Government unable to vouch for nuclear safety

I don't know just how long ago it was, but it must have been at the end of the 1950s when I received an invitation to attend a press conference at a hotel here in New York to be given by a distinguished British airplane designer.

I went along in the late afternoon of a beautiful spring day and the great man laid bare the details of a new British plane, a big, four-engine turboprop. Britain had had great success here with a small prop, the Viscount, but the problem of breaking impressively into commercial aviation over here was simply the problem of the size of the United States. A short run in Europe is typically London to Paris or Paris to Rome and the Viscount was cleaning up in the European market. But Americans think of a short run as New York to Chicago – a thousand miles – and the Viscount couldn't manage that. There'd have to be a refuelling stop at, say, Pittsburgh or Cleveland. But now Britain had come up with the answer: a big, four-engine job that would make the long hauls. It would, the man said, revolutionise domestic aviation in the United States. 

However, the Americans had just launched their own answer to it, an intermediate turboprop, the Electra. It so happened that on that very evening of the distinguished designer's press conference, the first Electra to come into New York was due to land at La Guardia Airport. On a perfect night, about four hours after the press conference, it wheeled in over Flushing Bay, was about a minute or less away from the tarmac when it flew directly into the waters of the bay and sank with all hands. 

This shocker was magnified by another accident to an Electra within, I recall, a week or two. Somewhere out West, an Electra wobbled and crashed, a freak victim of what is called 'clear weather turbulence' – this is a hazard which can hit any propeller plane that has to fly low enough to be in the middle of a weather system. I've had it myself and it's a nasty feeling. You're flying in perfect weather, you can see for miles on miles, but then you come out from over some mountains, say, where the air is cool, and you come over the desert where hot air is rising, the change can be violent, and the trouble with the Electra, I remember, was that the wings were a little too wide for the struts that supported them. Anyway, a wing snapped and the first thing the public knew about the Electras was that two of the first to go into commercial service had crashed. As you can imagine, these two accidents dealt a shattering blow to the makers of the plane and the airlines that used it. 

The La Guardia accident, incidentally, was due to a faulty altimeter which told the pilot he was, say, still a thousand feet up when in fact he was only five hundred. By the time he saw the black water of the bay coming at him, it was too late to rev up and pull out of the descent. 

Now both these flaws were fixed in no time and once for all. The model was, of course, recalled. Altimeters were checked and corrected, the wing struts were strengthened but the name 'Electra' carried an ominous sound. It was changed to something more cheerful, more lyrical. But to this day, any pilot I've talked to about the Electra will testify that it's one of the finest and safest planes ever made. But the Electra was doomed twice and so was the incoming British competitor: the Electra, by those two freaky early accidents, and both of them by the sudden arrival of the jet. 

For a time, the Viscount and the American turboprops held out on the short runs but one airline here that had taken the plunge two years earlier and converted its entire fleet to Viscounts went bust. What killed off the prop plane, both two and four-engines, except on small, local airlines, was the small jet, the 727, which is now the workhorse of the American domestic network. From here to Boston – 727, here to Chicago, here to Atlanta, the same. Only when you want to go a couple of thousand miles or more non-stop do you find yourself in a 707 or a jumbo or the smaller jumbo, the DC-10. In other, and blunter, words, the big jet finished off the big turboprop and the little jet, the 727, finished off the little turboprop. 

But suppose – in 1958 I believe it was – the jet had not been ready for service, was not about to come in. The big turboprop, the Electra, certainly would have had a cruel time reinstating itself even before it had instated itself. No matter that the Federal Aviation Authority quickly assured us that both the altimeter and the wing struts were now without fault or flaw. People – all people – are on the whole superstitious about such things. The name 'Electra' was doom-ridden and one cynic at the time, I remember, said, 'I suppose the company's next model will be called the Cassandra'. 

Well, I couldn't help recalling this story, a sorry one but instructive, when I read the report of the government's advisory committee on the safety of nuclear reactors. This country has 72 working reactors. 43 of them are close enough in design and operation to the one at Three Mile Island and they are all now under suspicious scrutiny. The government report says that in these 43 it would be very difficult for the operators to control an incident or an accident similar to the one in Pennsylvania because the pressure gauges in these reactors – which indicate that the uranium fuel rods are not heating up too much – the pressure gauges, the report says, might be misleading. 

In other words, the government is not prepared to guarantee that the pressure gauges in more than half the nation's reactors are reliable. Twenty-one years ago the government's aviation authority gave that guarantee about the safety of the Electra but the sheer ill-luck of those two accidents impressed the public more than the government's assurances. So, the nuclear industry is in worse repute. Although the head of the government’s regulatory commission has given his positive word that the crisis at Three Mile Island is over and the plant is safe, the advisory committee can't bring us the comfort of saying that what went wrong has been fixed and won't happen again. 

On the contrary, we are left with an official government statement that the same sort of hazard remains in 43 reactors, that human error is not the only danger and that a move should be made at once to devise and install remote control systems before we can say that a hydrogen bubble won't pop up in any of the working 43 reactors. Well, the upshot has been a dramatic rise in the public opposition to nuclear plants, to their very existence. 

The New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System, which jointly undertake regular polls, nearly two years ago asked people whether they approved or disapproved of building more nuclear power plants. Sixty-nine per cent approved, 21 per cent disapproved. The figure today is approve 46 per cent, disapprove 41 per cent. That's a big swing but at least it's close to 50/50 even after the Pennsylvania accident. But bring the question close to home and ask people, 'Would you approve or disapprove of building a nuclear power plant in your community?', and it goes down 38 per cent approve, 56 per cent against. So though nearly half the population approves of nuclear reactors in principle, nearly two-thirds want them built somewhere else. 

This is a problem that is going to boggle the government and the manufacturers for a long time because it comes out in many spot interviews the television people have been conducting that most Americans don't believe or haven't thought that, without nuclear power, there wouldn't be enough alternative power to drive their machines, maintain their industries, light their cities and their homes. 

And just to make things a little tougher for the government and the whole nuclear industry, the health department of the county that includes the city of Denver, Colorado, has put out a report saying that people who live downwind from a nuclear weapons plant near Denver have more cancer than people who don't and this, they say, comes from the emission of plutonium. And the cancer rates of the residents downwind are dramatically higher than for the rest of Denver. Once this report gets out and around the country, I should guess that the numbers of people who are willing to have a nuclear plant near their own homes would decline still more drastically. 

Well, I'm sorry that this letter should be so sombre but there it is. It is far and away the most important topic of national news in this country just now and not talking about it won't make it go away. To go from the cataclysmic to the comic, let us consider one question that the New York Times-CBS poll has not yet asked. Would you, a professional athlete, want a woman reporter in your changing room, or locker room, as it's called over here? This tremendous lurch from the fear of nuclear plants to the fear of girl reporters is not quite so wild as it sounds. There is a logical association. People want nuclear power on principle but not near them. Men who are hot for women's equal rights are asked to say, 'Well, how about a woman reporter regularly assigned to your changing room?' And they say, 'Mm, well, let me think a minute'. 

This comes up because at the end of last year's baseball season there was a big rumpus between the baseball managers and the baseball reporters when women sports reporters – and there are more of them all the time – demanded as an equal right the right to interview ball players after the game in the locker room, as the male reporters do. 

Well, the baseball season has just opened and first thing you know a woman from a New York paper comes into the Yankees locker room with a photographer who takes pictures of her interviewing the Yankees' star batter, Reggie Jackson. Jackson – wait for it – topless! The paper says it was paying tribute to a landmark, the day women set up another milestone on the road to Utopia. The Yankees manager says the new custom is a nuisance and an extra harassment to the players. Embattled women's equal righters say they don't propose to follow the players to the showers but if they're excluded from the men's locker rooms, they'll take it up with the Supreme Court. 

Good sense says, in the still, small voice of an old woman reporter, 'As a journalist I'm ready to march for open interviews. As a woman I am not titillated by jock sweat, jock jargon or the inside jokes of team mates. As a woman, I do not aspire to become one of the boys up at the Yankee Stadium or down at McSorley's Saloon.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.