... AND MORE ECONOMISTS

Rifakes, vice president of a utility that operates both nuclear and coal-fired plants, has no reason to massage his data.

But Komanoff be komanoffed; the more depressing point is that this type of economics rates a full page, specially boxed and replete with plug where and how to get it, in Science, the weekly of the American Association for the Abolition of Science and the Advancement of Censorship. Not a word about other studies or Rifake's report (if Science's gossip scribblers think that utility economics is what science is about); and SE2's activities, such as requesting that its Nobel Prize winning scientists get the same chance to appear before the NRC as the obstructionists, continue to be censored.

And who sings Komanoffs praises in the New York Times? None other than A. Parisi, whom we met on his way up in Business Week when he called Commoner's Marxist economics "heady stuff," and described himself as one to whom the Second Law of thermodynamics was unclear until he studied Commoners book. That is like saying the laws of equilibrium were unclear to him until he studied them with Humpty Dumpty; Commoners tutelage is well visible in Parisi's statements like "The laws of thermodynamics dictate that as much as two thirds of the energy [fuel-based power plants] escape in the form of heat." (Nuclear breeders and MHD have reached more than 50% efficiency; thermodynamics has no laws limiting efficiency to anything but a function of the working temperatures.) Parisi has advanced via the New York of the Petroleum and Energy Intelligence Weekly, where his intelligence is now on display for all who seek to abolish obscene profits; a subscription will cost them but $780 a year.

Meanwhile The Nation has risen to the standards of the National Examiner by printing Sternglass' horror fiction; what it did not print was a response sent to the editor by Dr A.P. Hull of the Brookhaven National Laboratory ("Beyond using data in this misleading manner, Dr Sternglass has in this instance gone so far as to invent data...")

The Washington Star (3/29/81) reviews a work tellingly called The Killing of Karen Silkwood, which seems to admit that she was unstable and suspected of intentionally contaminating herself with plutonium before she died in a one-car accident (see J. Srouji, Critical Mass, Aurora Publ., Nashville, 1977). But reviewer J. Conaway has a new hunch: "The dirtiest industry yet devised by man" (and he does not mean the mass media) killed Silkwood to cover up the nuclear armament of Israel and South Africa.

What distinguishes all of these scribblers from Jane Cook, no longer with a red-faced Washington Post, is that their fiction is not good enough to win a Pulitzer Prize.

S.S. Sinderson, Conservation Chairman of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania In the Bulletin, the ASWP's monthly, February 1981