Power—Yes; Power Plants—No

In contrast to the collision of values and objectives evident in the unique ecological setting of South Florida, the problem of finding suitable and acceptable sites for new power plants is nationwide. At its roots lie (1) the necessity of providing increased amounts of electricity and, therefore, of sites where they can be generated; (2) the rising sensitivity to the effects on environment that result from large installations such as are projected for the future; and (3) the lack of both guidelines and institutional arrangements that can lead to comprehensive planning and speedy decisions.

The energy policy staff of the Office of Science and Technology, in a report on siting released in January 1969, conveys some idea of the siting problem's dimensions. Between 1968 and 1990, it is estimated, the number of large thermal generating plants (500 megawatts and up) will more than double, from the current 237 to 492 - 60% fossil fuel and 40% nuclear. Moreover, of the 255 new sites to be found, about 100 would have to accommodate facilities of 2,000 mw or larger, some perhaps as large as 10,000 mw. The report also suggests that by 1990 no less than 160 plants would cool their steam with cooling towers at sites as yet largely unidentified. Competition for suitable sites would concentrate on locations near water sources that also would be likely to attract other pollution-generating enterprises.

While transmission lines have come under attack less frequently, the concentration of large plants foreseen in the next two decades suggests that powerful long-distance lines will be an associated feature open to criticism.

The capacity of the 255 new plants would total one million mw and so would have over three times the capacity of the more than 3,000 plants that constitute the present utility industry. The plant mix in 1990 will, therefore, differ radically from the present one; already struggle has begun to accommodate a sizable number of very large plants whose potential impact on the environment will be massive enough to arouse passionate controversy and to create an urgent need for new technology and institutional mechanisms. Several projects, most of them nuclear, have become bones of contention between the utility that needs added capacity for meeting rising demand for electricity and groups and individuals that see the proposed construction as a threat to one or another aspect of the environment they deem worth preserving.

While a sharp dividing line cannot always be drawn from available information, environmental issues appear to have had a part in delaying or shelving perhaps ten projects. True, a substantially larger number has been set back for other reasons, but the tide of public apprehension has been swelling. In addition, current studies of Lake Michigan and the Chesapeake Bay as potential foci of pollution could result in findings that would affect a large number of plants now planned on waters that eventually reach one or the other of these two bodies. The problem is more likely to escalate than recede.

Caught in the struggle are federal and state regulatory bodies, executive agencies, the courts, and in the final analysis the consumer who, unless the construction program can be brought back on schedule is likely to either suffer interruptions in his power supply (as he did on a few hot summer days in 1969 in parts of the East) or pay higher rates—or taxes—than he would without such delays, or, most likely, both.

At issue are principally air pollution from fossil fuel combustion; water pollution from discharges of cooling water at temperatures sufficiently above those of the recipient water body to affect the aquatic environment; and, in the case of nuclear facilities, discharge of radioactive material into the water and the hazards associated with the remote possibility of accidental escape in plant or in transit. The struggle over hydroelectric plants is more "traditional" but here too it has intensified since the Supreme Court refused to review the 1965 opinion of Judge Hayes of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Storm King Mountain case. This opinion held that regulatory commissions must consider all alternatives to a proposed project and include "... as a basic concern the preservation of natural beauty and of national historic shrines …"

Some of the problems will in time be solved by technology. Improved processes for removing noxious products from coal and oil, before or after combustion, will alleviate air pollution problems. Farther into the future, higher thermal efficiency of the breeder reactor will lessen thermal water pollution. Improved shielding and other safety devices will reduce the already minimal probability of catastrophic consequences of "nuclear accidents." Controlled fusion whenever it is achieved will all but eliminate creation of radioactive waste material.

But what about the near future when technology offers only limited or very costly escape hatches? And what about environmental impacts, such as landscape disfiguration by huge cooling towers or overhead transmission lines?

To keep from lingering in a costly stalemate we need: (1) better knowledge of the relevant facts, (2) better decision-making mechanisms, and (3) an understanding that in most situations desirable remedies will involve higher costs.

Demand for "more research" is often just a sophisticated way of avoiding action. In many situations, enough is known of at least the direction if not the magnitude of effects to permit some action. But in many circumstances more research is clearly needed; there are large areas of knowledge in which the experts differ drastically on the effects upon the environment and the human organism of exposure to various offending substances as well as on effective remedies. At one extreme, for example, the deceptively simple demand for "zero" levels of emission of undesirable substances even where technically feasible, is bound to miss the best level of trade-off between efficiency and environmental quality.

There is urgent need for detached and dispassionate research to establish and enlarge areas of agreement. This will take time. Meanwhile, new ways must be explored for reaching decisions in which the voices of the utility, the government, the scientific community (including ecologists, biologists, health services, etc.) and the consumer can be heard in such a way as to minimize the opportunity for subsequent litigation, shorten the lead time for new installations, and thus maximize the chance of reaping the benefits of new technology in terms of lowest feasible electricity cost and avoidance of shortages.

Enough beginnings of such arrangements exist to make one hopeful that an improved setting may emerge. But it will not be easy. For instance, just as a congressional consensus was reached on ways to ensure proper consideration of thermal water pollution (S.7 and HR 4148), in a closely related area a decision by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (which was promptly moved to a court test by the utility affected) sought to set standards for radiation emissions that are stricter than those set by the Atomic Energy Commission. This introduced new uncertainty into the area of federal-state relationships. Within the federal government, the advisability of locating federal responsibility for radiation standards elsewhere than in the Atomic Energy Commission will receive increasing attention.

Adequate control will require a high degree of coordination among federal and state agencies. In the case of water pollution, it is the states that will be required to certify that the proposed generating facility would not adversely affect water quality standards in all cases in which construction requires any kind of federal permit, a condition now true in all but a few cases. Differences in standards among states could importantly influence the regional makeup of power generation. Because pollutants do not respect state boundaries (witness the role of the Chesapeake Bay as a terminal for power plant effluents of several states), differential state standards pose a potential problem.

Smooth working would also require that a balance be struck between reasonably easy intervention based on the opportunity given to "interested persons" to ask for public hearings, and the need for expedition in reaching decisions that all participants can live with.

Avenues towards such a goal are the assignment of sitting responsibility to an existing or new agency, to a national advisory committee on utilities and the environment suggested by FPC Commissioner Bagge in May 1969, or an advisory committee to the Federal Power Commission, suggested by that body's new chairman (though this might be too close to a regulatory agency to gain the full confidence of all participants). One of the first subcommittees of the newly formed President's Environmental Quality Council was one that will attempt to formulate siting guidelines or at least means of formulating them. Similarly, the Electric Power Council on Environment, an industry organization formed in September 1969, should be helpful, even though it decided at its launching to exclude non industry representation other than representatives of the Interior Department and TVA.

At the state level, New York in 1969 set up the Nuclear Power Siting Committee to advise the previously established New York State Atomic and Space Development Authority; in California attempts at early resolutions of conflict began several years ago and have had beneficial results in a somewhat more loosely organized meshing of various agencies and interests (recently, establishment of an agency modeled after the New York Siting Committee has been envisioned), and meanwhile local bodies, such as the Orange County Board of Supervisors in the case of two proposed fossil-fuel plants, have taken independent action; in Maryland, the Public Service Commission was given authority over siting of nuclear plants as well as transmission lines in mid-1968; and in both Oregon and Washington advisory and coordinating committees carry out similar functions. Other states can be expected to follow suit. Important if not crucial to the success of such an approach is an early, publicly announced decision of utilities as to desirable locations; as a parallel move, early acquisition or at least some way of "freezing" such locations to prevent intermediate price escalation would probably be needed. Maryland's Public Service Commission in late November asked all utilities in the state to advise it promptly of the facilities they will need in the next ten years.

None of these moves will bear fruit unless it is widely understood that as utilities broaden their traditional objectives to include preservation of hitherto "non-costed" environmental values, new costs are bound to arise, and in the last analysis these will be borne by users of electric energy. This is as true for the $5—$15 per kw it costs to build a cooling tower, as for putting distribution lines underground, or for devices to clean up stack gases. It is also true for the cost of those stopgap measures, typically high priced, that are taken to ensure adequate, reliable power, pending the resolution of conflict over new sites.

Technically feasible solutions are sometimes dismissed with the comment that they involve "excessive costs," but at what level costs become "excessive" is never defined. Nor is much thought given to the possibility that the search for efficiency via large-scale generation and its associated savings is perhaps reaching a point at which it provokes problems that cannot be readily accommodated within the constraints now appearing so important. That is bigness may carry its own penalty not in terms of economic and financial power, as in times past, but in terms of its impact upon the immediate environment.

The more thoroughly it is understood that not only is there no free lunch but also no free beauty, the easier it should become to find solutions. Unfortunately, here too new difficulties have lately arisen. Rate increases asked for by utilities have been opposed as unfair to the poor (as indeed are any price increases for basic goods). But the remedy here is in the field of income and welfare policy, not utility pricing. It will be hard enough to reconcile an adequate, reliable, low-cost electric power supply with the preservation of environmental values.