ECHOES AND UPDATES

1) Dear Dr. Beckmann: 26/9/85

Ernest Sternglass came to this area last month... Among his claims was one that the controlled release of radiation after the TMI incident caused a measurable increase in the amount of radioiodine in the thyroid glands of sheep in Ireland. If you would like a copy of the video tape, I would be glad to supply it.

Dear Mr. V.: Thank you, but no thanks. The man is getting so silly, it is no challenge to refute him anymore. His fraudulent correlation of SAT scores with bomb tests was described in the Feb. 85 issue, and the effect of TMI on the sheep in Ireland is doubtlessly more of the same. I wonder what it did to the tigers of Bengal.

I understand he became such an embarrassment to the U. of Pittsburgh that they made him an offer to retire he could not refuse, and I wish him luck, for though he does not know it, he does no less than I in discrediting the antinukes, albeit by a different method.

2) Dear Dr. Beckmann: 9/22/85

When Israeli fighter bombers took out the Iraqi nuclear reactor, where was the fall-out? Are there any reports or studies on this incident?

3) Dear Mr. D: The research reactor was destroyed before it went into operation, so that no fission products had yet formed. The uranium in fresh fuel (or anywhere else) has a half-life of 4.6 billion years, and therefore radiates insignificantly.

A brief report by the deputy director of the Interntl. Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Safeguard Dept. can be found in the IAEA Bulletin, Dec. 1981, and is notable mainly for its omissions: it ignores the tons of depleted uranium which could not be used for anything but breeding plutonium in the manner India made its bomb, and it claims that modifications of the reactor for this purpose would be detectable. (By whom?) Among those who fell for the IAEA story is Harvard professor Richard Wilson, who moralizes about the incident in a letter to Nuclear News (July 85) in a discussion of Iraq's air raids on two unfinished Iranian nuclear plants in February and March of this year.