Word: gofman
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Whether Jones sleeps easily at night is a matter between him and his pharmacist. But reader's of "Irrevy:" An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power may conclude that the nuclear industry is killing people on a scale the Son of Sam could only dream of. Author John W. Gofman asserts that everyone in the industry shares responsibility for the peculiar modern crime of "premeditated random murder." Gofman chairs the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, which has published his collection of talk given at anti-nuclear rallies and in a debate with Edward Teller, famous for his H-bomb paternity...
...Recently Gofman spoke at the New York no-nukes rally where Musicians United for Safe Energy entertained a crowd of 200,000. Jackson Browne and company will keep the machinery of dissent from running on empty by raising money with benefit concerts. But the members of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility are supplying much of the movement's intellectual firepower. Among them are Lewis Mumford, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and four Nobel Laureates: Linus Pauling; James D. Watson; George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus; and Harold Urey...
However, "Irrevy" (an unspeakable title) is a popularization with a list of supporting technical documents to the back pages. Displaying a refreshing lack of academic pomposity, Gofman dedicates the book to the cartoonists whose works entice prospective readers. Perhaps Gofman feels kinship with cartoonists because, like them, he seems constitutionally unable to mince meanings. The urgency that charges his writing springs from his conviction that no quality of radioactivity is harmless. The National Academy of Sciences upheld the 1969 finding of the Gofman-Tamplin Report that no evidence exists for a safe level of radiation. Gofman also cites a Nuclear...
...Gofman and his colleague Dr. Tamplin estimated in 1969 that 32,000 additional cancer deaths' would occur each year if the public were exposed to the legal radiation limit, with an additional 100,000 to one million deaths per year resulting several generations later from genetic damage. The National Academy of Sciences objected that their figures were possibly four to ten times too high. This caveat, however, leaves intact still-imposing fatal statistics and Gofman's theory that the number of deaths is directly proportional to the number of persons exposed and the size of the dose each receives. Utility...
While the number of deaths in as exposed population is a statistical certainy, it is impossible to identify which cancers are due to radiation and not to other causes. For this reason, the nuclear industry can disingenously challenge critics to point to a single radiation fatality. Gofman compares the nuclear and tobacco industries in this respect. Cigarettes may be linked to 90 per cent of lung cancers, but the individual smoker can't prove his own cancer isn't traceable to something else. Of course, unlike the average Harrisburg resident, the smoker chooses to pay his money and take...