TALL BUT TRUE FROM COLORADO

105 years later, Packer might not have been charged with mere cannibalism; he might have been guilty of radioactive waste disposal as well. Flesh and blood, mainly due to potassium 40, is quite significantly radioactive, and House Bill 1162, now before the Colorado Legislature, prohibits any kind of radioactive waste disposal, defining radioactive as "any material, solid, liquid or gas, which emits ionizing radiation spontaneously."

This writer had intended to testify in favor of this insane bill, quoting copiously from the statements of such sages as doctors John Cobb, Hugo Sternglass and John Goffman, and pointing out the benefilts accruing to the State (such as the jobs created by extending the sewage lines from Denver's residential districts some 90 miles across the state line into Wyoming). But he was dissuaded from doing so by friends who pointed out that this newsletter might lose credibility if he played the clown during the hearings. As we go to press, physicians hospital administrators, scientists and others with an underdeveloped sense of humor will testify against this priceless bill, and will in all probability kill it, instead of letting it go on the books and be thrown out of court the first time somebody is charged with breaking the law by belching.

And more weird stories from Colorado:

To this day, the boys from Cronkite's Brainwashing Service (CBS) have neither retracted nor apologized for their news item, nationally broadcast on 23 Jan. 1978, that "a radioactive cloud is now approaching Denver;" nor have the boys from Universal Political Indoctrination or from Assorted Piffle, whose wires carried similar stories. The escaped radioactivity proved to be ridiculously small: The most worrisome isotope, iodine, escaped in quantities so small that its radioactivity was 10,000 times smaller than that of iodine injected directly into the blood of a healthy patient in a thyroid take-up test.

Nevertheless, the "incident" was not without consequence: The owner of a wildlife farm claimed that an elk of his died of starvation when he could not feed it because the police had blocked all roads in the vicinity of the power plant until the gravity of the leak had been established. He therefore fed the carcass to a lion who, apparently unaccustomed to such diet, also gave up the ghost. (A lion? In Colorado? That's what the man claimed when filling under Price-Anderson insurance.)

The claim was handled by American Nuclear Insurers, a private company, for under Price-Anderson, the federal government does not pay until the claims from an incident reach $120 rnillion; it is taking in fat premia, but has never paid a penny yet. ANI rejected the claim on the grounds that "the claim died with the lion."

This improbable (but doubly checked and confirmed) story came to light when ANI published a summary of claims filed in various nuclear "incidents" in the past 22 years.

The episode will be of interest to legal scholars: If the Public Service Co. of Colorado had run a coal train over the elk owner's children, drowned his wife in a hydroelectric feedstock, poisoned his father with natural gas, and boiled his mother in oil, the poor man would not have collected a penny without proving negligence or malice. But Price-Anderson is no-fault insurance (the only no-fault insurance in the energy industry), and all he has to do is show that there was an "incident" and that he was damaged by it, regardless of who was at fault. If the alleged lion had not devoured the elk and thus destroyed the corpus delicti, the bereaved owner of both would have collected from a private insurance company ultimately funded by the electric rate payers.