Cult of the Atom - Nuke Power's Report Card

Cult of the Atom: Secrets of the AEC book review NYT
THE CULT OF THE ATOM. The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission. By Daniel Ford. Illustrated. 273 pages. Simon & Schuster. $13.95. According to Daniel Ford, the mindset that allows obscurity to replace truthfulness flourished in the offices and adjunct laboratories of the now-superseded A.E.C. In ''The Cult of the Atom,'' Mr. Ford, an economist and former executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, persuasively assails what he regards as the duplicitous nature of much of the commission's work. Relying heavily on internal memoranda released through Freedom of Information Act requests, he explores the ways in which the A.E.C., empowered and directed by Congress not only to regulate the nuclear industry but also to promote nuclear energy, played ''the incompatible roles of coach and umpire, of partisan as well as judge.'' Mr. Ford argues that many Americans, who were defensive if not sorry about the bombings of Japan, welcomed the early utopian visions of nuclear power - including plutonium-heated swimsuits for scuba divers. Soon, as he describes it, leading scientists were ''looked upon as the high priests of a state religion.'' One can easily understand their unwillingness to admit infallibility, incompetence or ignorance. The result of this all-too-human response, Mr. Ford suggests, was the bypassing of the building of prototypes and the proliferation of very large nuclear reactors close to major metropolitan areas. According to Mr. Ford, A.E.C. engineers who reviewed the safety devices at the Indian Point plant in Westchester County ''used to joke half-seriously among themselves'' that its site at Buchanan, N.Y. ''should be renamed 'Hiroshima-on-Hudson.' '' This is frightening: Mr. Ford describes many occasions on which the A.E.C. censored negative findings of its own scientists - or published inaccurately Pollyanaish precise stifled dissent in its ranks by cutting financing to recalcitrant staffers and relied on industry manufacturers to perform critical tests and write their own regulations. As an example, in 1971, the engineering staff of the A.E.C.'s National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho prepared a chart on the state of knowledge about emergency core-cooling systems. It listed in one column the 29 major technical areas where information was needed to predict whether the systems would work, and in another, it summarized the ''current status'' of available information. The ratings were as follows: four incompletes, three unverifieds, one preliminary, eight inadequates, two inaccurates, four uncertains and seven missing. In 1973, after almost two years of hearings on the systems, the A.E.C. reaffirmed the existing designs. At times, ''The Cult of the Atom'' reads like an awesomely bad report card.