The Electric Wilderness by Andrew Marino & Joel Ray

Author:Andrew Marino & Joel Ray [Marino, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cassandra
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

PART III

CHAPTER 10

Playing Dirty

When the hearing ended I felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration. I knew I had gone through a baptism of fire in both science and the law, and I realized my life would never be the same as a result. But mostly I felt relief. I was out of jail, off that damn witness stand, and now I could look forward to the return of some routine and normalcy. At times during that eight days I’d wondered whether I could go back the next morning to sit there and endure it; several nights I had a terrifying nightmare, always the same, filled with threat and violence. Now, I thought, all that was over. But very soon after the tension of the hearing had dissipated, I began to realize that the real nightmares were about to begin. A reaction phase set in, and Becker’s professional life, and hence mine, began to worsen.

One of the first indications that things might take a bad turn had actually come before I had gone on the stand. It came from the lips of Morton Miller. Right after Schwan left the stand, Harvey put Miller back up there to get him to change some of his previous answers, and in the course of his testimony Miller leveled a blast at me. He said that he had suffered an electrical shock when he examined my exposure apparatus during his visit to the lab (impossible—the power was off), and that with the help of RG&E engineers he had repeated my experiments and found that my results were due to artifacts (shocks to the rats). I had half expected such a fabrication, but what he said next was a surprise. He said he had been approached by Robert Flugum, an official of the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA, the predecessor of the U.S. Department of Energy), and offered money to do powerline-related research. Miller said that he told Flugum he thought there were no effects due to powerline NIEMR, so that such a search would be a waste of money. Besides, he said, he didn’t want to spend half his life “looking for the needle in the haystack.” But when someone asked Miller what he was going to do—whether he would take Flugum’s money—Miller asked to go off the record to make a “humorous comment.” “I follow the golden rule,” said Miller. “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

The only conclusion one could draw from this answer, it seemed to me, was that Flugum had plenty of gold to spend on studies that would be aimed at finding “no effects.” So after the dust settled from the hearing, I looked into the matter, to find out who Flugum was and what ERDA was.

Some years earlier, Congress had split up the old Atomic Energy Commission into two separate agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—to regulate the nuclear power industry—and ERDA, which was mainly intended to promote and advocate energy development, particularly nuclear energy. Its very mission was to be pro-utility, and it was, unabashedly so.

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