The Once and Future Nuke

Zombie reactors are being reanimated

As my aging brain gathers memories into sweet honeycombs to be sampled and savored, I occasionally am forced to remind myself that anyone born halfway through my life would not have many of the same lived experiences or whatever frame of reference I am using. Take, for instance, Three Mile Island. Anyone younger than 46 (and probably 60) would not recall that event as a lived experience.

Allow me to help younger readers to visualize. In March, 1979, my publisher had just released my fourth book, Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial, to bookstores. Some 5000 copies had shipped. The book was a recap of the then-known public health effects of nuclear energy, as authenticated by government sources — publications such as the Health Physics journal and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — and the courtroom testimony of expert witnesses John W. Gofman, medical director of Livermore National Laboratory and author of Radiation and Human Health, and Ernest Sternglass, an epidemiologist specializing in populations of atomic workers, downwinders, bomb test eyewitnesses, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. The experts and the literature concurred that, likely for Cold War national security reasons, government safety regulations understate the biological effects of ionizing radiation by several orders of magnitude.