A TALE OF TWO TALLIES

The total tally of killed and injured was zero the danger was spotted in time, and countermeasures were taken. No big deal was made out of it, and quite rightly so. Like any other energy facility, solar energy has its risks; in fact, per energy produced, it presents greater hazards than most other forms of energy conversion, which still does not make it particularly dangerous. Indeed, its comparative lack of safety is not even its biggest drawback.

It would have been easy, if stupid, to make a big deal out of the incident. Hundreds of people could have been killed when one ton of ice is accelerated to a murderous velocity before it crashes onto a busy Manhattan street; and anyone endowed with Nader's fertile imagination of the improbable could doubtlessly turn these hundreds of potential victims into the total annihilation of all living souls in the entire Boston Washington corridor.

But the fact remains that nothing serious happened, and the only reason why we mention this rightfully neglected incident is to compare it to the ballyhoo around another event which occurred 3 days later. There were again no casualties, but there were two differences: One, nobody could possibly have been hurt; two, the energy facility was nuclear.

On January 23, a helium pump malfunctioned at the Fort St. Vrain nuclear plant some 50 miles north of Denver, Colo. (It is a one of its kind commercial power plant using helium rather than water as the heat convecting medium a safer and more efficient design than conventional reactors, but due to its newness plagued by many minor bugs.) As a result, some helium escaped into the atmosphere. The helium itself is not radioactive, but it can entrain other radioactive elements from the reactor. Of these, the one to watch is iodine, which could get into the food chain, particularly into the milk of cattle grazing in the area, and thus present a threat to human health (specifically, to the thyroid gland) if present in sufficient quantities. In small quantities, radioactive iodine is used for both diagnosis and therapy.

The quantity of radioactive iodine that had escaped at Fort St. Vrain amounted to less than one microcurie (>Ci, a unit of radioactivity). To gauge this, compare: A (healthy) patient in an uptake test of his thyroid gland gets 10 HCi at a time not into the atmosphere, but straight into his bloodstream; a patient treated for hyperthyroid gets 10 mCi (millicuries), or 10,000 times as much; and a patient treated for thyroid cancer gets 200 mCi, or 200,000 times as much. We would suspect that what goes into the sewage from a normal medical school every day must amount to many hundreds of thousands of times the amount escaped from Ft.St.Vrain on January 23.

If that iodine had not harmlessly dispersed in the atmosphere, but had been injected straight into the bloodstream of the females who next day demonstrated against the "Ft. St. Vrain cancer plant" in the streets of Denver, it would have done nothing for their thyroid glands, which might well be abnormally active.

It would have done nothing for the officials who busied themselves with proclamations on how they were going to implement special programs of daily milk inspections.

And it would have done nothing for the news twisters at CBS: At 3 p.m. EST on January 23, the CBS national news bulletin stated that "a cloud of radioactivity is now approaching Denver."

That "information" they had from the Associated Press, which claims to have obtained it from Don Bower, sheriff of Weld County; if he can shoot as straight as he gives information, his rear end must be riddled with bullets.*

But more interesting than the good sheriff's rear end is what the wire services and network newsrooms consider a reliable and knowledgeable source of information for their nuclear horror propaganda not statements by scientists or even public health officials, but the hunches of a boondock sheriff.

Neither AP nor CBS nor any other network ever put out a correction, of course. Next time you hear more nuclear horror propaganda on the radio, remember it is brought to you by your friendly newscasters who said a radioactive cloud was approaching Denver on January 23, 1978.

* We assume, for no good reason really, that AP quoted him correctly. Our apologies to Sheriff Bower if the quote turns out to be yet another lie.