HOLOCAUST AT SEA

A new battery will power a weak flashlight for many weeks, but will be drained quickly by a strong light. A loaf of bread lasts the longer the slower you eat it, and a quantity of fuel lasts forever if you don't burn it.

Obvious?

Not to the media moguls or to the supreme intellects who set their tone. For in the same way, the halflife of a radioisotope is inversely proportional to its level of activity. The dangerously high levels are produced by shortlived nuclides. Radiologist Jane Fonda will frighten you with long halflives, and poet Allan Ginsberg will scribble "poems" about the 25,000-year halflife of plutonium, but it takes only a minimum of horse sense to see that if an element is stable and does not radiate at all, its halflife is infinite.

Among the most inocuous radioactive elements, therefore, is uranium (U 238), for its halflife is 4.5 billion years. In practice, the only radioactive danger arises in its natural decay chain producing the Unmentionable Gas radon, and that is not so dangerous by its activity (halflife 22 days) as by its role as a transporting agent; the real radioactive danger comes with the radon daughters, with halflives of only hours.

It inexorably follows that the brilliant intellects in Slime, Newspeak, the Public Brainwashing System, etc., will studiously avoid breathing a word about the radon daughters, for it most inconveniently causes lung cancer in energy conservation (not in the English Channel, which is rather well ventilated), but when a ship with a uranium cargo sinks (the chemical combination with fluoride does not affect its radioactivity), they keep it in the headlinesnes for weeks. Newsweek used phrases like "a nuclear miss... Fears of nuclear contamination across Western Europe... Compared with the threat of a nuclear disaster, the danger of an old-fashioned oil spill came almost as a relief."

Fortunately, cooed the Newsweek scholars, "uranium hexafluoride has a low level of radioactivity until it is converted into enriched uranium for nuclear reactors... " Quite false: enrichment does not significantly change the level of activity, which remains very low. (Reason: enrichment raises the fraction of U 235 from 0.9% to about 3%, but the halflife of U 235 is 710 million years.)

Any danger from radioactivity is thus close to nonexistent; but what would happen if a terrorist nevertheless somehow brought the 3% enriched uranium to a nuclear explosion?

He would surely be guaranteed the next Physics Nobel Prize.