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1608 Lavaca 32nd & Guadalupe 201 E. Riverside 478-3281 452-5010 441-5331 Create a positive first impression with your next paper or report. Complete your project with one of our inexpensive bindings to create your own special effect. Remember, first impressions can have lasting effects. Congr ess Ginrty Anderson Lane s Services Bindery 2700 2021 Guadalupe \\N Call 476-9171 for details Copying is our middle name but not our only service Ginny’s Copying Service, Inc. 411111.11=1111111111111111111110 T S A N THE TEXAS OBSERVER in getting into nuclear technology, but they did not have access to industry data and could not mount a convincing challenge to the economic fictions of the nuclear club’s insiders. By the mid-1970s, even though it had become abundantly clear that the cost of building nuclear power facilities was going up, not down, nuclear salesmen were still arguing that rising prices of fossil fuels have kept nuclear costs competitive. But they are not so convincing anymorenew orders for nuclear reactors have plummeted from 35 in 1973 to just one in 1978. Buyers have been tak “Systematic confusion of expectation with fact, of hope with reality, has been the most characteristic feature of the entire 30-year effort to develop nuclear power.” ing a hard look at the costs hitherto left out of the nuclear equationthe costs, for example, of decommissioning a plant \(some experts estimate it may be as expensive to take a plant apart as it is to of unforeseen upkeep, and of lengthy licensing procedures needed to assure safe construction and operation. Standstill in Texas The national experience with nuclear power has been mirrored in Texas. Disillusionment occasioned by skyrocketing costs has moved one Texas nuclear developer, T. L. Austin Jr., chairman of the board of Texas Utilities, to announce, “If we can find anything else to burn that is within any economic range, then we won’t build [another] nuclear power plant.” It’s easy to see why: Texas Utilities’ Comanche Peak nuclear generator, under construction at Glen Rose, has more than doubled in estimated cost \(from $777 million to $1.7 bilThe story has been much the same at Texas’ other nuclear construction sites. Houston Lighting & Power’s planned Allen Creek facility near Houston has been kept on the back burner for five years, and its projected capacity has been halved. Gulf States Utilities’ proposed Blue Hill unit at Wallace has been all but abandoned \(Obs ., And the South Texas Nuclear Project underway at Matagorda Bay, which was supposed to cost $1 billion to build according to 1973 estimates, now has a price tag of $2 billion. STNP is now the focal point in Texas of the pubic controversy over nuclear development, a controversy Bupp and Derian say was sure to occur nationwide once actual costs began to give the lie to the nuclear establishment’s deceptions