RETURN OF THE HICCUPING LEPER

Remember the hiccuping leper in last month's item on floating nuclear plants? Truth is stranger than fiction: On March 16, a Dr. D. De Nike was one of 30 guests on a Sierra Club visit to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station run by the Southern California Edison Co. When they came to the observation room, he pulled out a table knife and an empty medicine bottle and triumphantly proclaimed that the bottle might have contained nitroglycerine.

He was coolly informed that, first, the SCEC had, in advance, added security personel and strengthened its security measures in anticipation of a sabotage hoax, and second, that even if the armed guards on hand were unable to subdue him, his silly little bottle of explosives would not make much impression on the reactor core located many feet away with thick reinforced concrete around the steel containment vessel. At most it could have caused an automatic shutdown of the reactor, and in no case could there have been any leak of radioactivity.

Such puerile buffoonery is easy to suspect in the case of a Sierra Club member; but what if there are no such clues to a person's mentality? In particular, when breeders go into operation, could not a nut or a criminal steal some plutonium to make a bomb? That is presently the most fashionable scare tactic.

Apart from the fact that reactor-bred plutonium is isotopically different from the plutonium } used in bombs, such an attempt would run into three majors obstacles. First, the nut would have to get at the plutonium; and the danger being concentrated at one point, it is easy to eliminate (the gold of Fort Knox has never yet been stolen). Second, all he could get would be plutonium oxide, not plutonium; and a plutonium refinery is not exactly the thing he could hide in his basement. Third, and perhaps most decisive, it is not enough to have sufficient plutonium to exceed the critical mass. The nut must also have a triggering mechanism to bring the subcritical masses together long enough to cause a sustained chain reaction (instead of the initial explosion blowing itself out again). Most of the theory of nuclear bombs is now accessible to experts; but since 1945, the triggering mechanism has been, and still is, one of the most closely guarded secrets. It is not even known whether the U S. Russia, France and China use the same mechanism. What is known is that it is not of the kind that can be invented in a bicycle shop.

Instead of buffooning with table knives, Dr De Nike would do better to take a look at the risks of not going nuclear. For a start, he might find that there are now 50,000 US miners afflicted with black lung disease. But the anti-nuclear crusaders are not in the business of protecting people; they are in the business of technophobia.