QUACKS FOR SOCIAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

Nuclear power is badly off because the nuclear industry avoids comparisons in safety, health and environment so as not to offend their coal-burning customers, the utilities. But nuclear defense plants are even worse off because they are run by the DoE, which is bent only on media imagery and indirectly supports the Green lies by settling meritless claims for millions of taxpayers' dollars as they did in Fernald, Oh. [AtE Sep, Oct 89]. So the lies about Rocky Flats, Hanford and other weapons plants go unanswered.

Rocky Flats now has an organization, CANDID (Box 283 Broomfield, CO 80038; tel. 303-825-3738), independent of the plant's make-no-waves management, to inform the public. But Hanford continues to be the antinukes' national whipping boy. In mid-October the Syracuse (NY) Herald-Journal gave special prominence to a letter "At weapons plants nudear dangers are a dirty secret," signed by Richard W. Weiskopf, M.D., as a member of the notorious Physicians for Social Responsibility.

"From 1944 to 1947 Hanford spewed 400,000 curies of radioac-tivity into the atmosphere, raising the risk of thyroid cancer," he whines. But the thyroid gland is mainly prone to injury by iodine 131, whose halflife is 8 days; so that the threat 43 years (1,424 halflives) later is probably a lot smaller than of this alleged M.D. being drowned in a barrel of prune juice by a one-eyed twin in a leap year. Another M.D., R.V. Rose of Pasco, Wash., reports that he has probably seen more thyroid cancers in the Columbia basin than anyone else in the profession. He notes that over the last 11 years there has been only one death of thyroid cancer in each of two counties: Beron, which includes all of the Hanford project, and Franklin, which is downwind from it.

The other point is the cheapness of this demagoguery. It is true that large quantities of radioactivity were released at Hanford in 1944, and no doubt other mistakes were made. But the country was at war, and gambling against time to save lives on the battlefield.

And not only on the battlefield. Judging by his name, Weiskopf may well be Jewish, but that seems to do very little to remind him that Hanford played its part in thwarting the German nuclear pro-gram and in the overall war effort of the allies, including the libera-tion of Auschwitz in 1944. Would this alleged M.D. be willing to say that the Manhattan project should have been slowed down by exaggerated safety regulations while the gas chambers were exter-minating prisoners at the rate of up to 6,000 a day? Hanford played its part in enabling Richard W. Weiskopf to survive in freedom and to answer my question.

[More: Letters by R.V. Rose, M.D., and Dr Ralph E Lapp to New York Times, 8/22/90, Hanford Reach Study, Ntl. Park Service, April 1990 (on p.5 it notes "Large- ly because of the restrictions established in 1940 when nuclear activities began on the Hanford Reservation, the Reach retains many characteristics of water, vegeta- tion, and wildlife that have been lost elsewhere."). A bizarre oddity in the abundant anti-Hanford literature: a 7-page call to shut down the facility by the Communist Party USA (Seattle, Feb. 1988). see also low cancer rates of workers, [AtE Sep 78]; false comparison of N-reactor [AtE Dec 88]; on Physic. f. Soc. Respons.: Doctors against Health, $2 from this newsletter.]