ustxtxb_obs_1980_03_28_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

“If I didn’t speak out on nuclear power . . . I would feel I have forfeited my right to public office. When I feel that way I speak.” been intimidated, they have been physically assaulted, and they have been ordered not to reveal to the proper authorities some of the findings of their inspection. It is just absolutely unbelievable . “Listening to these inspectors, half of whom have worked in the majority of the plant sites in the United States, the people of Boston are under the menace daily and there is a potential for destruction at the Pilgrim plant . . . . There are others, ranging from the one in New York to one where, indeed, you have already had accidents, in Alabama, and a couple of others, that if I were responsible as an administrator I would either resign or quit or commit suicide before I would remain silent, and I would shout from the rooftops the danger, the imminence of it . . . . We are not talking about just explosions.” Gonzalez contends that the plant inspectors are “all beholden to the builders and owners all the way even the inspectors hired from outside,” since the ‘Nuclear Regulatory Commission “goes to the same pool the builders contact.” “Look,” he says over a cup of coffee in a restaurant, “even the nuclear industry and the public utilities are abandoning nuclear power. There hasn’t been an application in a year or two. “They talk about nobody’s dropped dead except a billion dollar plant, which may never operate again. It’s not in a coma it’s dead.” Addressing an anti-nuclear rally last summer near the South Texas Nuclear Project at Bay City, Gonzalez said we were worshipping the modern Moloch, the atom. “If I didn’t speak out on nuclear power, knowing what I know,” he says, “I would feel I have forfeited my right to public office. When I feel that way I speak.” Advocates of nuclear power admit, Gonzalez says, that the technology in, for instance, the STNP plant will soon be obsolete and that the only way nuclear power can continue is to build the breeder reactor. “But the breeder reactor . . . is more dangerous than anything yet dreamed of by the most malicious mind of man. The breeder operates at such high temperatures that it must be cooled by liquid sodium a liquid that burns violently in the presence of air, and a liquid that would create a hydrogen gas explosion in the presence of water. And if that is not bad enough, what the breeder produces is weapons-grade plutonium, a product more deadly by many times than anything used in nuclear plants today.” Gonzalez has introduced a bill in Congress to prohibit any further licensing or commissioning of nuclear fission power THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7