Environment & Energy

...almost completely ignorant of nuclear technology at the time, but was probably a rather rote antinuke, since it seemed to be de rigueur for political liberals at that time.

It was Chornobyl that changed me from antinuke to pronuke and only because it caused me to apply my scientific knowledge to understanding the issues in nuclear power technology. I was trying to understand how bad it would be, thinking it would a far larger disaster than it proved to be. It took about two years to change my mind about nuclear energy. I know it happened pretty quickly because I was rather upset that Michael Dukakis was an antinuke but I voted for him anyway. I was at that time unaware of the climate effects of fossil fuels.

At that point in my life, like most chemists back then, I had never taken a course in nuclear chemistry. I still haven't but the extensive knowledge I have on the topic was obtained in an autodidactic undertaking.

I was impressed that President Carter traveled to and went into the control room of TMI. At that time I believed the hype that he was a nuclear engineer (which he actually wasn't.)

I didn't know that he had, as a young naval officer, led a US naval team into brief, very brief, forays into the core of the partially melted Chalk River reactor to manually loosen bolts so the reactor could be repaired and restarted. He said his urine was measurably radioactive for months thereafter. That he lived to be 100 says something. Interestingly he did not develop the pancreatic cancer that killed his father, his mother, and his three siblings. This is almost certainly not the result of his exposure to radiation but oees to simple Mendelian genetics. The genetic mutation that caused the pancreatic cancers in his family is a dominant gene, and apparently his parents were both heterzygous and thus developed the cancer. He must have been lucky to have inherited two copies of the recessive normal gene, a classic 1:4 distribution.

Thanks for your comments.

If you must know when I was a kid, I worked on the preparation of RIA kits with radioactive ₁₂₅I labeling. It was a fun job and it was my first exposure to radioactivity. I has a mildly hot thyroid, as well as radioactive shoes pants and socks. One could not prevent this exposure, even with shoe covers lab coats and leaded protective vests. Iodine is volatile when oxidized and that's what we were working on and radioactivity is easy to detect, which is why it has so many medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Thanks again.