[NukeNet] Dr John Gofman On Nuclear Power's Lethality & Industry's Attempts To Kill The Truth While Killing The Public

[Bill Smirnow]

      Gofman also has more published in "The Bulletin Of The Atomic
Scientists  http://www.thebulletin.org  [circa 1993], "Beware The Data
Diddlers."


    http://www.mothersalert.org/gofman.html  [Dr John Gofman On Ionizing
Radiation's Potential Effects]


    http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/090707HA.shtml
    Go to Original

            The Genius Doctor Who Diagnosed Nuke Power's Deadly Disease
            By Harvey Wasserman
            The Free Press

            Friday 07 September 2007

            The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan
guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the
warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom
ever larger.

            One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear
pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal"
radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year.

            At the time, Gofman was the chief medical researcher for the
Atomic Energy Commission. He told the AEC that reactor emissions must be
radically reduced. The AEC demanded he change his findings, then forced him
out when he refused.

            Since then, reactor backers have ceaselessly and erroneously
attacked Gofman and his findings. But they could hardly have picked a more
brilliant, committed opponent. Gofman was both relentless and uncorrupted.
His findings should have doomed from the start an industry he called
"insane."

            In addition to being a world-class nuclear chemist, Dr. John
William Gofman was one of history's most important heart specialists. His
pioneer research helped define our modern understanding about cholesterol,
distinguishing "good" fatty acids from bad. Gofman's astonishing medical
discoveries remain at the core of today's common wisdom about diet and heart
disease.

            For that work alone, Gofman was a towering figure. Throughout
his life, he was friend and peer to Nobel Laureates such as Linus Pauling
and George Wald.

            But Gofman was also a nuclear chemist. As part of the Manhattan
Project that built the first atomic bombs, his pioneer work helped lead to
the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium.

            Yet his career suffered from an inconvenient truth: when he
discovered that atomic power plants kill people in large numbers, he refused
to shut up about it.

            As a full professor at the University of California, Gofman's
combined medical and nuclear credentials made him an obvious choice to
manage health research for the Atomic Energy Commission, which both
regulated and promoted the young nuclear power industry. When public
questions were raised about the health impacts of radioactive reactor
emissions, Gofman was dispatched to prove the industry safe.

            But his findings showed that reactors are serious killers. So
even Gofman's towering resume could not protect him from the wrath of an
industry determined to build all the power plants it could. He and
co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs.

            When their POISONED POWER detailed the killing potential of
atomic energy, Gofman and Tamplin were attacked mercilessly by an industry
with immense investments to protect. The experience showed that no matter
how impeccable their credentials, and no matter how thorough their research,
any scientists whose findings might indicate problems with atomic power
would be automatically "discredited" by industry flacks to who did no
comparable research.

            Even at his passing, the tired attacks on Gofman's findings have
resurfaced.

            But his research remains the gold standard on the health impacts
of radiation. And as a gentle but firm advocate, mentor and friend, his
integrity was matched only by his willingness to step outside traditional
boundaries for what he believed.

            One of Gofman's most powerful and influential moments came in
1974, when he agreed to defend a civil disobedient named Sam Lovejoy in the
small town of Montague, Massachusetts. A member of a communal organic farm,
Lovejoy had manually knocked over a 500-foot weather tower erected as a
precursor to the building of a large twin reactor complex.

            Gofman agreed to testify in Lovejoy's defense, arguing that
building two nuke reactors constituted a lethal threat to the health and
safety of the community. In a monumental moment for the rise of the
anti-nuclear movement, Lovejoy was acquitted.

            Gofman's pivotal pronouncements appear in the award-winning
LOVEJOY'S NUCLEAR WAR (gmpfilms.com), which has been shown all over the
world. As a pivotal struggle over a "bailout in advance" for new reactor
construction rages in Congress, Gofman's words resonate with a renewed
critical importance:

          "The decision to build nuclear power plants may very well be, for
the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth
with respect for life for all future generations."
          "Why do we want to put every city and hamlet of the United States
at risk by building a thousand of these plants? We can get the power from
sunshine, very easily and economically."

          "When we're talking about a mass of a hundred tons or so of
material, melting 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with water around, with hydrogen
being generated and burning explosively, melting through concrete into soil,
when someone tells me that we're sure it isn't going to go far away, I say
that I've heard various forms of insanity, but hardly this form."

          "Even if this hazard of a meltdown were securely answered, it
doesn't alter for one second my opposition to nuclear power, because I'm
concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down,
you've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must
contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war,
with human error and human malice, guerilla activity, psychotics, malfunctio
n of equipment ... do you believe that there's anything you'd like to
guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand
years?"

            After fifty years of proven failure, the nuke power industry is
demanding still more taxpayer handouts to create still more of this waste.

            The great and good Dr. John W. Gofman warned us all against this
insanity. His words and spirit remain at the core of what must be done to
save this planet.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Harvey Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the
Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Senior Editor of
www.solartopia.org and www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
For a fuller account of the amazing life of Dr. John Gofman, see
www.beyondnuclear.org.
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