great journalism, VII

This is the earliest thing of mine that I recall being published, except a letter to the editor of the now-defunct Amherst Times, which I'm pretty sure I've lost. The Phoenix Press had published a short piece in which one Robert Croke defended nuclear power. Well, that didn't exactly hit my sweet spot, so I penned this treatise -- it was much longer than what Croke wrote -- to put him in his place and, by golly, set the record straight once and for all. I don't remember anyone from the Holyoke (Massachusetts) Community College student newspaper contacting me before publishing this. There were a good number of conservative students at the school back then, and I assume that the political demographic of the student body must have been reflected in the Phoenix Press's editorial board. At least one of the editors must have been less-than-utterly welcoming of the trashing of nuclear power and the nuclear-power industry; one of them would therefore call me on my facts with the goal of quashing the article. That radical can't get his facts straight, so there's no use running this. But nope, without even consulting me, they published the whole dang thing. Where did I get my facts? I don't remember, which is understandable, seeing as how it was 32 years go. However, back then I knew many members of the Clamshell Alliance, and I had read Barry Commoner's ``The Poverty of Power,'' so I can say that I have a vague memory of being well-versed in this stuff. Still I do question some of my assertions. I mean, is the area ``immediately surrounding'' the ``temporary waste storage facility'' in Hanford, Washington really uninhabitable for 250,000 years? How come I haven't heard anything about it since? Must be the liberal media.