THE BIRDS WALK BACKWARDS

"The clouds originate from six mammoth, cylindrical cooling towers that rise from the banks of the Ohio river like idols to the gods of energy. Superheated vapors from the nuclear works below form the clouds which appear so white and innocent. But they hang over Shippingport like a pall. Beneath them is a dying town contaminated by a deadly white dust of lead, cadmium, chromium, and iron and an even more deadly irradiated mist."

Atta boy! That's the type of journalism that keeps the cash rolling in. Not a word of it is true, of course, but what fool would expect the truth from Jack Anderson? The white mist is pure water, no matter whether the towers cool a coal-fired or nuclear plant. But since the 852 MW plant at Shippingport is nuclear, it not only produces no air pollution, but eliminates the following pollutants that would be produced by a coal-fired plant of equal capacity: 511 lbs of CO² per second, 8.5 lbs of SO² per second, 26 lbs of bottom and fly ash per second, as much nitrous oxides as 170,000 automobiles, countless tons of lime sludge generated in scrubbing the stack gases, and toxic metals the three mentioned in Anderson's concoction, plus 16 others.

"Others [in Shippingport]," continues this investigative journalist, "fear a lingering, invisible death from the radiation. There are tales of birds walking backwards."

The "pall" above Shippingport is one of the few things in town that is not radioactive. One that is radioactive is Jack Anderson when he comes to visit. Two Jack Andersons (perish the thought) would emit more radioactivity than the NRC allows for the Beaver Valley plant.

And birds walking backwards? They would stagger backwards if they could read Anderson's nonsense.

Jack Anderson is one of the proud new breed of investigative journalists; and that, as we all know from Woodward and Bernstein, means a journalist who is handed (or leaked) all his news on a silver platter. The source for Anderson' s piece of science fiction is no mysterious " Deep Throat;" some of it, says Anderson (and this time we believe him), was supplied by none other than Dr Sternglass, the renowned radiologist.

There are several reasons for his renown. One is that he was the first person in the world to have noted an increased infant mortality in the neighborhood of nuclear plants; and he has remained the only such person. Another is that he is one of the very few scientists ever to have been publicly condemned by his own professional society, the Health Physics Society; he was also officially refuted by the E.P.A., the US Health Service, and the States of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois and New York. Finally, there is his inspiring perseverance. For close to two decades he has been preaching his unfounded theories. Nowadays he can get nobody but Jack Anderson to swallow them; yet still he perseveres.

But not even Sternglass, one would hope, would go for the birds-walking-backwards bit, which seems to be Anderson's very own concoction. And why not? It sells, doesn't it?