To: "Tracy City Council" <council@ci.tracy.ca.us>
February 3rd, 2007
Tracy City Hall
325 East 10th Street
Tracy, CA 95376
To the City Council and Citizens of Tracy:
I was labeled an "anti-nuker" in your local paper (Tracy Press) recently.
It was meant as an insult.
But in reality, it simply means I am pro-DNA. And proud of it.
Radiation is chaotic (random) and destructive. DNA is logical (non-random) and self-organizing.
The two are in opposition to each other. Either you appreciate the delicate structure of our DNA and its progression (through mating and natural selection), or you prefer the random destruction of your and my DNA, and our descendents' DNA, via the simplest, most direct route: Ionizing radiation. Indeed, "ionizing radiation" basically just means "induced atomic jiggling with the potential to cause irreparable damage."
Being "pro-nuclear" or "anti-nuclear" is really a vote you can cast today for or against the future. I choose to cast my vote in favor of our DNA and against ionizing radiation, which destroys our DNA.
I've never found a pro-nuker -- an "anti-DNAer" -- who claims to have credentials in everything necessary to understand the dangers of what they are promoting.
For example, if you ask a typical pro-nuker about the biological effects of low level radiation, you'll probably learn that they believe in Hormesis (the idea that a little radiation is good for you, like a vitamin), but yet they won't profess to know anything about molecular biology! Hormesis has been debunked. The LNT (Linear, No Threshold) theory is accepted as fact by the vast majority of scientists. But many, of not most, pro-nukers STILL believe in the exact opposite: Hormesis.
Similarly, pro-nukers are invariably missing one (or more) of the following skills;
They're not economists. They think nuclear power pays for itself. They don't understand who pays the subsidies and who pays with cancer.
They're not geologists. They don't believe offshore landslides can cause massive tsunamis that would inundate coastal reactors. They learned NOTHING from the Banda Ache tsunami in 2004.
They're not chemists. Their alloys become brittle much sooner than they expect. This is a problem of epidemic proportions in the nuclear industry.
They're not statisticians. They believe we can rocket nuclear waste to the sun. They never notice that rocket failure rates, which are way too high to permit such disposal methods, have remained nearly constant for more than 50 years.
They're not engineers -- who know that buildings sometimes fall down. They're nuclear engineers, a special breed of engineer who thinks every weld is perfect, no earthquake will ever exceed "design specifications," and no catastrophic combination of multiple small failures could ever occur.
They're not epidemiologists. They can't figure out what's wrong with simplistic studies of poorly defined populations, for instance.
They're not terrorism experts. The nuclear power industry says it's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's job to prevent terrorism, the NRC says it's the military's job, and the military says they are not prepared to handled "domestic terrorism issues." Which leaves us all vulnerable.
They're not modern warfare experts. They don't equate what happened on 9-11 with what COULD happen next at our nuclear power facilities. The term "asymmetrical warfare" is alien to them. They've never even heard of the book: "Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril" by Bennett Ramberg, for instance.
They're not munitions experts. They believe a few inches of steel and concrete will protect a dry spent radioactive fuel storage cask from being destroyed by armor-piercing rounds fired from a pickup-truck-mounted 50-caliber machine gun.
They're not geneticists or humanists (see above).
They're not insurance experts. Without the Price-Anderson Act, a criminally negligent piece of legislation, there would be no nuclear industry.
And of course, they are not green power experts. They think wind power is not feasible, when in reality its the cheapest form of electricity available on the planet today.
To be pro-nuclear, if you want to be SURE you are right, you HAVE TO consider yourself an expert in ALL these things (and many more), because if a nuclear project fails any ONE of these "smell tests," it's no good for society.
LOTS of pro-nukers are experts in one thing or another, and sometimes three or four of these various fields. But I have yet to find ANY nuclear expert who can, by him or herself, argue the whole. Who will declare him or herself an "expert" in ALL the necessary fields.
Instead, they lean on each other for "expertise."
For example, one "expert" might say, referring to the proposed Tracy facility: "Only a little Depleted Uranium drifts offsite." They are considered an "expert" because they are a nuclear engineer. But, not being a microbiologist, they won't listen if you try to explain why you think the Environmental Protection Agency's standards for low-level radiation exposure are probably at least two orders of magnitude too lax. It's not their field. The definition of "a little" may be all wrong, but they don't care. It's not their area of expertise.
So they can't answer the question of whether or not what they are promoting is really safe. They just know a little part of it. They EACH rely on OTHER experts' "expert opinions" to proclaim some nuclear activity is "safe," but they never look at the whole picture themselves.
Government and industry have enormous financial and other incentives for wanting to keep the public in the dark about how dangerous so-called low-level radiation really is: To avoid reparations for past damages, to continue to be allowed to release radioactive materials into the environment, and most of all: To not feel any guilt for poisoning our progeny.
There is, on the other hand, NO conceivable benefit from falsely accusing the nuclear industry of poisoning the earth. There are thousands of other poisons, and we only live barely a century -- hardly enough time to learn all there is to know, meet all the people one would like to meet, do all the things one would like to do. If radiation were not an obvious problem, a grave danger to you, me, and everyone else, I'd work on something else, and I'm sure, so would most people who spend their lives as I do, trying to educate people about this danger.
But I've read too many books, too many articles, too many web sites, too many government documents, and interviewed too many "experts" to think this issue isn't important.
The Tracy City Council has the opportunity to stop a dangerous and foolhardy operation. Depleted Uranium weapons should be banned entirely, therefore, there is no reason to build a test facility for them anywhere on earth.
I hope you will vote pro-DNA.
Thank you,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA