No Greater Challenge digitized

This film envisions deploying large nuclear power plants coupled with desalination plants to form 300k-acre scientifically-managed food factories in otherwise arid land. Besides making 1 billion gallons of fresh water per day from the sea, the complexes would also generate phosphorus using electric furnaces, ammonia from electrolytic hydrogen, and caustic and chlorine from brine electrolysis. Such a complex could feed 6 million people.

Catalog description: Shows man's historic and growing hunger for water and a dramatic solution to this great challenge --- the Agro Industrial Complex. With the nuclear reactor as the energy source and the desalting plant as the fresh water source, tomorrow's coastal deserts may be transformed into self-sustaining mammoth nuclear powered agro industrial centers consisting farms and industrial plants. Nuclear power reactors will pump millions of gallons of water from the sea and provide the heat to desalt it. At the same time low cost nuclear energy will produce electricity to help extract and process the ocean's mineral wealth. Electricity from nuclear energy will power plants that produce fertilizers. Fertilizers and fresh, desalted water for irrigation will enrich lands where no crops have grown for centuries. Designed to convert waste lands into new lands of desert agriculture and to provide new industries and new jobs, the proposed Agro industrial complex will raise the standard of living for millions of people.

This is film 53094 in our catalog.

Background info on nuclear agro-industrial complexes

On September 25, 1963, President John F. Kennedy said:

We are now examining in the United States today the mixed economic-technical question of whether very large scale nuclear reactors can produce unexpected savings in the simultaneous desalination of water and the generation of electricity. We will have before this decade is out or sooner a tremendous nuclear reactor which makes electricity and at the same time gets fresh water from salt water at a competitive price. What a difference this can make to the United States. And, indeed, not only the US. but all around the globe where there are so many deserts on the ocean's edge.

In 1967, just after the Six-Day War, an idea to user cheap power from nuclear plants to literally make the desert bloom with seawater desalination plants became even more interesting and intriguing. Lewis invited Alvin Weinberg to his estate to discuss. Lewis Strauss passed these ideas to Eisenhower, who soon published The Eisenhower Plan in Life magazine.

The Atomic Energy Commission then directed Oak Ridge National Lab to conduct studies of the concept. They formed a team of reactor experts, agronomists, economists, and social scientists who traveled to Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon. The team released a series of reports including:

As it turned out, nuclear plants became more expensive rather than cheaper, and this plan depended on cheap energy, so it was never implemented. At least not yet!

A 1969 film about nuclear-powered Agro-Industrial complexes

Background info on nuclear agro-industrial complexes

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