QUADRUPLE GENOCIDE BY FOUR ELEMENTS

Uranium, reprocessed by the Fernald, Ohio, plant, has a halflife of 4.5 billion years (710 million years for the minute amounts of U 235), which makes its radioactivity utterly negligible. Its only con-nection with radiation is via the elements in its decay chain, parti-cularly radon and its daughters. Coal contains 1.7 ppm of uranium (not to mention the far more active carbon 14 and other radioiso-topes); with some 800 million tons per year burned in the US, 544 times as much uranium is released into the environment by coal burning in a single year (1,360 tons) than in the entire life of the Fernald plant (allegedly 2.5 tons).

Like all heavy metals (such as lead), uranium is a bone-seeking chemical toxin. But that aspect is of little use to the scaremongers. Only radiation was of interest to Sulzberger's sickening swindlers.

Tritium is hydrogen with atomic weight 3, manufactured at the Savannah River plant as part of the fuel for nuclear weapons. With a half-life of 35 years, it must be continually replaced in these weapons, for they are not cannon balls that can be kept on the shelf indefinitely. If you are over 30, you probably remember the greenish glow of the figures on watch dials, in part caused by the radium in the paint. In the mid-196Os it was replaced with tritium, a weak beta (elec-tron) emitter, for safety reasons. That is what the assorted hacks arc trying to scare you with when a little of it is involved in "deadly radioactive leaks" (MacLean's, Canada). Also, a fuel rod melted at Savannah River, and "if the process had not been checked" (Slime), disaster and meltdown could have followed, just as when one of its editors fell out of bed: if the ground hadn't stopped him, he could have fallen thousands of feet to his death.

Carbon is used as a moderator in the plutonium-producing N-reactor in Hanford, Wash., and also in Chernobyl. Therefore the two must be identical just like a grand piano and Willie Horton's jailers (they both have keys, don't they?). Unlike Chernobyl, the N-reactor has negative reactivity (reducing the cause of an excursion from normal operation), horizontal tubes (from which the water cannot flow out by gravity), oodles of automatic safety equipment, and perhaps most important, a very low power density. However, after Chernobyl, Reagan's wimps gave in to the political demand for a safety study, found (surprise!) that it was 44 years old, and shut it down. What is supposed to have happened there is not alto-gether clear, since even Slime's professional muckrakers found nothing that did not have to be preceded by may, might, can, could, all of it about events between 1944 and 1956, with the evidence consisting of anecdotal cancer cases. Soon after I came to Ame-rica, President Kennedy was assassinated. Clearly it must have been I who killed him.

Plutonium, used in the nuclear-bomb triggers made at Rocky Flats, Colo., is an alpha emitter whose radiation is absorbed within a few inches of air. If it gets into the lung, it may eventually cause lung cancer, though even here past accidents have shown that the danger is not acute.

You will probably not believe what happened at Rocky Flats (the only case where I have direct information): Somebody forgot to remove (no, not display, but remove!) a sign "Respiratory Protec-tion Required " at the exit of a hall when it was no longer required. Three workers entered the hall without masks, then left, saw the sign, and mistakenly thought they might have breathed plutonium dust. This was an "incident," and the media ghouls did the rest. Measurement of their bodies revealed that they might have been exposed to a possible maximum of 0.03 mrem, an amount that testi-fies, above all, to the sensitivity of the measuring instruments. In alpha radiation, this is one third of a cigarette, or spending 1 ½ hours in an American home with the average radon concentration. In general radioactivity it is one hundred times less than Colorado's Schroeder (who played this triviality to the hilt) gets when she takes an unauthorized jet flight at taxpayers' expense, and three thousand times less than she would get if she spent a year in Denver rather than Washington.

That is the big secret Reagan's sissies are hiding.