FAIRNESS FOR THE FIRE FIGHTERS!

The Journalist's Guide to Nuclear Energy by Edward Edelson, science editor of the New York Daily News was commissioned by the Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF), which gave Edelson full editorial freedom. The booklet of 61 pages is very good as far as it goes: its information is accurate, as one would expect an AIF publication to be. (In 12 years of publishing this newsletter I have not once found AIF information wrong or even inaccurate.) But if I were limited to 60 small pages on the vast subject of nuclear energy, I would surely include (especially in the chapters on reactor safety, accidents, wastes and transportation) the all-important question: Is it safer and healthier than what we have now?

Edelson did not ask; but had he done so, I wonder if the AIF would have published his report. For the AIF and the antinukes, each for their own reasons, brush this question under the carpet. The antinukes' motives are obvious; the AIF, when pressed, will incongruously answer "We don't want to play up one energy industry against another" (read:

"We can't do that to our clients, the utilities, nor to our brethren in the coal lobby").

The booklet contains 11 "Basic Information Sources" added by the AIF (not Edelson). Incredibly, it contains the Scientists' Institute for Public Information (SIPI), the disinformation center founded by Barry Commoner. Have they changed? Right now there is a media-inspired uproar in Nevada about some lowlevel (!) wastes to be shipped by rail from New Jersey, so I tried SIPI for information. What they gave me, apart from a totally useless number in Nevada, was the number of none other than Marvin Resnikoff, director of the Sierra Club's "Radioactive Waste Campaign."

At this point (for lack of space) I would earnestly request readers to write for a free copy of Shipping Casks for Spent Fuel: Safe Enough? to Committee for Energy Awareness, 735 1 St. NW/#500, Wash. DC 20006. First and foremost, this contains some excellent material on the safety of shipments of radioactive material, well worth knowing for its own sake. Second, it is a rebuttal of 10 claims by the Sierra Club, which will give readers an idea of the depth of falsehood disseminated by Mr. Resnikoff. And third, this is the man to whom journalists are eventually referred via the AIF, for it has a policy of true fairness: every fire station should have at least one arsonist.