Anti-Nuclear Hysterics

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz points out the obvious about food irradiation;

Food irradiation is a process by which foods are zapped with a sudden burst of radiation that kills microbes but leaves the food otherwise unaltered. It’s exactly the same process as pasteurization except that it uses radiation instead of heat, with the added benefit that it doesn’t alter the taste or nutritional content of the treated food. It leaves zero radiation in the food. The technique was first developed during WWII and during the next 20 years it was tested, retested and tested again for safety. They force fed generations of lab rats massively irradiated food and never found the least hint of problem. By the early ’60s at the latest, it was proven beyond all doubt that irradiation was a safe and highly effective means of preventing microbial contamination of food.

Despite this overwhelming scientific evidence, ever since the mid-1960s anti-nuclear leftists have demonized irradiation and created such anti-irradiation hysteria that for decades no politician could even think of allowing the irradiation of food, no matter how many lives it would have saved. Virtually everyone who has gotten sick from eggs, meat, vegetables, etc. in the last 40+ years has done so needlessly. The hundreds of immune-compromised people who die of salmonella every year didn’t have to die that way. All of the hundreds of people, many of them children, crippled or killed by E. Coli did not have to suffer. The people killed and maimed by contaminated leafy vegetable didn’t have to die.

True but, as usual, for the “saviors of the planet,” the pose is everything, the reality nothing. Hit & Run reminds us of another familiar example of the same phenomenon; the non sequitur of claiming that global warming is the greatest threat to the planet combined with the rejection of nuclear power in any form. Note the comments at the end of the post. They’re generally civil and well-intentioned, but reveal gross ignorance about breeder reactors. It would be well if people would take five minutes to learn the basics about breeders before commencing to pontificate on the subject.