PLUTONIUM AND SUPERSTITION

For a trip to Mars, only nuclear energy can provide sufficient energy for electricity, and for trips beyond, only nuclear energy can provide sufficient energy for anything, including fuel. Chemical fuels would make the spacecraft impossibly heavy, solar energy would make the collectors impossibly large (hundreds of square miles), and outer space suffers from an acute shortage of wind, chicken manure and other Lovinsian energy sources. So the rocket to be fired from Cape Kennedy to Mars uses a nuclear source of electric power (a small amount of heat running a thermocouple); and the safest, most suited substance for the job is plutonium.

That has the charlatans shrieking everywhere. To unmask them as quacks (in reply to their letters to the editor), feel free to use the following facts: plutonium is an alpha emitter, whose radiation is absorbed within a few inches of air; 3,500 tons of it have been com-mitted to the atmosphere in the bomb tests of the 1950s, but no known casualty has resulted; it is dangerous only if inhaled as dust in significant quantities (but even then many times less dangerous than the naturally found element radium); of the 25 Manhattan Project workers, each of whom inhaled 25 times (today's) permis-sible lung burden in an accident, 23 are still alive, the remaining two died of unrelated causes (one in a car accident); Prof B.L. Cohen of the U of Pittsburgh has challenged any nuclear critic to go on television with him and consume as much caffeine as he will consume plutonium, and I have repeated the challenge for my own person without prespecified limit (just keep eating till death us do part), but we have found no takers.

To commemorate "Hiroshima Day," the Denver/Boulder peaceniks tried and failed, as every year, to turn out 10,000 people to encircle Rocky Flats, which makes plutonium triggers for the DoD. (3,500 turned up.)

[Allow me to digress on two interesting points. First, some Boulder shops meant for the sensitive and relevant close for "Hiroshima Day," naturally, they are open on Pearl Harbor Day.

Second, the Colo. Libertarian Party supports the "encircle- ment," one of the openly stated reasons in past years being "to coalesce with the Left." These lovers of liberty now also operate a national computer "Libernet" (within the university networks, at taxpayers' expense, of course) where a libertarian scholar, four decades after Stalin, Mao and Hitler, posted the message, "Bush's proposed flag-burning amendment is the greatest threat to liberty in this century."]

To return to plutonium, this year it was recommended to the heroic protesters to put plastic bags round their shoes, lest they contaminate their cars as they get back into their Volvos, BMWs and Jaguars.

And that brings me to the readers who have taken me to task for using such strong words as "superstitious." Since the protection against the imagined plutonium by the plastic bags was precisely as effective as it would have been had they used a rabbit's foot dunked in witch's brew by the midnight moon, what other (polite) adjective can I use?