YUCK! PLUTONIUM TOXICITY AGAIN...

Ouch, the Khrushchev calluses are beginning to hurt badly, and I refer you to [AtE Oct 89, Dec 89] and to pp. 246-256 of B.L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option, Plenum Press, New York, 1990.

Instead of getting repetitious, let me note how the GAB (Great American Brainwash) went berserk over the Japanese freighter. I am not talking about The Globe, Hustler or the New York Times; I am talking about the Wall Street Journal (11/9, p. A10), where a semi-literate incompetent called Jacob M. Schlesinger breaks all records of idiocies like "the most toxic substance known to man" by claiming that plutonium is "the most radioactive material known." The statement has no meaning, but presumably this inarticulate scribbler means emitting most radiation per unit mass. If so, he means the highest specific activity and is wrong by a factor of 162 compared with radium, which nature has abundantly put in the Rocky Mountains and all over the globe; and he is wrong by a factor of more than 865 million compared with Technetium 99, used in bone scans all day long at his nearest hospital. These are merely two common substances widely used and occurring outside research labs. Technetium, which is injected directly into the patient's blood, is in no way the highest numerical example refuting Mr. Schlesingers "reporting."

He also claims that "opponents of the shipment say that one gram of plutonium released in the air could give thousands of people cancer in the surrounding area." This is remarkable, in part because of the 3.5 tonnes (3,500,000 times of the claimed amount) of plutonium were released to the atmosphere in the bomb tests of the 50s without a single known cancer case tied to them, and I wonder how Schlesinger would explain that if he had heard of the 1950s. Perhaps even more remarkable is the "opponents say," with which this loafer covers his butt; for he is too lazy to go to the library to get elementary facts and tables before indulging in laughable absurdities. Please note carefully that I do not accuse Schlesinger of being a lousy science writer; I accuse him of being a lousy journalist.

There are many more fantastic statements in the article, most of them wrong, some of them meaningless. (A statement must be meaningful before it can be tested for truth.) The name, once more, of this "journalist" is Jacob M. Schlesinger, and remember it well: should you run into it again, it will save you wasting time on the garbage underneath it.