ECHOES AND UPDATES

I spent the summer of 1944, including D-Day, near England's southwestern-most tip ("Lizard Head") as an LAC [= PFC] of 311 Czechoslovak Squadron, RAF. This part (Cornwall) is one of England's loveliest, and together with neighboring Devon, far and away its most radioactive (see map in [AtE Apr 90]). Near the Cor-nish town of St. Austell, reports Nuclear Issues (London), amateur mineral collectors have found individual spots where due to rich uranium ore in the ground the natural background level reaches 4.3 millirem per hour (37.7 rems/year) . That is more than 75 times the maximum level recommended for the public by the EPA, and 377 times the maximum level recently recommended by the British National Radiation Protection Board. Not surprisingly, it is presumably hormesis that puts the Cornwall and Devon cancer in-cidence well below the British national average, much like Colorado and Wyoming in the US.

International negotiations to draft a global warming treaty were adjourned in late June until September. The bad boy is the US, which has committed itself "only" to greenhouse gases emis-sions in 2,000 no greater than in 1987. Not because global warming is a scientific disgrace based on doctored and inconclusive data and on the studious omission of the counterevidence, but because to go further (!) would be too costly. This infuriates some other delegations ("environmental" groups are on equal status with government delegations) which blame such obstinacy on the "power lobbies" of US coal companies and utilities (see Nature, 7/4/91). That's a laugh. The "environmentalists" get their abundant funds largely from the energy corporations and utility wimps who do nothing but cry "We are the Greenest!" They have so far done nothing effective to expose the warming or ozone hoaxes.

Coal is delivered in 38,000 100-ton rail cars per 1,000 MW plant per year; a nuclear plant of equal capacity requires only three automobile trucks. Between 100 and 150 Americans die each year in accidents at railroad crossings involving coal trains, but the corresponding number for nuclear fuel has not, to my knowledge, been estimated. Now an article in Resources, Summer 1991 (Res. f.the Future, Washington, DC) quotes a Battelle Inst. Report es-timating the deaths associated with trains taking spent nuclear fuel to the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository. This includes radiological deaths (absent from fresh fuel); for regular trains without interim monitored storage in the East it amounts to 0.83 deaths over 25 years, or roughly 0.0332 deaths per year. Adjusted for the US coal/uranium ratio (2.75), the result is still 1,136:1 in favor of nuclear in the transportation of the same energy.

Surprisingly, no one in Madison, Wisc., has yet spoken up to oppose Jeffrey Dahmer's persecution for his sexual orientation and preferred lifestyle. However, Earth First!, some of whose members have been charged with carrying bombs and blowing up power lines, has sued the FBI. They have also published a list fingering the CEOs and chairmen of oil, timber, mining, and other companies, urging readers to "do whatever you deem ap-propriate." During the 1990 Redwood Summer protests, Heil Erde! issued leaflets calling for "Non-nonviolence," explaining that "Nonviolence has plagued us for decades. [It] only affirms the privileges of the white upper-middle class and the habits of obedience to authority . . . We need to disassemble civilization . . .

Find out about the techniques of non-nonviolence and think up new ones. Then go into the forest, or the desert, or the office build- ing and do what you have to do." [Source: Information Digest, 2805 St. Paul St., Baltimore, MD 21218.]

"Dear Abby: My teen-age daughter has been receiving pen-pal letters from a girl in the Ukraine who lives in Dniepropetrovsk a few hundred miles from Chernobyl. Every time she receives a letter I can't help but wonder if it is safe (non-radioactive). . . Please help me." (7/26/91)