapenny, Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, few people We pay for protection against unreasonable search and seizure by making it harder to fight crime, and we pay for protection against job discrimination by making it harder to do business. would buy. As usual, Dr. Johnson had a point. We simply do not think of civil rights as having a value that cart be measured in dollars and cents. How could anybody put a price tag on freedom of speech? How could we figure out a reasonable fee for the right to vote? Yet, civil rights are anything but free. They do have a price. But the price is payable in a different sort of coin. For example: We pay for the right of habeas corpus by letting some villains go free. Privacy Right We pay for the right of privacy by letting some mischief stay hidden. We pay for the right of jury trial and I agree with him that the news business is plagued by superficiality, triviality, and negativism. I agree that a spell away from the news can produce "a sense of creeping peacefulness. I agree, even, that a person can be a good if passive citizen without patronizing the news business. Are we buying our civil rights at a fair price? The answer is never final. In fact, haggling over how much civil rights are worth is the very essence of our political process. It does not follow, however, that a free society could long remain free without a free press flawed, eccentric, and annoying though that press might be. The vacuum inevitably would be filled by authoritarian government, and the peacefulness of the citizenry would not be that of a free people. (Copyright) Relative Terms Consequently, the law deals with civil rights in relative terms. It says (in Aldous Huxleys words): Senator Soaper There is no such thing as natural only adjustments of conflicting rights. Or, In the homelier language of an old legal aphorism : Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. There are worse ways to describe what freedom is all about. A report says that the nations hospital charges are rising at the rate of $24 million a day. But at that price they usually give you a room with a color TV. rights; there are One network has come up with a new TV program devoid of sex, but full of violence. Its about marriage. NEWFR0M DESERET BOOK aster for small farmers; the expectation that trash fish from the sea would solve the worlds protein shor- tage was confirmed in laboratory settings, nut otherwise failed and is now rarely heard of; brilliant, low-cohousing techniques work well In experitechnology are a natural barrier mental situations, but Bomehow never against new schemes. But perhaps of survive in the real world of labor unions equal Importance is the realization that and zoning codes. the ' products of research are never The result is nut a mood of defeatism more than a part of the solution to a about research. Rather, an accumulaproblem and, furthermore, that the tion of defeated expectations has prodo not to mean ability something does duced a sense of reality and, at that society can accommodate doing it. long last,healthy has dissolved the medicineThe postwar record is strewn with man myth. Which explains why it's been a long many lessons: the Green Revolution is now acknowledged to be a technological time since youve heard anyone say, If success and a social failure, a boom for we can land men on the moon, why capital-intensiv- e agriculture and a dis cant we . . . ? st ever-increasi- t,: x ' ' ' w Z" ??ftrJmS v v - y gndders " r took a long step toward regional championship honors today by defeating Springville, 6 to 0, in a hard-fouggame played on a muddy gridiron. The break" came in the middle of the final period, just after a formidable Springville threat had been averted. Payson smashed in to block a punt by the first Springville kick Childs blocked during the contest. Oct. 1, 1952 EDITOR, Tribune: Why didnt Sen. Nixon leave the decision as to whether he should stay on the ticket up to Gen. Ike or the Republican National Committee? Instead, he stood there and told a heroic sob story and appealed to an emotional radio and telev ision audience to deride his late. Remember, he was once sn actor. 'J Jfj0 WrM DEPOSITION OF school A V 1 ' i The Way It Was Here are briefs of news in The Salt Lake Tribune 25, 50 and 100 years ago today: Oct. 1,1877 CITY JOTTINGS The mines Tintic are showing up splendidly. During the month of September there were forty-nin- e deaths in Sait Lake. Two hundred dollars worth of seats to the Kellogg-Claopera were sold yesterday. Gideon Legrioux has been appointed postmaster bf Clover Flat, Piute county. Yesterday Grandmother was presented with a cabbage head weighing sixteen pounds. The only way the boys in the office can distinguish it from Grannys head is by the night cap. Oct. 1, 1927 SPRINGVILLF Payson high of is actively harmful, creating, as it does, a constant, if slight emotional disruption the equivalent, perhaps, of a low fever? Why is it that such a high percentage of news is negative not merely in content but in tone; is it catering to a human need for bad news or is it creating such a need? Can newspapers be said to be performing the cathartic functions of Greek religious drama, to purge us of pity and terror by informing us constantly about the pitiful and the terrori- Some seer may come along and point out to them that it is quite possible to lead sane and happy lives, to be well Perk Barrel Appeal Meanwhile, the Clinch River breeder reactor, once the great hope of the nuclear establishment, is now generally acknowledged to be a technological dud. It hangs on in Congress by virtue of its pork-barrappeal, rather than as a promising contribution to national energy needs. Defense has always been the super-bow- l of research, blessed with virtually untlimited funds, an uncomplicated zeal to marketplace and a .stay ahead of the Russians. But even here there's been an erosion . of the belief that in weaponry, research must he followed wherever it leads. Research led to the B1 bomber, a superlative aircraft that had been e deveieped to the point where production could commence. But after President Carter and Defense Secretary Harold Brown bad sifted through the politics, technology, and economics of the B 1, they concluded that for all its military virtues, we could do without. The decision, apparently, was close, and the reasons for It were many, but "Is Family Lawyer Research No Longer Provides All Answers among them was the realization that improvements in armaments do not necessarily bring improvements in security. Cast a Natural Barrier costs of The huge and whether or not the news questions industry is actually putting obstacles in the way of sound citizenship and human happiness, for one. He goes on: of the innumerable idle pastimes with which we distract ourselves? " Era of Realism research and development are the keys to salvation. Former President Nixons Project Independence is not quite real, since they know better than anyone that the product they are selling is indeed a superfluity. It is no sort of necessity, and there is always just the chance that the public will find this out. Neal A. A ' s''S DISCIPLE Maxwell $4.95 Deposition of a Disciple is a series of answers or depositions responding to actual questions, primarily doctrinal, put to the author in correspondence or concerns advanced in private conversation. The giving of a deposition suggests a formal, legal setting. It is aibo a way of preserving testimony, a device tor discovering and drawing out evidence and that is what this book accomplishes. By answenng probing questions and concerns of the questioner, the author, a member of the First Council of the Seventy, treats many intellectual and spiritual concerns of the reader. The e deposition-typformat provides insight that might not be achieved in a more formal type of wnting Available at and wherever LD.S. books crec:!d |