How furbish is the lousewort?

Nader's Public Citizen Health Research Group has called for a ban of ionization smoke detectors, now protecting some 4 million American homes and fully approved by the NRC and the National Fire Protection Association; the detector uses a radioactive element, and Naderite spokesman Dr S. Wolf, who not long ago embarrassed himself by an inept analysis of cancer incidence, claims that even the slightest bit of radioactivity poses a cancer threat.

That he should ignore the almost 12,000 annual American deaths in fires, as well as the thousands of lives saved by these sensitive and reliable detectors, fits the Naderite pattern to perfection; but what this star of the medical profession has also overlooked is that he gets more radiation from his own blood than he would get from a smoke detector even if he wore it 8 hours a day on the top of a dunce's cap.

Now these two cases of dementia environmentalis are merely funny: The Maine project appears to have been an unsound federal porkbarrel anyway; and it is Darwinian justice that anyone foolhardy enough to give credence to Naderite nonsense should run the risk of being burned alive.

But not exactly rolling with laughter are the more than 400 construction workers who were laid off last month at the site of the $2 billion Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire after some petty EPAcrat reversed a previous decision approving the world's most complex cooling system seven miles of 19 ft diameter hard-rock tunnel to discharge warm water through 22 nozzles spread along 1,000 feet of ocean floor, just so the Atlantic would not be warmed up by more than 4 degrees F near the discharge point. The EPAcrat could find no iron-clad proof that the system would not interfere with the migration of a fraction of Mya arenaria larvae, which, as everyone knows, are no less important to human welfare than the furbish lousewort.

Not rolling with laughter, either, are the shareholders of the Public Service Co. of N.H., nor investors throughout the country who are asked to come up with the capital for sorely needed energy facilities; and certainly not rolling with laughter will be the consumers of New England, already critically dependent on nuclear power virtually their only alternative to oil - when the power runs out; their laughter will be no heartier than it was in Polo, Mo., when the gas ran out in freezing weather last month.

Nobody, in fact, is rolling with laughter; unless it is Russell E. Train, the outgoing Grand Protector of the Environment, who has so far refused a summary reversal of the demented Seabrook decision.

But things are not hopeless. A few more outrages like Seabrook, and perhaps the country will realize that it is time to protect the environment from the Environmental Protection Agency.