Energy accessibility should be solely a technological problem. As engineering knowledge and the science that underlies it continue to advance, the real cost of usable energy decreases and energy availability for each of us should, therefore, concomitantly increase. Since energy is virtually the currency of technological progress, everything from human living standards to human longevity increases as people obtain more energy - and at a rate that, given the large number of innovative scientists and engineers and the technology at their disposal, could be astonishing indeed.

Instead, however, progress in energy development is today severely stalled. In the United States, propaganda campaigns by all sorts of ignorant, fearful, and uninformed groups have led to a tragic diminution of progress on technologies that affect our access to energy.

The problem, however, is not misinformed people. Informed innovators could make progress even if their fellow citizens could not - if the freedom of those capable people were not being suppressed.

This suppression of freedom is essentially a question of property. It is a self-evident truth that economic freedom is an indispensable part of human freedom. A person who cannot hold property and use it as he wishes becomes a slave. Every free human being has the right to hold and use his private property in any way he wishes as long as he does not infringe on this same right of other people.

This right to private property does not depend upon the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or even common law. It is an inherent right that has been recognized as an indispensable part of freedom for thousands of years. Men and women cannot be free if they lack the right to private property and complete freedom in its responsible use. Those who do not have such property rights are slaves - regardless of whether or not their property has been seized by an oppressive government against their will or voluntarily turned over to some other entity, as is the situation, for example, with some religious sects. There are, of course, degrees of slavery. People can also lose or relinquish a part of their economic freedom.

Obviously, certain property rights, such as the allotment of airspace to airplanes, require communal adjudication. Also, a judicial system and usually a military defense are required to assure protection of property rights. These are legitimate functions of government.

Many aspects of our future access to energy look bleak today. The real reason for this is that our energy producers are being denied their fundamental rights to private property.

Why do we care that Al Gore is listed as author of a book filled with misrepresentations about energy production? Gore cannot fill our energy needs. His views should be irrelevant. We care about Gore's views only because misguided laws backed by the police powers of the state are being used to interfere with the property rights of those who can produce energy. This has hindered the advancement of nuclear energy in the United States and is increasingly interfering with the production of energy from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Why have we allowed the economic freedom of our most productive scientists, engineers, and businessmen to be so severely abridged that the flow of energy to our civilization has become imperiled?

While most of us might answer this question by means of a well-oiled tirade against oppressive politicians, bureaucrats, and other low types - and be correct in doing so - there is another consideration.

Every free human being (or assembly of human beings, such as a corporation, that shares their pooled rights) has the right to use his property as he wishes as long as he does not infringe on the same rights of other human beings.

For example, the sympathies of a twelve-man jury in a civil trial would ordinarily lie with the victim of a burglary and against the burglar - unless the victim also turned out to be a burglar. Regardless of the details of law, most people would agree that a burglar, as a result of his thievery, gives up his claim to sympathy when he, too, is burglarized. If I am mugged on a city street by a thug who steals my wallet, I do not gain the right to replace my loss by mugging someone else. If I become a mugger, I forfeit my right to property protection - and, of course, even my right to physical freedom if I am caught.

Most farmers are bitterly opposed to government agencies that are taking their property through regulations, taxes, fees, and confiscations. Yet, many of these same farmers are paid government subsidies with money taken in taxes by force or threat of force from other citizens who have earned that money by honest work. Since these farmers are accepting a share of the loot obtained by denying other citizens their property rights, they have lost the moral right to complain of their own losses to government thievery.

Recently, a local farmer complained to me about the new government regulations, fees, and potential fines that are destroying his property right to maintain a gravel dam necessary to irrigate his farm. When I suggested that he just ignore the bureaucrats and repair his dam in the same way that it has been maintained for over 100 years by owners of his farm, he replied, "I wouldn't want to make them mad. They are considering my request for a government subsidy to put in a sprinkler system. Then I can sell the farm for a higher price.'' It is an astonishing and very sad fact that many American industries support and encourage the taking of property from other Ameri-cans through governmental means in order to enhance their own prospects. Yet, they whine about their own suffering under the same sort of oppression. Much of our energy industry engages in these activities. In fact, a large part of the American utility industry has traded away most of its freedom in return for government-assured monopoly markets and guaranteed profits from utility commissions.

If all Americans and American corporations were to honestly audit all of their own sources of income and other market advantages and terminate all activities that involve the improper taking of the property of others, the benefits to the free market and to technological progress would be spectacular indeed. Imagine our government with no customers except for those involved in national defense, the maintenance of an honest judiciary, and minimal national housekeeping!

Free enterprise, science, and technology cannot thrive in an atmosphere of economic slavery. Each human being has a self-evident right to freedom, except for those people who make their way by destroying the freedoms of others. Those people deserve to be slaves.

If there were an annual international prize given for the most interesting peer-reviewed science journal (periodicals that publish detailed, rigorous reports of research within the scientific community - not articles for nonscientists), Health Physics, which is the official journal of

the Health Physics Society (published by Williams and Wilkins 351 West Camden Street, Baltimore, MD 21201-2436), would be, in my opinion, a certain winner - even though the vast majority of its articles are likely to put even the most enthusiastic of young physicists to sleep. Month after month, this journal inches forward, filled to the brim with research papers documenting the most accurate and detailed experiments possible with modern technology concerning radiation protection and exposure. Some of these articles describe rare cases of accidental high radiation doses and resultant health effects, but the vast majority deal with the distribution and detection of very small amounts of radioisotopes and radiation. Since instrumentation for these purposes has become extraordinarily accurate and the underlying science is relatively simple, research results reported in Health Physics tend to be detailed, exact, and complete with very rigorous mathematical analysis.

The underlying assumption supporting most of this work is that radioisotopes and radiation are very dangerous in even the tiniest quantities and must, therefore, be rigorously tracked down and quantitatively measured wherever they are found. It is evident that nearly all of these scientists blindly accept this assumption, which has, after all, been accepted dogma in their profession since the 1950s - although most of their articles do not discuss this. They just report their measurements.

The editors of Health Physics are apparently excellent classical scientists who are willing to publish any submitted paper that survives peer review of its experimental and theoretical rigor and its relevance to the journal's purposes. [You thought, perhaps, that this is the way all scientific research journals are operated? Welcome to the age of political correctness. Even the prestigious Proceedings of the United States National Academy of Sciences has formed a special medical censorship committee, which prevents publication of any paper with medical implications that are contrary to current medical dogma - regardless of the quality of the research or the importance of the conclusions.] It is this willingness of the editors of Health Physics to adhere to unbiased fairness in review that is causing a most startling form of chaos to break out within their publication. While the steady march of apparently endless radiation measurement articles continues apace like tin soldiers from a toy factory, interleaved among them are articles reporting research on health effects of low radiation doses - results that completely invalidate the underlying assumption of radiation dangers.

In two recent issues, for example, are "Setting Standards for Radiation Protection: The Process Appraised'' by H. Wade Patterson, pp 450-457, and an exchange of letters by D. J. Strom and B. Cohen, pp 488-490, Health Physics 72, No. 3, March 1997, and "Questionnaire Study of the Lung Cancer Risk from Radon in Homes'' by B. Cohen, pp 615-622, and "Problems in the Radon vs. Lung Cancer Test of the Linear No-Threshold Theory and a Procedure for Resolving Them'' by B. Cohen, pp 623-628, Health Physics 72, No. 4, April 1997.

The Patterson article points out that the no-threshold linear hypothesis originated during the 1950s to estimate the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests. This hypothesis had two advantages. First, it was simple, since it involved only a linear extrapolation to zero from health effects at very high doses. Second, it gave results that were politically desirable to those who wished to ban atomic testing. Citing this hypothesis as fact, they claimed world-wide damage to human health from tiny increases in background radiation.

People who certainly were good enough scientists to know better, yet determined to ban testing regardless of the truth, claimed to the public that this hypothesis was established scientific fact - the most infamous example being that of Linus Pauling in his debates with Ed-ward Teller. Teller was working to preserve American nuclear defenses against Soviet technology. From this activity Pauling wangled a Nobel Peace Prize and a Lenin Prize, the latter being well-deserved.

The primary disadvantage of the no-threshold linear hypothesis of radiation damage to health is that there is not a shred of experimental evidence to support it. The predicted health effects are so low that such experiments were exceptionally difficult to carry out. Politically, of course, proponents multiplied the tiny hypothetical effects by the total number of people on the earth and then cried crocodile tears over the calculated human suffering - none of which was ever observed.

Well, time moves on. Pauling is dead, and Edward Teller is revered both personally and as a proxy for the many patriotic scientists whose work preserved American freedom during the Cold War - and kept Western technology far enough ahead of the Soviets that the use of nuclear weapons has, so far, been deterred. In addition, experimental methods have improved. It is now possible to test the no-threshold linear hypothesis. This hypothesis has spectacularly failed all experimental tests. In every instance, low-level radiation has either been found to have no health effects within the experimental errors of the research, or has been found to have beneficial effects - radiation hormesis.

Access to Energy has discussed some of these experiments - most recently in the February 1997 issue. Figures 1 and 2 show additional experiments used as illustrations in the Patterson Health Physics paper.

Figure 1, adapted from "Radium in Man'' by R. D. Evans, Health Physics 27, p 504 (1974), gives tumor incidence versus radiation dose to the bone. Figure 2, adapted from "Further Observations on Environmental Radiation and Cancer in India'' by K. S. Nambi, S. D. So-man, and S. D. Further, Health Physics 59, p 543 (1990), gives cancer incidences as a function of environmental doses.

For a detailed analysis of this work, see the published papers. Any ten-year-old (at least a home-schooled ten-year-old) can see, however, that linear extrapolation to zero dose would be ridiculous for the data in Figure 1 and that the line best fitted to the data in Figure 2 is that labeled "Hormesis Hypothesis.'' Professor Bernard Cohen (who will be speaking at our San Diego meeting in June) has become the worst nemesis of the no-threshold linear hypothesis with his extensive studies of lung cancer in the United States as a function of radon levels. First, as we have described earlier, he has gathered data on 1,729 counties containing 90% of the United States population and including nearly a million deaths from lung cancer and 20 million deaths from other causes, along with mean radon levels for the homes in those counties (see Access to Energy, February 1997 and earlier articles). This work shows an inverse correlation between lung cancer and radon in the low dose levels - the higher the radon, the lower the lung cancer. Since average radon values are used (but specific radon values are not known for each lung cancer victim), these experiments rigorously disprove the no-threshold linear hypothesis but do not rigorously prove the hormesis hypothesis, so Co-hen has been cautious in claiming lung cancer protection by radon.

Considered with data from numerous other experiments, however, his results provide strong support for radiation hormesis.

Now Cohen has driven a new, unique nail into the coffin of the anti-radiation industry. In the first of his two articles in the April 1997 issue of Health Physics, Cohen reports the results of 266,000 individual radon measurements in American homes, which include 4,438 homes where an occupant died of lung cancer and 7,756 homes where a death occurred from some other type of cancer. Here deaths are individually paired with individual home radon levels. He treats basement radon levels separately from living area levels, smokers separately from non-smokers, and both the cancer-free homes and the homes with cancer other than lung cancer as separate control groups. The cancer victims had been living in their houses for an average of 19 years. Lung cancer is estimated to have a five-year latency period between induction and symptoms.

Although the statistical significance of his calculations varies, as expected, with sample sizes, in every instance there is unequivocal rejection of the no-threshold linear hypothesis. Figure 3 shows the lung cancer result when all 266,000 measurements are included - lung cancer and control. The linear regression curves shown are curved by the logarithmic axis (ask your home schooled twelve-year-old to explain this). The line labeled "theory'' (curving toward the top with no data near it) is that predicted by the no-threshold linear hypothesis, and the line labeled "best fit'' is the line resulting from a best mathematical fit of the actual data: "+3SD'' is the 99% confidence level of the theory line, while +1SD is the 67% confidence level of the best fit line.

Sample sizes were too small at the hormetic radon dose levels to prove beneficial effects from radiation, but most of Cohen's calculations of this work do show deviation of the measured averages in the hormetic region that are consistent with radiation hormesis.

Meanwhile, what is happening in Health Physics? (This is a very reputable peer-reviewed journal in a substantially exact science.) Well, the articles on exact measurements of tiny radiation exposures keep marching out of cookie-cutter laboratories, and the articles invalidating their underlying significance are being published right alongside them. This has led to another phenomenon that I have never before observed in a mainstream research journal.

The good guys are beginning to augment their articles with quotations about the scientific method. This is the equivalent of mathematics journals carrying parenthetical reminders that we must not forget that two plus two equals four. Both Patterson and Cohen have taken to quoting Richard Feynman. From Patterson we have: " 'As Richard Feynman said, 'In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation with nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

" 'It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

" 'Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess you make is poorly expressed and rather vague, and the method you use for figuring out the consequences is a little vague - you are not sure, and you say, "I think everything's all right because it's all due to so and so, and such and such do this and that more or less, and I can sort of explain how this works . . .'', then you see that this theory is good because it cannot be proved wrong! Also if the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental results can be made to look like the expected consequences. ' '' (Feynman 1965) (This last Feynman paragraph is beautifully applicable to the global warming and ozone scare industries.) In the second April 1997 Health Physics paper, Cohen computes the discrepancy between the no-threshold linear hypothesis and his experimental data from nearly one million cancer deaths and twenty million deaths from other causes to be "20 standard deviations, which has a probability of occurring by chance equal to the inverse of the total number of electrons plus nuclei in the entire [known] universe.''

The no-threshold linear hypothesis is as dead as the hypothesis that the earth is flat, and with it has died the underpinnings of the anti-nuclear energy industry - which spawned, through similarly devious science, most of today's "environmentalist'' movement. Their only last hopes are the claims that nuclear plants might explode (like nuclear weapons) or burn like Soviet plants (with no containment buildings). The explosion claim is inconsistent with basic physical laws - it just cannot happen - and nuclear plants without containment buildings could only be built by communists who, as Petr Beckmann used to say, decided that people were cheaper than concrete.

All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean - or even over America after hor-mesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases. We leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess how long it will take the failure of the no-threshold hypothesis to reach your television set.

"Solid Evidence to Support Home Schooling'' by Michael P. Farris in The Wall Street Journal, March 5 1997, p A18, reports that on a battery of tests in reading, listening, language, math, science, social studies, and study skills, where public school students average, by definition, 50th percentile, home schooled students average between the 80th and 87th percentiles with an overall score of 85th percentile.

On reading tests, the home schooled whites, hispanics, and blacks all scored at the 87th percentile, while in math home schooled whites were at the 82nd percentile and the minorities at the 77th percentile.

In the tax-financed "public'' schools, however, in reading tests whites were at the 57th, while the blacks and hispanics were both at the 28th. In math, whites were at the 58th, while hispanics were at the 29th and blacks were at the 24th. Imagine the howls of racism and child abuse that would be heard from the public schools and their unions if these numbers for home schools and public schools were reversed.

The cost? Public school costs are $5,325 per student year compared with $546 per student year in home schools (excluding, in both cases, the capital costs of the buildings in which the students are taught). Using the 22 CD-ROM self-teaching home school curriculum developed by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, this cost drops to $49 per student year plus the cost of a personal computer (already present in about half of American homes) and requires very little teacher time.

In last month's Access to Energy, we reported that the San Diego meeting on the weekend of June 13-15, 1997, will include presentations by Sallie Baliunas, Bernard Cohen, Michael Dowe, Gordon Ed-wards, Robert Jastrow, Cresson Kearny, Stanford Penner, Michael Sanera, Edward Teller, and Robert Zubrin. The program for the meeting has now been completed with the following additional speakers: Jeff Cooper, the world's foremost authority on the defensive use of firearms, will speak about this subject. Jeff Cooper is not only a world champion (the hotel facilities will, unfortunately, not accommodate a demonstration) and distinguished representative of the best traditions of American military and civilian defense, he is also an accomplished author whose practical and intellectual insights have had a greater impact upon firearms use than those of any other living American.

Donald D. Derr, a colleague of Michael Dowe, will co-deliver the presentation on electron-beam irradiation for preserving food.

Lou Guzzo, veteran reporter, editor, and radio and television commentator, will speak about environmental matters from the point of view of the two books that he co-authored with Dixy Lee Ray, Environmental Overkill and Trashing the Planet .

Martin Kamen, discoverer of carbon 14 and 1996 winner of the En-rico Fermi Award, will provide a few words of wisdom as he did at last year's meeting. Dr. Kamen may, in fact, be brought to us through the benefits of radiation hormesis. He received very large doses during the years that he operated the Berkeley cyclotron for E. O. Lawrence and carried out his famous work on carbon 14 and the use of radioactive tracers in biochemistry. He has enjoyed a long life in good health.

Bruce Kimball, principal research scientist and colleague of Sher-wood Idso at the U. S. Water Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona, will speak about his extensive experimental work on the effect of increased carbon dioxide levels upon the growth of plants.

Jane Orient, Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, will speak about growing government impediments to the ethical practice of medicine. Dr. Orient led AAPS efforts to defeat the Clinton socialized health plan and is widely credited with having been instrumental in its demise.

Myron Pollycove, Emeritus Professor of Radiology at the University of California at San Francisco, will speak about radiation hor-mesis, the beneficial health effects of low-level ionizing radiation.

Frederick Seitz, past President of the United States National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the Board of the George C. Marshall Institute, will speak about politicized science and the IPPC report. Dr. Seitz's analysis of unethical actions in the preparation of this 1996 report was published in The Wall Street Journal . As a result of this analysis and Dr. Seitz's great personal stature within the international scientific community, efforts by the IPPC and others to promote the global warming hypothesis regardless of its lack of experimental verification were significantly exposed and politically damaged.

Hans Sennholz, President of the Foundation for Economic Education and greatly respected expert on free-market economics, will speak about "The Bull Market and the Bubble Phenomenon.'' I will have the privilege of introducing the speakers and am also listed as the final speaker on Sunday afternoon. Since the program includes world-class authorities on virtually every topic that we have featured in Access to Energy, I suspect a new form of censorship. These people are going to leave me with absolutely nothing further to say.

Registration is $95 for the meeting, which includes two luncheons and the banquet dinner. Details were given in last month's Access to Energy. Telephone DDP at (520) 325-2680 for registration.

• "Russia's Big Bang'' by James T. Hackett in The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1997, p A16, gives a chilling report of the breakdown of command and control systems governing the launch of Russian nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Even Russian Defense Minister Igor Rodionov has said that, "Russia might soon reach a threshold beyond which its rockets and nuclear systems cannot be controlled.'' Col. R. Bykov, who served in the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces for 33 years, describes an incident in which a "smart aleck'' in a missile regiment figured out how to bring the launch contact points together without the launch code. Meanwhile the Clinton Administration refuses to deploy technology to intercept even one ICBM fired at the United States. Robert Jastrow will discuss this at the San Diego meeting.
  
  
• "A Nuclear Waste Firm is Sued - For Paying a Regulator Too Little'' by Bill Richards in The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 1997, p 1, reports that a Utah environmental regulator supplemented his $60,000 annual income with payments in cash, gold coins, and real estate valued at $600,000 from the nuclear waste company he was regulating. (Utah law sets a maximum of $50 on such payments.) When the regulator retired, the payments stopped. Now, the regulator is suing the company because, he claims, the company orally agreed to pay him an additional $5 million dollars.
  
  
• "Over the Top'' by K. Kemm in Green & Gold (P.O. Box 74416, Lynwood Ridge, Pretoria, 0040, South Africa) reports that the Alar apple scare was based on human equivalent doses to animals of 5 tons of apples or (another study) 23 tons of apple juice per person per day. The Alar was harmless, but fruit at these doses is definitely lethal.

• Low Level Radiation Health Effects: Compiling the Data, published by Radiation, Science, and Health, Inc., P. O. Box 843, Need-ham, MA 02194 is an excellent review by numerous scientists of experimental research invalidating the no-threshold linear hypothesis. Even Japanese atomic bomb survivors show radiation hormesis.
  
  
• Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View by Henry I. Miller, published by Academic Press (1997). This is a detailed, well-informed and documented account of the negative impact of government on the advance of science and technology.
  
  
• "A '60s Radical Mugged by Reality'' by Joel Kotkin in The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 1997, p A18, about the travails of Tom Hayden, who began his political career disrupting the Chicago Democratic National Convention and is ending it at the hands of Los Angeles voters uninterested in no-growth pseudoenvironmentalism. Hayden is quoted as saying, "I guess this means that the '60s are really over.''
  
  
• Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos, published by Little, Brown and Company (1994), the remarkable true story of engineers who preserved American air superiority regardless of foolish and inhibitory bumbling by their governmental customers.
  
  
• Executive Orders by Tom Clancy, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons (1996), in which Clancy's conservative recommendations for improvements in the U. S. government pace the action - and the only person mentioned under his real name is Jeff Cooper (an officer trained in Cooper's methods saves the life of the President's daughter). Or, if you prefer non-fiction, try Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson, published by Berkley Books (1986) about the life of U. S. Marine Sergeant Carlos Hathcock. Hathcock was recently featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal because his killing of an enemy soldier at a range of 2,500 yards in Vietnam has inspired a new sport. Then for a reality check, read We Were Soldiers Once and Young by H. G. Moore and J. L. Galloway, published by Random House (1992) about the bravery and deaths of American soldiers forced by their government to fight in Vietnam with no-win constraints.