CAN WE TALK? ABOUT PCBs, DIOXIN, NUCLEAR AND THE REST?

Dioxin Scare Now Called Mistake /Citing Studies, Health Official Concludes Times Beach Evacuation Wasn't Needed

So read the five-column, top-of-Page One headline in last Thursday morning's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Given the liberal persuasion of the Post-Dispatch, this story and the prominence accorded it is remarkable. When the Post trumpets a leading national health expert from the Center for Disease Control saying, essentially, that a bunch of Chicken Little weenies have unduly scared us on dioxin at staggeringly unnecessary costs, it's rather as if the National Rifle Association magazine were to feature new evidence supporting gun control.

And so, we have another in a long, grim line. Add the last decade's great dioxin panic to the pathetic litany of pseudo-scientific scares that have paralyzed America and dragged down her economy, at costs so huge as to be incalculable.

Let's call the role (albeit a partial listing). Alar on our lunch apples, we were told, was a deadly threat to the lives of little schoolchildren, indeed, to all of us. Although its harmlessness is now widely conceded, apologies have been heard neither from Ed Bradley (of "60 minutes"), nor from Meryl Streep (the highly expert toxicologist), nor from the Natural Resources Defense Council (the panic-mongering lobby and PR group. (Hearteningly, all are now defendants in a $100-million damage suit brought by the apple growers of Washington state.)

Not one among these uninformed has ever apologized for the bankruptcies they caused among apple growers, nor for the countless millions in other costs that are directly traceable to their intentional acts of misinformation.

PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, a substance commonly used in electrical transformers. A few scientists did some highly questionable testing and claimed that PCBs might cause cancer in laboratory rodents. The United States Congress pounced, and listed PCBs among "suspected cancer-causing agents," banning them and mandating costly cleanup efforts that drag on for decades. No authority can point to a single person somewhere who has ever been made sick by PCBs, much less been killed by them. Meanwhile the honest businessmen who worked with PCB's all their lives are broken and ruined, their reputations vaguely besmirched, by a grotesque bureaucratic nightmare that's straight out of a Franz Kafka novel.

(Even assuming PCBs might be harmful, promising research indicates that they dissolve when lime is applied to them; EPA bureaucrats, blindly fixated on their costly "cleanup" plans, won't comment.)

Asbestos, a substance so common in building materials that few structures anywhere did not contain some, was a deadly carcinogen, or so we were told. Remove it from school buildings~! came the uncompromising demand. From all public buildings! From the face of the earth! Is it terribly expensive to do so? Well, hang the cost? A couple of mice got cancer when force-fed doses 100,000 times greater than any normal exposure!

Then, after untold millions had been spent removing the dingy old stuff from obscure corners of countless buildings, came the new wisdom: Asbestos may be rather a benign substance, harmful only if stirred into the air, as one disturbs it by digging into an old ceiling to remove it.

Minute traces of cyanide were found on a couple of grapes in one Philadelphia market, and suddenly, official roadblocks materialized to halt the fruit and vegetable commerce of the greatest county the world has ever seen. Not a single tainted grape was found anywhere else, and the "crisis" so beloved by national TV "news" people faded, to be replaced in due course by yet another bogus panic.

Or roll back in time to March 1979, when a basset-faced Walter Cronkite led his CBS Evening News with grim reports on what he dolefully called, "the worst nuclear power accident ever in American history." He referred, of course, to Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant, and to the release of radiation from there that experts ultimately admitted was approximately equal to one chest X-ray.

The harmless amount of radiation emitted at Three Mile Island did not prevent the national media and their favored liberal demagogues from hyping it to the point that the plant was shut down, casting terrible doubts on nuclear power with far reaching consequences we're still paying for. So great was the hysteria fomented by this near non-incident that the few orders American utilities had placed for nuclear plants were promptly canceled. None has been ordered in the ensuing 12 years, and American dependence on foreign oil grows, while Japan, France and the rest of Western Europe have gone on building reliable nuclear plants with super-redundant safety mechanisms. Americans risked their lives in the Persian Gulf (and some lost them) in part because of radical environmentalists who succeeded in scaring us out of nuclear, the cleanest and safest source of energy.

Meanwhile, the same people have whined endlessly about the horrible effects of burning fossil fuels (oil, coal and related products), heedless of the intellectual cul-de-sac they've marched themselves into. If burning fossil fuels so harms the environment, then aren't we going to have to rely even more on nuclear?

No way! comes the replay from the sort of people who told us Alar, asbestos, dioxin and PCBs would kill us. Then, we might ask, what will power America's mighty industrial economy? Windmills?

A year or two ago, one columnist reviewed the sort of depressing developments surveyed here and asked the pertinent question: are we descendants of the rugged pioneers who tamed a wilderness and conquered the great American West are we becoming a nation of weenies?

Good question. Let's hope the 1990s are a decade of building safe and reliable nuclear power plants, and a turning away from media-fomented hysteria about advanced technology and chemicals, which have such vast potential for improving our lives.