Notwithstanding the elaborate and stringent safety regulation, the rush to nuclear power involves substantial risks to the health and safety of the public. This is so primarily because the rate of technological advance in this area is so rapid, with the result that successive generations of nu­clear power plants are being authorized before adequate experience is in hand with respect to earlier generations. Leapfrogging experience in itself involves risk because there is no substitute for experience. In the absence of an adequate base of experience,* we must entrust health and safety of the public to the hardly infallible predictive judgments of scientists and engineers and to their hardly infallible engineered gadgetry. I am not pre­dicting catastrophe; I am stating only that there are substantial risks which must be weighed more carefully and more explicitly than is the case today. That substantial risks exist is scarcely even debatable so long as the Price — Anderson Act is law and industry requires its protection, f We could all feel much more comfortable about the risk if the Price-Anderson Act were repealed, since then industry would have to reckon explicitly with the costs of potential liability in making its nuclear power decisions, assuming the same risks it forces the public to assume.

Some critics of the aec have suggested that the vice in the present nu­clear power licensing process lies in the fact that the aec has a conflict of interest: it has a mandate simultaneously to promote nuclear technology and to regulate that technology in the interest of the health and safety of * When the Price-Anderson Act was originally enacted in 1957, it applied to only a 10-year period in the hope that by 1967 “there will be enough experience gained so that the problems of reactor safety will be to a great extent solved. . .” (H. R. Rep. No. 435, 85tb Cong., 1st Sess., 9 [1957]). In 1965, the Act was extended for a second 10-year period because “the potential threat of public liability. . . based as it is on a lack of sufficient operating experience to form an adequate judgment of risk” was as great a deterrent to private investment in nuclear power as it was in 1957 (H. R. Rep. No. 883, 89th Cong., 1st Sess. 11 [1965]).

t Even though we are told that “expert opinion holds that this indemnity [Price-An­derson] will never be utilized” because of the exceedingly remote possibility of an accident (ibid., at 8), the fact remains that countless hours and untold energy are expended by the aec, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and the nuclear in­dustry in amending the Price-Anderson Act to add elaborate and exquisite devices for enhancing the financial protection of the public against the contingency of such an accident.

the public. The conflict of interest is surely present, but my own opinion is that the aec regulatory staff calls the shots as it sees them and is not un­duly influenced by any promotional considerations. In my view, the prob­lems I have been discussing would exist even if the aec regulatory and li­censing program were completely separated by transfer to a wholly inde­pendent agency. The real vice, as I see it, lies in the assumption that scien­tists and engineers are omniscient and possess almost infinite capacity to solve problems and to permanently fix leaky faucets. Our society has per­mitted these experts to play God: to assess benefits, to define risks, and to determine what risks the public must assume, cheerfully, just as it pays taxes, in exchange for benefits which the experts think the public should have. What is more, under the carefully nurtured myth that judgments about nuclear safety can be soundly made only by these experts, we have permitted these experts to decide these risk/benefit questions largely be­hind closed doors and in the esoteric, obfuscatory jargon of their disci­plines. Almost forty years ago, Harold J. Laski discussed the limitations of the expert in the formulation of policy in an increasingly complex world. In Laski’s view, it is indispensable for wise resolution of social problems that the content of these problems be formulated by experts and that experts be consulted at every stage of the policy-making process. He argued, however, against making the expert’s judgment final because: “. . . special knowledge and the highly trained mind produce their own limitations which, in the realm of statesmanship, are of decisive impor­tance. Expertise, it may be argued, sacrifices the insight of common sense to intensity of experience. It breeds an inability to accept new views from the very depth of its preoccupation with its own conclusions. It too often fails to see round its subject. It sees its results out of perspective by mak­ing them the center of relevance to which all other results must be related. Too often, also, it lacks humility; and this breeds in its possessors a failure in proportion which makes them fail to see the obvious which is before their very noses. It has, also, a certain caste-spirit about it, so that experts tend to neglect all evidence which does not come from those who belong to their own ranks. Above all, perhaps, and this most urgently where hu­man problems are concerned, the expert fails to see that every judgment he makes not purely factual in nature brings with it a scheme of values which has no special validity about it. He tends to confuse the importance of his facts with the importance of what he proposes to do about them.” (“The Limitations of the Expert,” Harper’s Magazine, 132 [December 1930], 47.)

Perhaps this is an appropriate role for experts to play in our complex society. My concern is not so much that experts make these determina­tions, but rather that the public does not know enough about the problems with which they deal or their processes of making the judgments to know whether or not what they are doing is really in the public interest. What is needed is to drag the entire process out into the open so that the public will have a full opportunity to comprehend the risks and the benefits. The establishment tells us that the licensing process takes place today in a goldfish bowl. Perhaps this is true, but the bowl is opaque, with vision per­mitted only through the opening at the top. Somehow the means must be found to compel the experts to deal with these problems in a more com­mon, less rarefied atmosphere and in a vocabulary more easily translated into the language of ordinary political discourse. This can be accom­plished by injecting into the aec licensing process a healthy dose of con­troversy and adverseness. This is easy enough to state, but it is more diffi­cult to state where the adversaries may be found. This might be done by having the aec regulatory staff assume more of an adversary role and/or by making meaningful interventions more feasible. In addition, perhaps state governments ought to play a more critical, skeptical, and active role in aec licensing cases than they have in the past. In this connection, the present litigation involving the newly established Minnesota radiation standards applicable to the Northern States Power Company’s proposed Monticello nuclear power plant is a healthy and constructive development in that it focuses attention on a problem heretofore largely ignored.

Finally, it is worth noting that a new technology normally develops in response to market forces. The market provides a system of incentives and restraints which governs the rate of technological development. Where a technology involves health and safety risks, these risks are translated in­to costs by the firm, and the technology will not be developed and intro­duced unless there is a demand for the technology’s products at a price which fully covers the costs. In effect, the public votes with its dollars whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Nuclear power technology is not developing within the market system, but in spite of it. The technology came into being as a result of governmental investment and is growing as a consequence of governmental support. Its hazards to the health and safety of the public are not reflected in its costs because of the exculpatory effect of the Price-Anderson Act. Since the absence of market restraints deprives the public of the opportunity to vote with its dollars on the ques­tion of risks versus benefits, the public can participate in the risk/benefit determination only through its vote at the polls. The public is entitled to this vote and to the maximum feasible articulation of the risk/benefit problem in the political arena. This can come about only when and if nu­clear power ceases to be a noncontroversial, nonpartisan sacred preserve in which the risk/benefit calculus is regarded as a scientific exercise rather than as the sociopolitical issue which it in fact is. I readily concede that this may well lead to “unfounded” public apprehension and may retard nu­clear power development. But why, in a democracy, should the public not have the full opportunity to decide for itself, rationally or irrationally, what benefits it wants and what price it is willing to pay?