79-07-A3

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Three Mile Island II

Transcript On the previous commentary I reported the testimony of government officials such as H.E.W. Secretary Califano, the Surgeon General, the head of Food & Drug and others that the event at the Three Mile Island power plant was more an incident than a catastrophe. Secretary Califano and the others said there would be no additional deaths from cancer among the two million people living within a 50-mile radius of the power plant. Now Califano has changed his testimony. He says there was more fall-out than he had previously stated, and as a result, there might be one additional case of cancer in the lifetime of those two million people. No one can take this lightly, but the question arises--will we ever know? Can we be so accurate in predicting how many among two million people will develop cancer in the next 30, 40 or even 60 or 70 years that we'll even know if there is one extra? There was fall-out of a beneficial kind to one small group of Americans -- the cast, crew and investors in the movie "The China Syndrome". The story line of this picture involved a threatened nuclear disaster and the attempted cover-up by the utility bigwigs who, being businessmen, were of course more concerned with finances than human lives. I say "of course", because businessmen are portrayed as villains more often than not in today's movies. Anyway, the box office receipts for "China Syndrome" boomed with every scare headline about "Three Mile Island". The screenwriter admitted to an interviewer that his script reflected his personal views about nuclear power. He obtained his technical help from engineers aligned with the anti-nuclear forces. He also stated that his first garget was going to be the oil industry but then he switched to nuclear. Recently the Knight Rider newspapers carried a story by Mike Lavelle that revealed something of the fanaticism indulged in by the anti-nuclear group and how opposed they are to giving the other side a fair hearing. David Rossin was invited to a preview of "The China Syndrome" . Rossin is an engineer with Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Company. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas had invited about 50 editors of college newspapers to the preview, which Lavelle says was to be followed by a question and answer period. A young girl led off asking a question critical of the movie. According to the news story, Michael Douglas "asked her sneeringly if she worked for Commonwealth Edison. David Rossin raised his hand. He was asked to leave. Not wanting to make a scene, he did. One wonders if any of the college editors wrote about the one sidedness of the question and answer session, or did they accept the anti-nuclear brainwashing? One wonders also if the makers of "The China Syndrome" were pleased that the accident at Three Mile Island caused no deaths from radioactive fall-out. I'd like to think so. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-07-A3 Production Date 05/08/1979 Book/Page RPtV-440 Audio Youtube? No
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