The Michigan Daily-Sunday, Dec Page 6-Sunday, December 11, 1977--The Michigan Daily uraniu-m (Continued from Page 5) Leaching is good because it is what causes uranium deposits in the first place, according to many geologists. A major reason the U.P. has become the target of uranium exploration is that its western end contains a combination of sandstones and phosphates which are favorable to concentrated "leached" uranium deposits. But leaching can also be bad if buried tailings are "leached" by groundwater and reach the general water supply. "You have no assurance you're not going to contaminate the groundwater in a major way," Sagady claimed. "Groundwater is very mobile stuff." Industry officials feel environmental impacts connected with mining should be considered only after ore is discovered. Allan Mullins, Chief of TVA's Nuclear Raw Materials Branch, says TVA is providing an "ongoing en- vironmental assessment of activities," but will not submit an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) during the ex- ploration phase. TUCKER SAID DNR will re- quire an EIS before any digging on state lands, but added that nuclear (Continued from Page 5) originally anticipated due to delays propagated by budgetary problems and ensuing inflation. Edison Co. officials call it "normal inflation." PIRGIM officials call it "inefficient and poor mangagement" on the part of-the utility. Detroit Edison justifies spending large initial sums of money because, it maintains, the fuel costs for nuclear energy are cheaper, making it less ex- pensive for their customers in the long run. "It's like paying a high price for a car that gets (better) mileage, rathet' than paying a low price for a car that gets (worse) mileage," Harris explains. Still, the arguments plod on and little is resolved by the Public Service Com- mission (PSC), responsible for protec- ting the public interest, which adds to the dissatisfaction of consumer groups. Meanwhile, electric bills continue to climb. Frustrated consumers last October the effort everyone was making at the time to conserve energy." HIS $500 COMPENSATION, by the way, went to support Inglis House, a semi-palatial resi- dence on Regent's Drive that houses University guests like Jerry Ford. Consumer skepticism about Detroit Edison's advertising program, however, baffles company officials. "What more do you expect us to do?," asked one, "pull switches on people? That's not what they want." PIRGIM and MCUE also are em- phasizing conservation, but clearly feel that legislative cures are needed in ad- dition to curtail the growth of an expen- sive nuclear industry fraught, they say, with hidden costs that have never been accurately calculated. SINCE NUCLEAR power plants the size of Fermi II have proven to be less productive than ex- pected, the Edison customer, according much of the responsibility for mining regulation lies with the federal gover- nment. "It's a federal field," he said, "and until responsibility is delegated there's not a hell of a lot you can do." Tucker's primary concern now is the drafting of the new minerals lease, and he is sen- sitive to industry complaints that the state bureaucracy is responsible for the long delay in achieving a final draft. "There's very little difference bet- ween the bureaucracy of a corporation and the bureaucracy of a state," Tur- ner asserted. "I don't give a damn if it's Ford Motor Company or Kerr-McGee, or the Department of Natural Resour- ces, there's a great deal of similarity. "The difference is that in one case they're responsible to the public and in the other to their stockholders and board of directors . . . (we) have a larger constituency to consider" In addition to those concerned with radiation and those who feel the state should tighten up its leasing policies, some environmental groups oppose ex- ploration because they oppose nuclear power in general. Sagady said his group does not. "We're not prepared to say there shouldn't be uranium mining," he ex- plained. "We have very serious doubts about whether uranium can be mined in an environmentally safe manner." Sagady said Environmental Action would have been involved even if the issue had been ordinary minerals ex- ploration, but conceded that concern over uranium probably drew more people into the lobbying effort. The exploration companies are generally confident about a future based on nuclear energy. According to TVA's Mullins, "Any mineral or fuel resource is finite. The problem is in the estimation of the total amount of fuel available. We are confident.that there will be sufficient coal and uranium to meet the Nation's Qeeds well into the next century." "Nuclear energy is a thing of the future, one way or another," said Kerr- McGee spokesman Pat Pietre, "and we're just expanding into new areas." Other prospectors have doubts. "When I was in school, uranium and fusion were going to be the saviors of the future," recalled Jack Van Alstine, A DNR geologist who supervises two DNR rigs drilling for uranium north of Marquette under a program funded by the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). "They haven't been able to do fusion even in the lab. . . and all the uranium we had coming out our rear ends years ago just isn't there, or hasn't been proven to be there," he said. HETHER THE U.P. actually has commercially useable uranium deposits is anybody's guess, and all the prospectors currently wintering in and around Marquette can probably agree with Van Alstine when he says "It's either here or it isn't. Nature took care of that years ago." For Kerr-McGee, Chevron, TVA, and other energy companies, upper Michigan is only a small part of the ex- ploration pie-compared to other areas of the country, Michigan is a small in- vestment. For TVA, that investment must pay off soon. The power agency would not comment on the future operations of the exploration group to which it belongs, but that group is sub- ject to the terms of the lease signed with Ford Motor Co., which owns the land under exploration. That lease stipulates payments of $1 per acre per year, but after 1980 the payments in- crease $1 per acre per year every year. For Van Alstine, a big strike would pose some interesting questions. If the DNR finds uranium on state land, who gets to mine it? "We're going to write up a report, put it on open file, and whatever happens is whatever happens," Van Alstine said. For the residents of the Upper Penin- sula, uranium mines would mean a change of lifestyle, but not as big a change as if ore were struck in, say, Iowa. This has always been a mining area, wearily accustomed to the boom and bust cycles of a rich vein or a played-out operation. Only uranium's radioactivity makes it different, and Harvey Spiegel of the Environmental Law Society pointed out that low-level tailings radiation is not always obvious. "You could walk across (a buried tailings pile)," he said, "and the radioactivity.. . well, I wouldn't say it wouldn't affect you, but it is nothing like high-level waste from reactors." E CONOMICALLY, THE area is depressed, though the end of a lengthy mine workers walkout in the iron mines last month may have a good effect on the local economy. Uranium mining would mean jobs, and for many U.P. residents jobs and elec- tric power are the real issues. "You've got to have a healthy economy first," said Jerry Stafford, a Marquette resident who works for a meat packing company. "If you don't have a healthy economy, you can forget about a healthy ecology because people will be burning all the trees to stay warm and eating all the animals because they don't have any food." Other residents disagree, and some of them-the Upper Peninsula Environ- mental Coalition-will help sponsor a forum in Marquette Tuesday at which local residents will air their views to an assortment of company officials, .DNR representatives and environmentalists. "Some people say 'No mining under any circumstances,"' mused Van Alstine, "and on the other side some people say 'Go ahead and mine regar- dless.' I think the proper course lies somewhere in the middle." Caught between environmentalists and com- panies, energy and conservation, the DNR is looking hard for the middle. By Tom O'Connell The Book of Sand By Jorge Luis Borges E.P. Dutton: New York 125 pp. $7.95 ORGE LUIS BORGES is, above all else, a literary craftsman. Nearly 80 years old now and obviously in the twilight of his career, he nonetheless continues to produce stories which are both thoughtful and clever, and invariably well-executed. Though the works collected in The Book of Sand may lack some of the intellectual gymnastics that have previously characterized the Argentine mas- ter's short stories, they are still more than just "variations on favorite themes", as Borges himself self- deprecatingly labels them. When in the course of his lifetime a writer has created a body of litera- ture that includes collections like El Aleph, Dreamtigers and the brilliant Ficciones, one becomes more than willing to grant him the right to a few "variations". But actually, the pieces in this latest anthology (all of which have been previously pub- lished in various periodicals) still maintain that most timeless of Borges' standards - they force the reader to think. The Book of Sand spreads itself across a number of genres, though it delves most heavily into fantasy; here it is also at its most intriguing. Witness the title story, in which a man purchases (at a dear price) what is apparently a holy book, written in Arabic, from a wandering bookseller. What is astonishing about the book is the fact that it contains an infinite number of pages - no matter how long one turns them, the back cover cannot be reached. Never is a page repeated. The buyer's initial fascination with the book gradually turns to repulsion as his quest for a repetition or a terminus begins to prove fruitless: "I felt the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself . .. I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke." Finally, he is driven to deliberately lose the Book of Sand on the dusty shelves of a library's basement. Borges here seems to be mocking man's constant grasping at the meaning of infinity, a concept which by its very nature can never be understood, much less visualized. Written in a similar vein is "The Disk", a story which Borges has based on the idea of the one-sided Euclidean circle: a woodcutter mur- ders an exiled king in order to possess his badge of authority - a metal disk with but a single side. However, in dying the king drops the medallion. face down on the ground and thus it disappears, leaving the woodcutter to waste his life in years of fruitless searching. Delves heavily, into JORGES' 'BOOK OF SAND': I As usual and direct; their bare to cherish writing. Hi; well as his that under Northern F in "The N1 story simil Palace" in a court po an epic de patron, th After yea completes ever writte ing the ex After this i the only fi death Perhaps works, and cal, is "Th on a bench encounter Se4 'Day by Day Lowell's boc poems, By Constance Ennis DXY BY DAY By Robert Lowell Farrar, Straus and Giroux 137 pages; $8.95 N 1937, when Robert Lowell was Na sophomore at college, he went through a metamorphosis that caused him to renounce his social world at Harvard, and commit himself entirely to the profession of writing. Lowell's about turn might well have been provoked by a comment made by Ford Maddox Ford, which was recorded thirty years later in a poem from Notebook (1967): " 'If he fails as a writer', Ford told my father, 'at least he'll be Ambassador to England or President of Harvard.'" In time, Ford thought, Lowell might live to be an artist. When Lowell began writing, no poet seemned more private or hermet- ic. In 1947 the originality and genius of Lowell was recognized by the literary world when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. At Lowell's death last August, he was regarded by many, as the best English-language poet of his gener- ation. Both as a poet and a public figure, Lowell embodied our uncer- tainties, our unease, our despair; and history, for Lowell, became the cause and substance of his work. Day by Day is Robert Lowell's first new book since the appearance of The Dolphin (1973). It carries on a versified autobiogr verse that is autobiographical and the collection as one piece completes a self-portrait that is linked to a past as well as an anticipated future. Like Lowell's historical, political, and literary poems, the poems of Day by Day are a scenario of his past and present, and there is no denying that they need footnoting. As an autobiog- raphy, Day by Day reaches back- ward to the guilt and love in his marriage to Caroline Blackwood, the birth of his son Sheridan, and his move to England, all subjects in The Dolphin (1973); this new collection recounts that marriage and the struggles during that period - Lowell's life in Kent, his hospitaliza- tion in England, his wife's sickness, their temporary stay in Boston, their separation, a reconciliation, a fur ther rupture, -a parting in Ireland, and Lowell's return to America. But though factual occurrences form the basis for Day by Day, the subjects of each poem are more per- sonalized, founded on accidents which the day-to-day flow of events turns up. Who knows if the live season, will add tomorrow to today? Young we identified with the sounds of the summer night, the mating birds, roadsters and sex of the incumbent generation ... If I could go through it all again, the slender iron rungs of growing up, AT "BALLOON DAY" last August, opponents to the construction of Detroit Edison's nuclear energy plant, Fermi II, released balloons at the Monroe site to demonstrate the ease with which radioactive materials could spread in case of a leak. The facility is scheduled for completion in 1980. burned their utility bills in a Detroit rally. Chanting "better active today than radiactive tomorrow," the demon- strators charged the power company with "a callous disregard for the health and welfare of Michigan citizens.. . to sustain its own profits." Although some 500 activists gathered in Lansing last month to lobby for legislative support for rate reform, the average person has tacitly accepted the increases. Even Robben Fleming ad- mits he doesn't know much about why his rates have gone up $50 in the last year, but explains his participation- in the Edison media campaign as "part of to PIRGIM, pays once for the initial high capital cost of the plant and again for the more expensive power which the company must then purchase from other utilities. Petrini explains that the consumer is "socked twice when the nuclear power plant does not operate to design capacity." But Petrini's opposition remains con- fident in its promotion of nuclear power: "Sure it's scary if you don't know anything about it," -says Harris. "But if someone had invented the elec- tric chair before the light bulb, we'd still be burning candles.". i'",c "i r': "?f 1, ff:::rj. y>:: if.;y ..". +'.' : ":{': h {#fi::w,"rti:r3 .k w'r :"x ; {tir:" ?'ha).' .'" ~".'2'. : ' ss:?t' %, :.+i.ttt+r..',s'- r .. "r:!:c" .Gx". .}... a"' xnc ""xa .t{, r:. '." r:"r5 3b:":.3ax £" ."f utc " ."a.. - . 4:.. Sunday magazine Susan Ades Co-editors Jay Levin Tom O'Connell I would be as young as any, a child lost in unreality and loud music. In the course of his literary life, Lowell has mastered opposite ex- tremes of style; he has explored both literary density and conversational nonchalance; yet in spite of his diverseness and unpredictability, his work is unified. In Day by Day Lowell continues with his lifelong struggle to break away and re-consti- tute the Although unpredic from an "All your poem." L B ECAL by I expect fr literary subtlety, S1 Elaine Fletcher Associate Editors Cover photo of cloud pattern over North Campus by Andy Freeberg 1 .. , . "ti ... p .- Ai x tff~,, rf:40# i # ik t "'a :s' r +y .e .i _ n_"_'. .. ^.".'...-a . '* .r'' tr. 'av.-v aa. v' "ir '-i 1r