SUPPORT GREENPEACE--HELP STARVE A WHALE

According to Prof. Luckey's book Hormesis [AtE Oct 81] living organisms not only have never been without radioactivity, but they need it as an essential ingredient to survive; small amounts of it are decidedly beneficial.

If that is so, how can deep-sea fish and other marine life survive? Screened from cosmic radiation, atmospheric carbon 14 and from the sea bed by thick layers of salt water, where would they get their radioactivity from?

From the sea. The sea contains 400 billion curies (Ci) of potassium 40, 100 million Ci of radium, and I billion Ci of uranium 238. The top inch of the sea floor contains several more million Ci of uranium; the Mississippi River alone adds 363 Ci of this renewable resource every year, 190 in the water and 173 in the sediment.

Many marine organisms receive tens of rems (not millirems!) per year from polonium 210 which, like plutonium, is an alpha emitter. As a rule they get more than 10 rem/year, and one type of shrimp gets an annual dose of 100 rems this way. (For people, the National Radiation Protection Board sets 0.5 rem/year for the public, and 5 rem/year for occupational exposure, of which not more than 3 are to be absorbed in any one quarter.) The high doses absorbed by marine life have been discovered relatively recently, and further evidence of the avid absorption of radionuclides by fish and shrimps was published last month (see below).

As we have pointed out before, the sea and its relatively sparse life is starved for organic material, and possibly for radionuclides, too. Plankton and other small organisms, for example, are food for whales. The amount of low level wastes dropped into the sea is of the order of 100,000 Ci, and with hundreds of billions of Ci already there that is, well, a drop in the ocean. It gives no significant support to these organisms.

Therefore the green peaceniks of Greenpeace could not seriously damage marine life even if they were to succeed in depriving it of man's contributions to its diet. However, they can try, and they do. Their commitment to non-violence, clearly displayed last January 30, when they staged a nocturnal attack on the Zion, Ill., nuclear plant by the light of flares shot into the air, again came to the fore last August, when they forcefully and in defiance of a court order broke into the British freighter Gem and chained themselves to the platforms used to dump low level wastes into the Atlantic under international supervision. However, the crew rigged up a further platform and dumped 2,700 drums of what marine life needs, though even then they were obstructed by more non-violent Greenpeaceniks trying to maneuver inflatable boats below the chute. Alas, British naval marksmanship is not what it used to be, and every one of the drums missed these enemies of the sea.

In today's usage, Greenpeace behavior is classed as nonviolent, since it does not use flamethrowers, poison gas or even (like the Friends of the Earth) scaling ladders and lances. It differs, nevertheless, from that of other people, most of whom are born with an innate love of nature. Greenpeace and their kind evidently do not have much of that. If you, too, hate the creatures of the sea, send them a contribution.

Radiation research, meanwhile, has been enriched by findings that have hitherto escaped regular scientific methods. "As many as thirty people experienced the same prophetic nightmare in which they saw the cooling towers of Three Mile Island glowing deep red, with lightning crackling all around," reports Larry Arnold, director of Harrisburg's "Para Science Informational," thus lending support to the findings of other well publicized researchers such as Harvey Wasserman, Ernest Sternglass and John Gofman. To avert future nuclear disasters, Director Arnold has set up a national telephone hot line for psychic warnings. Do you, perhaps, have persistent dreams of Helen Caldicott chewing her big toe, or nightmares of John Holdren being on the faculty of a respectable American university? Call Para Science International at 717-236-0080.

The report appeared in the April issue of Omni, originating from the same publisher as Penthouse, which likewise publishes pictures seen in many people's dreams.

[More."Evidence of high natural radiation doses in certain mid-water oceanic organisms," Science, 1 Oct 82, pp. 54-56; C.L. Osterberg, "Why not the ocean?" IAEA Bulletin, vol. 24, no. 2 (Summer) 1982; C. Osterberg, "Waves of the future," Cornell Executive, Spring 1982.