On Growth

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37. Ralph E. Lapp

Ralph E. Lapp was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1917. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. He is one of America's best-known critics in the field of atomic-energy uses and development.
From 1945 to 1946 he was connected with the so-called Bikini Island bomb tests. He has been an adviser to the Pentagon on atomic matters.
Among numerous articles and books, we mention We Must Hide (1949), Nuclear Radiation Physics (1954), Atoms and People (1956), Kill and Overkill (1962) and The Weapons Culture (1968).

Dr. Lapp, what are your views on the steady increase in use of nuclear power as to the endangering of the environment or human society?

My view on nuclear power is that we have to have this new source of energy in order to supply the power for the future, as our fossil fuels - especially the premium fossil fuels, oil and natural gas - are being rapidly depleted. It is not so much a question that we cannot find more oil and natural gas or exploit coal resources, we certainly can. But the nature of our modern society in the twentieth century is that we are all trying to shinny up the industrial ladder as fast as we can. In fact, some of the less-developed countries are even proceeding at their stage of the game faster than we are. This means that there is an enormous demand upon resources, especially the fossil fuels which are a one-time inheritance and which cannot be replaced.

The United States has exploited fossil fuels like no other country in the world, to a point where today it is forced to import twenty-five percent of all its oil and is now importing natural gas from Algeria. Indeed, it's beginning to import natural gas in liquid form. So great is the need in the United States for these premium fossil fuels that we are going to get gas from the desert in Africa. Liquified after being pumped to a coastal port and then put upon a special tanker.

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In frozen condition?

In liquid form and then transported in supercooled state across the ocean to a port facility where it will be pumped ashore as a fluid again and then held until it is needed to be gasified. This gas comes out of the Algerian desert at probably a few cents a thousand cubic feet, but by the time the Boston housewife gets it, she will be paying two dollars and a half for it. That's an enormous markup in the price of a commodity. We've gotten so hooked on this fossil fuel and on the things which are produced from it, namely, electricity, that we have to go where the fuel source is. Now I happen to believe that nuclear power comes along as a necessary extension of our reserves of fuel. It is of course a completely different kind of fuel from the fossil fuels which are burned in the presence of oxygen in a combustion technique. This of course forms the major source of pollution which comes from the smokestack of a powerplant. There is also the pollution from the more than one hundred million tailpipes of the mobile vehicles in the United States when the products of gasoline and diesel oil combustion are exhausted. So the Americans have in their ingenious way combined an enormous gas machine in the form of hundreds, indeed thousands, of stationary sources, burning coal, oil and natural gas and in the form of something like one hundred and thirteen million four-wheeled vehicles which gulp down gasoline. Now, the problem is that we are in the United States converting ourselves into an increasingly electrified country. Mid-century only ten percent of our fuel went into producing electricity, today it is gone to about twenty-seven percent; by the end of the century fifty percent of all the fuel will be burned just to produce electricity. We are becoming an electrified society, and the rest of the world is following in our footsteps.

Some scientists seem to feel that energy someday could be tapped from the sun, which would give man unlimited energy.

Yes, when I talk of nuclear power, I talk not only of power from uranium, but also of power from the fusion of light elements, such as hydrogen, that is of course an unlimited source of energy for us. It is not without its problems. Nobody knows how to predict the time scale for it. We have a general idea of how such a machine burning hydrogen in a nuclear sense would look. But we don't know how to make one, nor do we know how to cost it out and tell at what price such a machine

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would produce electricity. But the fuel for such a machine is virtually the fuel of the oceans itself - the heavy hydrogen that is contained in water itself. So we will really be ocean-burning and of course with the magnitude of the oceans we literally have solved the energy problem of this planet for a billion years.

The public will ask, Where will nuclear waste go?

The basic problem in the heavy-metal power - which is uranium and thorium - the basic problem is to ensure that the energy release that is accomplished in machines known as nuclear reactors, that the hazard is confined at each point, from the time you take the uranium ore from the ground, mill it, refine it, convert it, fabricate fuel elements, burn them inside these nuclear plants and then reprocess the radioactive fuel to get new fuel and finally ending up with the residual waste, the very long-lived, radioactive elements, which form a unique problem for man. We must find - and most countries must find it within their own territory - a unique cemetery. A place that will be undisturbed for centuries to come, because that is the time it takes for these radioactive elements to lose their potency. One cannot look at countries in Africa and think of any political regimes that will be stable for centuries to come. We in the United States are a relatively young democracy. We think we have political stability. How long it will persist I don't know. But very few countries have political stability, or a history of it. The necessary repository will in my opinion be some sort of salt mine, in which to store the radioactive waste in perpetuity. This, however, is not an unsolvable problem. I believe that sufficient research is going on now so that we will be able to put these wastes in underground containment and that these will be safe.

For centuries to come, without endangering mankind? But didn't you write that the nuclear plants that are being built, mainly in the United States, tend to be constructed closer and closer to cities? What are the dangers?

My basic philosophy about a nuclear power plant is that until you prove them safe - and safe essentially to a very high degree - until you can prove these plants safe enough to locate close to a metropolitan population, you put them relatively far from a dense population. My reason is not because I have no confidence in nuclear-power design, but because

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we are dealing with a unique problem in the history of man. Never before in the history of this planet have we placed such a unique hazard so close to a large population.

About the only parallel that I can draw is that if you construct a high dam and then build a city at its base. That isn't generally done; and if you did it, the people at least would know that the dam was there and that they were in line of sight of the risk. And they would have some experience with how often dams break and if you got in trouble, the dams started to weaken, the engineers could release the water from the dam gradually, as was done in the case of Los Angeles after the 1972 earthquake. That's about the only parallel I know. But, for instance, eleven miles from Philadelphia, a nuclear-power plant is being moved in toward a very large population. In my opinion we have not demonstrated to the public that there is that degree of reliability in the safety systems for that plant, that it does not pose a rather severe hazard to the population, in case of an accident.

Yes, but demonstrating to the public is still something else than whether it is truly safe. In your opinion it is safe?

In my opinion the issue is in doubt. The issue is in doubt because we are dealing with very complex systems. We have not operated power plants or the new ones at this power level. We have very little experience with plants of this kind. Therefore, to say a nuclear-power plant is safe in advance is to say that you are depending on models which have been constructed to predict the behavior of the system. I know we have to rely on models, but the question is when you rely on models, how do you get the public to accept the model? This is very clearly the case in nuclear safety, because nobody wants to take a full-scale nuclear power plant and treat it to an experiment. It is too expensive, much too costly, to have an experiment of that kind. So what you do is you construct a model for this plant and then you subject it to an analysis to see how it will behave. But what you like to do is to carry out a series of small-scale experiments to prove the model out. Some of these experiments have been conducted in the United States by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Since we cannot prove even to the scientific community that these machines are that safe, I believe that we must (1) intensify the safety research program; (2) hold the line of the deployment of these plants, so that they are not too close to cities. Some plants - such as one not

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far from where we are today, namely, the Calvert Cliffs plant (forty miles east of Alexandria, Virginia) - if there were; to be a severe accident, there would not be serious consequences in terms of thousands of people who may be exposed to radiation from the plant, because the plant is favorably sited with respect to population at risk.

In your June 22, 1972, article in the New York Times Magazine you mentioned the possibility of building atomic islands in the sea - like eleven miles outside Atlantic City, New Jersey. Has that been proposed on official levels? Is it being considered at all?

Since I wrote this article on power islands for the New York Times Magazine, the public-service company in New Jersey has announced definite plans to build a $1.1 billion installation three miles off the coast of New Jersey, northeast of Atlantic City.

You mentioned eleven miles in your article. Is three miles not dangerous?

It's three miles from the shore, but over eleven miles from Atlantic City. I believe that in this particular case we have the problem of the calculated risk for a state which has no more rivers on which to locate plants. It's essentially run out of cooling water and these plants all require a very large amount of cooling water. When you are up against it, you find out that there is no really good place left for New Jersey - or for New York City. Therefore, going out into the ocean essentially solves the thermal-pollution problem, the so-called hot-water problem, so you don't destroy unnecessarily aquatic life. The other problem of nuclear safety still remains. But I believe that in this case, if we examine the wind patterns from the site, you will find out that the risk to Atlantic City is not nearly the risk, for example, that you would have from the plant they would plan to locate at Newbold Island, eleven miles from Philadelphia. All of these projects would involve risks.

Dr. Lapp, in managing the future of the planet, MIT (the Forrester people)¹ have tried to make a model of the planet in order to start a catalogue on how to manage it. Do you feel a model of that type has any value when no variables are included concerning atomic energy and the kind of power or energy that might save us in the future?

Over about the past seven years I have been doing a great deal of

1 See conversation no. 34.

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work myself on trying to look at the future, looking specifically at the year 2000. But I soon realized that you cannot look at such a short time ahead. You have to look actually to the year 2100 and beyond in order to see it through a perspective of some of the problems we face.

With respect to the question of the computer model of the planet, I believe that the MIT approach was a first attempt, and it was a brash one in my opinion. The danger of such a model is that people are prone to computer worship. They don't realize that all of these computers depend upon the wisdom that was put into them. They have no self-wisdom. There is no judgment or value system generated inside a piece of electronics at this stage of the game. When I look at people predicting the quality of life in the twenty-first century on the computer model, it makes me very unhappy, because I do not believe we can define the quality of life in computer terms. So, I don't expect the computer to print out predictions of the quality of life. That's utter nonsense, and I think people have a right to get mad and irritated when scientists make such outlandish predictions.

But, to put the best complexion on this, where a model will provoke people to think about the future realistically and see that there are finite resources on this planet, then I say hallelujah, I am for it. To that extent I go along. However, I do not believe you have to entrust the destiny of man to computers. I believe that the human brain, the three-pound piece of software inside my cranium, that still has great excess capacity and that it can itself analyze the problem and take into account many variables and make predictions which will, I think, have certain values.

For example, I believe that it is quite possible to construct a model of fossil-fuel resources of the planet and to sketch in for the twenty-first century how we will deplete these fossil fuels and how we will come to depend primarily in the next century upon nuclear power for our energy. The fact is that our fossil fuels are in very short supply. Demand for them is so great, with a growing population and with a growing per capita consumption, that we are virtually ‘blowing’ our fossil-fuel resources in a short space of time. The whole fossil-fuel period in the United States or in the world will be a transitory era, which is in between the wood-burning phase and the nuclear-burning era. Our problem is how to get from here to there.

Gasoline, for example, is probably the most critical fuel for the United States since its economic viability depends on mobility. I happen to regard the intemal-combustion engine as the most infernal invention ever made, because to me the internal-combustion engine is more revolu-

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tionary for the twentieth century and its economy than atomic energy. As a nuclear physicist this may sound a little bit off beat for me to make a prediction of that kind, but I have been looking at the twentieth century.

I have just completed a book called The Logarithmic Century. I call the century logarithmic because when I plot anything - whether it is consumption of cigarettes, whether it's production of kilowatt hours of electricity, whether it's burning of gallons of gasoline per year - everything goes up in a logarithmic ascendancy. So when I look at the actual course of events in the twentieth century, I find that the United States has been leading the pack of nations. It is leading them at such a rate that it is really incredible that we in this country, with our high degree of technological finesse, have not anticipated the shortages that are certain to come. We are blind, and the reason we are blind is because of our democratic system. Our democratic system is politically quantized to think in two-, four- and six-year time periods. These are the respective terms of office for congressional representatives, the president and senators - these men in office think of their time period when they will be reelected. It is very hard to get them to think in twenty-five-, fifty- and a hundred-year time units because they think that's not of importance to their constituents. This is a basic fault in the democratic system, and we must overcome it.

Therefore, I welcome studies such as the MIT studies, because they shake us up a bit. We may not like them but they make us look to the future and we have to be future-oriented. For example, I said that gasoline is the most critical commodity which is required to keep the United States in business. Two-thirds of the population of the United States is located in one hundred metropolitan areas, sprawling complexes of central cities, of villages, towns, which are interconnected with congested highways on which every day we have an inward and an outward flow of tons of millions of vehicles. This inward and outward flow is largely based upon occupancy of the automobile with 1.2 people on an average. I calculate what I call the energy cost of such transportation, and it is fabulous. By the way, in reckoning my energy costs I reckon far more than just the cost of the gasoline. I reckon in energy times the cost of the automobile, the cost of servicing the automobile, the cost of repair -

- The ‘ground,’ as Marshall McLuhan² would call it.

Yes. And when I do that, I find out that we have on our hands an

2 See conversation no. 12.

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extremely energy-consumptive machine. Yet we have gotten ourselves into a fix. Our people are so sprawled out in ameban geometric patterns that it is almost impossible to devise an efficient and reasonably priced mass transportation system, which can service people who live ten miles from the center of the city.

Dr. Lapp, Japan is having the same problem. In China, Chou En-lai³ told a recent visitor that there are one and a half million bicycles in Peking. Apparently he would not like to see them replaced by automobiles. Holland is overrun by cars. The entire world is suffering by now from this disease. How to tackle these problems on a global scale?

Well, precisely. In fact, I have a little chart, which of course we cannot inject in conversation very easily, but a chart in which I plotted the population of automobiles on the planet in the year 2000. It just gives me the willies because of the fact that while we are building this number of automobiles, we are also trying to make these automobiles less polluting, and in the process we are going backwards. These new automobiles have low-compression engines, and they have all kinds of antipollution devices which take energy. The result is that the car today in America, going in and out of the city, gets only about eight miles to the gallon, in a modern car. I am much more concerned about the conservation of our resources, than I am about the pollution because it seems to me that if we cannot keep our people mobile - if we cannot get them from here to there, from home to work, to the shopping centers - if we cannot do that, our economy will go stale.

The situation is terribly bad, you know. It is easy to say, ‘there are solutions to this.’ Fine. If you don't drive a Cadillac, but were to drive a Volkswagen, you could get twice as many miles per gallon. But imagine what it would mean if you could conceive of anyone in the White House telling General Motors that they should make Volkswagens. I assume they would like to make Volkswagens if they could sell them for the price of a Cadillac. But if they would sell Volkswagens at Volkswagen's price, what would happen to General Motors' stock? This is at the heart of our economy. About one out of every six and a half people in the United States has his job keyed to the automobile. When you tinker with the automobile economy, when Detroit's production is changed, the whole economy of this country is changed.

So if we want to talk about curtailing growth, we must realize that

3 Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China.

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there are severe consequences. Therefore, I believe the economists are correct when they say you must include the measure of cost of the system as you project to the future. In fact, in analyzing many things, I found a whole variety of constraints imposed upon various energy systems or various commodity systems. In the case of cigarette smoking, it's virtual saturation of the market. I mean, there are some more people who might smoke, but you cannot increase the market very much more, it's near saturation. The biological insult is a limiting factor here. In the case of power plants, it is our sure ability to build power plants and to finance them. I think this is a more limited factor than anything else. We will have to have by the end of this century one thousand nuclear-power plants, each one a million kilowatts in power. These plants will by the end of the century be costing a very large amount of money. This is a problem even for the United States with all of its wealth. But think what it means to a small country to try and get up on the industrial ladder if it has to go the nuclear route. They will have to pay almost the same price we are paying. I am almost inclined to believe that one of the impacts of nuclear power is that the rich countries will continue to grow richer and the poor countries will get poorer.

Let's put some of these energy things in perspective. We in the United States are of course energy affluent. We consume energy like there is no end to it. Really the Americans cannot believe - even though they have been told it by some high authorities - that it will ever stop. They say energy crises are an invention of the petroleum industry. They just want to sell, get a higher price and sell more oil. In point of fact, it took even time for the petroleum industry to realize it, because they normally think only in terms of about fifteen years in the future. But now we have problems here. When we look at other countries - India, for example - India has fifteen percent of world's population, but currently uses about one and a half percent of the world's energy and much of that energy is provided by burning animal dung. This is truly a backward country, and what happens when India attempts to climb up to an industrial state of development which is higher than it presently has? It has to get capital to finance it. Now, where do less-developed countries manage to get the money to finance these new developments? It's fine to say to a country, ‘Oh, we could build a nuclear-power complex which will produce electricity for chemicals and electricity to run pumps to provide agricultural water, but you have to have the capital to make it go.’