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...Because of increasing questions about the safety of PCBs, their use has been almost exclusively confined in recent years to transformers and capacitors, in which they are sealed. The chemicals are ideal for these electrical devices because they are excellent insulators, highly fire resistant and good conductors of heat. GE uses the PCBs in equipment manufactured at its Fort Edward and Hudson Falls plants on the upper Hudson, about 45 miles north of Albany...
...been found in every major river system in the U.S. The compound had either been discharged directly into the water by electrical equipment factories, or had been washed into the rivers by drainage from junked electrical equipment. In few places were PCB levels higher than in the Hudson, where GE's two capacitor plants had been dumping them at the rate of about 30 lbs. per day since the early 1950s. In tests conducted last summer, striped bass, carp and other fish species were found to contain many times the allowed federal limit of 5 parts of PCBs...
Some Symptoms. The long-term health effects of PCBs on humans are still unknown. But GE has admitted that at least 65 of its capacitor plant employees have come down with some of the same symptoms as those exhibited by the Japanese victims of Yusho. The chemicals have also been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals...
Last summer Ogden Reid, New York State Commissioner of Environmental Conservation, issued a warning against eating Hudson River stripers. He also initiated action against GE to force the company to reduce its discharges to zero by next September. He was opposed by State Commerce Commissioner John Dyson, who argued that forcing GE to meet such strict standards could force the plants to close and cost badly needed jobs. Meanwhile a state-appointed hearing officer has been taking testimony from both sides in the case. In a 77-page interim opinion issued last February, Professor Abraham Sofaer of Columbia Law School...
...nationwide approved of the expansion of nuclear power; no more than a handful of those with reservations about atomic plants seemed concerned enough to try to do something about them. But the anti-nuclear forces seem to be gathering momentum. Last month a trio of middle-level engineers at GE's nuclear-energy division in San Jose, Calif, suddenly resigned their jobs in protest. The trio, Dale Bridenbaugh, 44, Gregory Minor, 38, and Richard Hubbard, 38, announced that they would instead work full time for Project Survival, the organization coordinating the anti-nuclear referendum drive in California. Another engineer...