NUCLEAR NOTES

1) Madam Corazon Aquino, elected by Sen. Lugar, Rep. Solarz and a totally unknown number of Filipino votes, has canceled the almost completed Westinghouse nuclear plant and panhandled $250,000,000 from Japan for a coal-fired plant instead. In the rest of the world, 31 new reactors went on line last year, bringing the world total to 374 reactors in 26 countries, with a combined capacity of 249 GW, supplying 15% of the world's electricity. France is slightly ahead of its plan that will make 75% of its electricity nuclear by 1995; it has no viable antinuclear movement, and on the rare occasions when there is a demonstration, protestors must be imported from abroad. The French, no doubt, find antinuclear slogans irresistible when chanted in a thick German accent.

2) Hundreds of reindeer "had to" be slaughtered and fed to mink in northern Scandinavia after the Chernobyl accident, allegedly because of their cesium-137 content. But a group of radiologists from a Stockholm hospital sharply criticized the radiation limit for reindeer meat set by the Swedish government as irresponsible, politically motivated, and serving crude agricultural interests. Some 8,000 Swedish homes have a radon intake delivering a dose that is equivalent to consuming the cesium-137 in 7.5 tonnes of "contaminated" reindeer meat per year (sixty 12-ounce steaks a day). In Denmark, the head health physicist of the Riso Natl. Lab stated that eating annually 70 kg (154 lbs) of meat contaminated to five hundred times the Swedish standard would be a risk equivalent to smoking 1 cigarette per week. And a group of health physicists in Norway has advertised offering to buy reindeer meat "contaminated" up to 20,000 Bq/kg, or sixty-seven times the Swedish standard, for their families' refrigerators. [Partly based on information in the British newsletter Nuclear Issues.]

4) Don't miss Prof. B.L. Cohen's short article Radon: How great a hazard? (SASE to NCEB, Box 7732, Louisville, KY 40207). There is now also a fast radon analysis using two charcoal canisters in your home for 4 days for $45ppd. Results will be phoned (letter follows) within 48 hours. More from EnRad, Inc., 18705-B N. Frderick Rd., Gaithersburg, MD 20879 (tel. 301/948-8040).

5) Shoreham: would you like the story from the pols (and New York pols at that), or from 16 Brookhaven Natl. Lab scientists who have nothing to gain and their reputation to lose? Write for their 41-page report, free from Shoreham Safety Report, Box 344, Huntington, NY 11743.

6) Good: 20 questions: an introduction to food irradiation and The Chernobyl accident and its consequences, both background papers from AIF, 7101 Wisconsin Ave, Bethesda, MD 20814. Bad: When the UCS and Public Citizen covens panicked that nuclear plants use O-rings like the ones in the shuttle disaster, the AIF said the rings are utilized in systems with backups. Can the AIF do no better? Do the rings in nuclear plants seal off liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen at temperatures close to absolute zero, and is there then an explosion when they fail? Does a nuclear plant have any O-fings at all whose failure could lead to a major accident?

8) In early October Edward Teller gave a lecture on the SDI at the U. of Colorado. The Boulder Daily Camera simply censored the event, as it had done on many other occasions not to the liking of its leftist editors [AtE Mar 85]. Whereupon Prof. E. Rozek, who had invited Teller, gave his 200 students a homework problem: find out why. After some 60 telephone calls, the Camera capitulated. "We goofed," announced its publisher, lamely feigning an error, and brought the story after all. Activists for freedom of the press, please note and repeat where applicable.