THE ELUSIVE PRIMA DONNA

Is there anything more corrupt than buying votes with money? Yes: buying them with superstitions. Colorado voters, in the best traditions of the Tennessee monkey trials, have voted to put every under ground nuclear explosion in the state (for freeing gas and in situ processing of oil shale, for example) to a plebiscite - not earlier than the next general election. Many, perhaps most, candidates in the November elections scared the voters by the nuclear bogey and promised to tame or kill it.

Rep. Chet Holifield, who served on the Joint Committee for Atomic Energy since 1946 and has been singularly successful in holding the witch hunters at bay, is retiring and did not seek re-election. Egged on by mediaeval fanatics, the superstition mongers threaten to move into the void he leaves behind. Ralph Nader, the dean of witch hunters and corporation baiters, is running amok against nuclear power. In one of his more lunatic statements he told the Massachusetts legislature that a nuclear plant accident could lead to 100,000 deaths and the destruction of an area the size of Pennsylvania.

A charlatan like Nader could not get the attention of a marooned spinster if it were not for the propaganda the media make for him. On the other hand, they have dutifully ignored the Energy Research Group, a level-headed group of nuclear scientists of unusual excellence. In June of this year, they pubslished a position paper The Nuclear Debate: A Call to Reason. We doubt that anyone has presented the case for nuclear power in only 43 typewritten pages more fully or effectively. Unlike the lines you are now reading (for we find it hard to keep cool in the face of corrupt stupidity), the report is written in the cold steel of scientific reason, and it pulverizes the antinuclear superstitions.

The ERG (15 Jonathan St., Belmont, MA 02178) has presented its testimony at FEA hearings. It has also invited Ralph Nader to a public debate. It is, of course, impossible to get Ralph to shut up; but neither can you get him to put up. In public interviews, he has promised to take up the challenge, but at our last report, the ERG had recieved no response to four registered letters. Pressed by a New England Reporter, Prima Donna Nader replied with his usual modesty: "I'm not going to debate them in some little corner in front of 100 people." Demanding that they arrange a TV show, he boasted "I want to expose their phony arguments in front of 10 million people."

"Fine with us," said the ERG, and they are now arranging a TV debate. Nader is a great hero when demolishing straw men of his own making; what will he look like facing rational humans?