The Boulder, Colo., Daily Camera is the type of rag you would expect in a city flaunting its contempt for human rights by declaring itself a sister city of three others
¾one in Nicaragua, one in the USSR, and one in Red China. Yet at times one can find instructive items in the heavily censored articles written by its ignorant editors instructive in how to "lie with the truth," that is. On 11/22/87 it printed a wild editorial about a nine-legged frog, ostensibly so disfigured by fertilizer made from nuclear waste by Kerr-McGee (KM) Corp., which has thus "raised the anxiety background level to new heights. . . " etc. Suppose the nine legs were not a lie: there was nothing to link it to fertilizer or to anything else.The fertilizer contains "nitrogen and trace amounts of radioactive uranium, radium and thorium and poisonous heavy metals includ-ing arsenic, lead, mercury, . . . " How ominous! Except that trace amounts of these same elements are also contained in the body of the editorial page editor, one William Jordan, and that includes his brain, which counts arsenic as a heavy metal and regards the nitrogen he breathes as dangerous.
The stuff is radioactive! So is Mr. Jordan.
For 10 years the company has been experimenting with dumping wastes as a fertilizer. Wastes? Nuclear wastes? Can't be. I read it again: the wastes are not "nuclear wastes" (implying highly active fission products), but wastes after processing uranium fuel. They are wastes all right, and they are (to some extent) radioactive, too. Strictly speaking, this is not a lie: but neither is it then a lie that Mr. Jordan is engaging in clandestine radioactive waste disposal
¾ every time he goes to the toilet.The NRC gave its approval to the plan based only on KM's information; neither the EPA nor the DoA were consulted. Now that was indeed strange, so I contacted KM for an explanation and chemical analysis. Fertilizer, as every gardener knows, consists of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds (percentages marked on the bag, e.g. 10-20-10) plus other nutrients. What KM developed was a process cleaning the nitrogen component (am-monium nitrate), a byproduct of their process stream, until it is as clean as the one you can get at a local store. They then buy the other two components from a regular commercial supplier, so that the end product is indistinguishable from fertilizers you can buy at any gardening store or supermarket.
The NRC is involved because it regulates all operations of the KM subsidiary (Sequoyah Fuels Corp.) that produces the by-product. Should the Daily Camera wish to purchase their used typewriter rib-bons, the NRC would have to approve, and the transaction would, presumably, not require consultation of the EPA or DoE.
The chemical analysis, incidentally, shows the activity in KM's nitrate (0.706 nanocuries/lb) some 700 times smaller than that of the activity of the purchased commercial phosphorus and potassium components. To put this into perspective, albeit not a very enticing one, the activity of a pound of Mr Jordan's butt has about 1.5 nanocuries, or about double that of KM's "nuclear wastes dumped as fertilizer."
Where does Mr Jordan get his information? From a similarly truthful article in the New York Times
¾or so he says, if you are still willing to take his word on anything under the sun. (On this occasion, however, he was right.)Was Mr Jordan lying? In a sense, no: only telling the incomplete truth. Neither am I lying (in that sense) when I say that the only reason why he has not yet been charged with drug trafficking is that the evidence against him is as yet insufficient to guarantee conviction.
Heed this example when reading the Jordans of the American press.
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Vol. 15, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 15, No. 5 Date: December 01, 2004 10:29 AM Title: Peace in Our Time
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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