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My commentary of last month on the Agri Industrial Complex had an effect beyond my hopes, spokesmen for that $10 billion complex have protested to KPF A's manager and asked for equal time if they are at last willing to discuss the issues. I raised corporate responsibility, the

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aggregation of power and so forth, it will be all to the good and I'll be happy to keep the dialogue going, but I don't intend to get bogged down in a nitpicking contest and we'll have to see which it will be my commentary. This time doesn't

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deal with agricultural labor directly. However, issues have a way of tying in with each other in ways you might not suspect one of the leading actors in my discussion of interlocking directorates. Last month, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company also happens to be a leading actor

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in the drama of Bodega Head and Atomic Energy, which is my subject for tonight. I'm going to argue that it would be in PG and es own self interest to abandon its Bodega plans before they have gone any further and beyond that. And much more fundamentally

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than that. I'm going to appeal to all of us to begin planning now for humanizing changes in our social order to cope with profound changes in energy resources which lie in the not very distant future. The people who run PG and E are supposed to be

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good, hard headed businessmen, directing an efficient forward looking operation. The truth is though that the string of nuclear reactors planned for the Pacific coastline, the el Camino de los kilowatts, which has such support and subsidy from the Atomic Energy Commission will soon be outmoded backward looking

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and uneconomic. The nuclear reactor under construction at Bodega is likely to be a white elephant long before it has recovered its cost of upwards of $65 million. Perhaps the most effective thing for conservationists is to buy a share of PG and E stock a piece descend

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on the annual shareholders meetings and protest the onbusiness like way the company is being run contrary to what you'll hear from the pr departments of PG and E and the A EC, the power of the future is not going to come from atomic fission and particularly

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not from boiling water reactors of the Bodega type. The future holds energy sources as much superior to atomic fission as atomic fission is superior to the ox. One of them seems to me to hold particular promise and that is hydrogen power or thermonuclear power, the product

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of atomic fusion rather than atomic fission. Here are some of the respective advantages and disadvantages and please bear with me if some of this is fairly technical, it is necessary. I think as background to the later discussion of social policy. First, the the fishing process to

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which PG and E is currently committed requires a very costly form of fuel. Uranium 235, which is expensive to recover from nature and which furthermore undergoes expensive refinement and enrichment by the A EC before it is used in a nuclear reactor. The price is certain to

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go even higher as readily recoverable ores are depleted in the next 20 or 30 years. In contrast, the fuel for atomic fusion is almost limitless in quantity, easy to recover from nature and usable in its natural form. It is an isotopic form of hydrogen called deuterium.

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Every glass of water you drink for that matter, whatever you drink contains trillions of deuterium atoms. Second, uranium is highly radioactive, a nuclear reactor of the Bodega type must be shielded in an enormous fortress of reinforced concrete. This large cost component will be essentially unnecessary in

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thermonuclear installations since Deuterium is not radioactive. Third, old style nuclear reactors are massive immobile inflexible. By comparison, thermonuclear plants promised to be relatively light, adaptable and flexible. The transmission of power is a problem. As you are reminded, every time you go out for a drive and

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find all the hills around the bay area marred by PG and ES gigantic striding towers. PG and E may care nothing about aesthetics but ought to be interested in saving the cost of those hundreds of miles of towers. Thermonuclear power plants can be built close to

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the places, power will actually be consumed probably in your own backyard. If you wanted. One fourth, the atomic fission reaction is inherently unstable. No matter how many costly safeguards may be built in. There's always the possibility through material failure or human error or natural catastrophe that

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the process may slip its leash and get out of control. On the other hand, when the thermonuclear process is controlled, it will be inherently stable in somewhat the sense that an electric light is stable. By comparison with say a stick of dynamite. If anything goes wrong

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in the thermonuclear process, if there is a flaw in the magnetic field, which is going to be the container for the process rather than the fuel leaking out and running wild, the whole process will instantly snuff itself out. Sixth. The costliest aspect of atomic fission from

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several standpoints is what may be called garbage disposal. Imagine that the radioactive fallout from several 100 atomic bomb tests instead of drifting down over the whole northern hemisphere, we're all gathered together in one ash. Can you will then have some conception of the problems of disposing

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of the radioactive iodine cesium strontium and other waste products from nuclear reactors. The physicist Richard Post has stated in the scientific American that if the power needs of the United States in the year 2000 are met by fission reactors. We shall have to dispose of the

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equivalent of the fallout from 8 million atomic bomb explosions every year and no satisfactory way of disposing of these poisons has been devised. If the so called public utility companies and the A ec persist in this direction, we won't need nuclear warfare to make this planet

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uninhabitable. In contrast, the hydrogen fusion process will have no untoward by-product when the process has run its course, the by-product will be some garden variety hydrogen and some helium which are perfectly harmless and about 7 million electron volts of energy per deuterium atom, which is very

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harmful indeed in the form of a thermonuclear explosion. But which channeled into electricity could be the most liberating boon man has yet received from the physical universe. Now, I don't want to suggest that controlled thermonuclear energy is just around the corner. How do you agitate deuterium

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atoms to a velocity equivalent to what they would have at a temperature of 400 million degrees, 10 times that of the center of the sun and stabilize this stuff inside a magnetic field. If you have some ideas, you might communicate them to the radiation lab, all

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I can say is it's going to be done among other places. Important advances are going on at this moment about a mile from where I'm speaking at the rad lab in the Berkeley Hills. The problems in theoretical and applied physics and engineering are soluble and will

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be solved probably within a decade or so. But there is another order of problems, political, economic sociological, which are more difficult. What we are talking about is the true dawning of the atomic age. Only the first note or two of the prelude has been sounded so

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far, the overwhelming majority of mankind will never directly benefit from atomic fission due to the intrinsic limitations. I've tried to sketch but when the control of thermonuclear energy is perfected, no member of the human race can fail to be affected. It will be the realization of

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a dream which began when the first human being pitted his muscles against a recalcitrant environment with thermonuclear power. For the first time in the history of the human species, energy will become available cheaply safely and as abundantly as the oceans themselves, I'm sure you can draw

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up your own list of men's great fond dreams which could come true through the proper distribution of very large quantities of very cheap power. One which interests me particularly is the prospect of converting seawater on a previously unimaginable scale. The reason saltwater conversion is expensive today

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basically is that power is expensive. But with the aid of thermonuclear power, fresh water can be produced in any quantities. And with some of the power left over, that water can be pumped over mountain ranges anywhere it's needed. All the talk about bringing water from Montana

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or Alaska or wherever it is uh down to the Southwest is as unnecessary and even irresponsible as the fission reactor at Bodega Head, 1/5 of the earth's surface, an area larger than the United States and the Soviet Union combined is desert at the present time, producing

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nothing. But when irrigated deserts are capable of growing lush vegetation has witnessed the Imperial Valley which within the memory of men still living was nothing but shifting sand. Most of the earth's major deserts such as the Sahara, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the Middle East,

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much of the South Western United States and Mexico, parts of South America are contiguous to oceans or Gulfs. And in many cases, the converted seawater would not have to be transported. Even as far as Governor Brown proposes to transport water from the Feather River with old

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fashioned methods. In some cases, such as the Gobi desert, transportation would be a great problem but still feasible. Since the basic requirement is enormous quantities of cheap power, which is what we are going to have in the foreseeable future. The real problems are not technological but

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social who is going to make the decisions, who is going to decide where to build thermonuclear power plants and what to do with the power that's generated. And if the earth's deserts are reclaimed as they can be, what will be done with the land and who

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will own the land, who will labor on it? I say in all seriousness that if development takes the same form it has in the Imperial Valley. If deserts bloom, while human lives wither, the game will not be worth the candle, the human good won't outweigh the

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human damage. The forthcoming thermonuclear age offers a most rare opportunity. This is one of the few times in the human journey that we have the advantage of knowing well in advance that a certain change is coming. If we have any social intelligence at all, we'll start

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planning for it. Now planning how to make it bless, rather than blight human lives, planning, how to conjure with the changes it will surely induce throughout the war and whiff of our society and culture and every society and culture in these few minutes. I've barely had

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time to hint at just one of those changes in case. My earlier ironical remarks about PG and E stockholder meetings were misunderstood. Let me make my position clear. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company and indeed, utility companies in general have proven by word and deed that

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they are not fit guardians for the developments which are coming. They have proven socially irresponsible, indifferent to public wishes and welfare, answerable to nobody but nameless, faceless managerial elites. Somehow we've been able to get by in this country to date with the anomaly of so called

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public utilities operated by private companies for private profit. But we're not going to be able to afford the consequences of this policy very much longer. We had better start thinking and talking boldly right now about a National Power Service or better and International Power Service, which

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will recognize that energy is too important to leave to private elites. Just as we long ago recognized that education, the monetary system, postal delivery, fire, and police protection and many other things are too important to be left to private elites. And while we're at it, we

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had better start thinking and talking boldly about an international land service to prevent the rest of the world from repeating the human tragedies of California agriculture. I still have enough confidence in man's rationality to believe that in the time we have at our disposal, we will

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find and follow a new road. We allowed atomic fission to divide men from other men, even as the atoms themselves were split asunder, I believe atomic fusion will prove a force to bring men together even as the hydrogen nuclei are brought together in yielding their great

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bounty for a number of points. In the foregoing discussion, I was indebted to Dave Pessin of the Northern California Association to preserve Bodega Head and harbor and to personnel from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. But any shortcomings in the technical analysis or the interpretations are my responsibility

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alone.