adiseker@deimos.ADS.COM (Andrew Diseker) (09/14/89)
This article appeared in the Washington Post, Sunday 10 September. The author is Colman McCarthy. I don't know if this is the correct forum for this, but I think it spells out why we won't have much of a space program in the future, if this kind of fear-mongering gets worse. The article follows, excerpted without permission. ------------------- Atlantis: Countdown To a Disaster in the Making Within six weeks, Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, may be in jail. His crime could be the fractiousness of civil disobedience at the Kennedy Space Center where on or soon after Oct. 12 the Department of Energy and NASA plan to launch a plutonium-power (sic) space probe destined for Jupiter. Gagnon, 37, an Air Force veteran and son of an Air Force career man, has worked for more than a year organizing anti-nuclear, peace and church groups into a large and credible opposition to the health and safety risks of a Chernobyl in the sky. If the shuttle launch -- named Atlantis -- blows up in a Challenger-type explosion, it's rational to expect the worst from radioactive fallout. Plutonium is the most toxic substance known to humans, with one pound -- if evenly distributed -- capable of causing cancer among all the earth's citizens. Little of that bothers the nuclear wizards at DOE or their spaced-out allies at NASA as they mutually stage-manage the launching of 50 pounds of plutonium as not much riskier than sending up a balloon at a summer picnic. To back this flight of fancy, they spout odds like croupiers at a casino. It's 500 million to one that a worker at the space center will die of cancer if Atlantis explodes immediately after release. It's 10 million to one that the rocket will fall to earth after launching. Those are numbers from the early line, based on the dated NASA environmental-impact study. After the 1986 Challenger blowup, the oddsmakers at NASA began hedging: The chances of an accident are now 78 to one. For Gagnon, the numbers are no more reliable than bets on a tilted roulette wheel. He wrote recently to the space agency: "We don't trust your statistics and find it incredible that you think the public should believe that NASA can make objective safety determinations about programs such as this one. If the Challenger disaster taught the public anything, it was that NASA will always put its best face forward and always downplay any possibility of risks." It was citizens like Gagnon who spent more than a decade of marching, getting busted and trying to give wake-up calls to Congress about the incompetence and arrogance of DOE in such nuclear fields of dreams as Rocky Flats, Colo. They were labeled alarmists by engineers and technologist (sic) whose record of spills, design flaws and equipment failures leaves the public with bills for clean-up and waste disposal that citizens not yet born will be paying well into the 21st century. Rocky Flats, a nuclear bomb plant that bombed, joins Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez and a long list of other catastrophes as refutations of officialdom's "trust us" approach to public safety. [ Description of Bruce Gagnon's history as a community activist deleted ] During this period, Ronald Reagan had come to Orlando to deliver his Russia-is-the-evil-empire speech. Gagnon volunteered to help the FREEZE campaign expand in Florida. The state, splashed with sun and dominated in four congressional districts by defense contractors, never had a history for citizen resistance against military or nuclear programs. As much as anyone, Gagnon, now an organizer for more than 10 years, has changed that. Florida newspapers have been reporting his anti-plutonium campaign as a major story. Much of the national media, still gaga over NASA's Neptune number, have yet to get their collective heads out of the clouds about next month's scheduled launch. Gagnon and his coalition are now considering a suit to secure an injunction to stop Mission Plutonium. The nuclearists who brought us Rocky Flats have yet to answer the question: If plutonium isn't safe on the ground, how can it be safe in the sky? ---------------- Fortunately, this article appeared in the Style section, not the Outlook( Op-Ed ) section. Hopefully it will influence fewer 'citizens' that way. I realize there are dangers involved with Gallileo's nuclear generator, but the writer obviously doesn't know enough science to understand that the only danger to earth ( slim chance that it is ) is during the launch itself, not once the probe is on its way to Jupiter. Moreover, he makes no mention of the fact that ALL deep-space probes have been and must be nuclear-powered. This type of fear-mongering disgusts me. I only posted this to make other people aware of the damage this type of journalism can have on our space program. Andrew Diseker UUCP: sun!sundc!potomac!adiseker Advanced Decision Systems Internet: adiseker@potomac.ads.com The above opinions are mine. I speak for myself and not my employers.
dschuetz@umd5.umd.edu (David John Schuetz) (09/14/89)
In article <9117@zodiac.ADS.COM> adiseker@ADS.COM (Andrew Diseker) writes: > This article appeared in the Washington Post, Sunday 10 September. >The author is Colman McCarthy. Oh. Well, then, we can ignore it. I assume you're familiar with Mr. McCarthy, if you've read the Post for any length of time. I'm not really sure that there are that many people around here who take him seriously, and, fortunately, I don't believe that his column is syndicated. I had a friend who took a class from him here at UMCP once, "Alternatives to Violence." While she thought the class was interesting, she also thought that most of the people in the class were less-than-impressed by his more radical ideas, and didn't like the fact that though he was morally opposed to killing animals for food or anything, he wore a leather belt and shoes. In short, the author, IMHO, has a reputation for going very far out on a limb in exactly the same manner he did here. I read his column for the semester my friend was taking the course, just out of curiosity. I got very quickly disgusted with the man and his ideas. I think this is part of the reason he's on the Style page so often, rather than Outlook.... >The above opinions are mine. I speak for myself and not my employers. And mine are mine. I speak for noone but myself, and I mean to make no slander towards Mr. McCarthy, only to say that I don't put much stock in what he has to say.