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Consternation in the London Hilton last week. Well, mild embarrassment
and a security snarl-up. The British Nuclear Forum was holding its annual
conference in the hotel ballroom. On the second day a handful of soggy antinuclear
demonstrators picketed the main entrance-at a distance. One enterprising
activist managed to infiltrate the building and fetched up in the gentlemen’s
toilets closest to the ballroom. He duly daubed a message suggesting that
Britain’s first PWR, Sizewell B, is unsafe.

This prompted a mild flutter among conferencegoers and the Hilton’s
security staff. Cleaners erased the offending message. Yet had the bold
campaigner stayed around he would have heard an interesting contribution
from Leo Duffy, the American engineer in charge of cleaning up the US government’s
ageing, grossly polluting and definitely leaking nuclear sites: Hanford,
West Valley, Savannah River and so on.

Duffy painted a graphic picture of lousy management and inadequate environmental
protection. Many of the sites, he revealed, were located over or near aquifers
and key ground water supplies. His slightly bemused audience heard such
stomach-churning facts as that 65 of Hanford’s tanks holding highlevel liquid
radioactive waste are leaking; ground water in the Miami area is contaminated
with 500000 pounds of depleted uranium; and 400 billion gallons (American
gallons, of course) of waste water has been discharged into the Colorado
River.

The good news was that a home has been found for 80000 tonnes of slightly
contaminated nickel-it will be recycled as shielding material for the country’s
latest supercollider.

Oh, the title of the conference? Well, since you’re asking: ‘Nuclear
power: clean, safe energy for the future.’ Just don’t talk about the past.

* * *

Another convert to environmentalism: the Lead Industries Association,
based in New York. The association has announced ‘a major new lead health
initiative to promote the safe use of lead’. Plans include surveying lead
levels in the blood of smelter workers and children living’ near lead smelters,
promoting recycling of lead, and teaching ‘proper hygiene’ to lead workers.

‘It is up to us to show that lead is a beneficial metal and that it
can be used safely,’ proclaims lead institute chairman Jeffrey L. Zelms
in a press release. The three-page release neglects to mention lead paint,
lead pipes, leaded petrol or lead poisontng. It also omits the telephone
number of the new ‘lead media hotline’.

* * *

Read the following, if you can, without waving your hands about. Until
recently the British Sign Language for ‘computer’ consisted of both index
fingers spiralling clockwise, followed by typing motions. You know, a computer
is one of those things you see in the movies with nine-track tape drives
whirling and people typing on terminals.

Now the sign has been updated: both index fingers draw the rectangular
outline of a video monitor and then make typing motions. A computer is one
of those things where you look at your screen and type on your own keyboard.
As this increasing familiarity breeds contempt, we can expect to see the
sign evolve into the terser ‘threefingered salute’ employed by IBM PC users
whose recalcitrant software has gone off to contemplate its own navel, forcing
them to reset the machine and start from scratch.

* * *

The all-party committee of MPs delving into the parlous state of London
Zoo s finances might have a firm grasp of accounting principles, but their
knowledge of natural history appears more rudimentary. The minutes of the
committee’s hearings were published last week.

Anthony Steen MP: ‘May I ask you about the research, which I found extremely
interesting; it was like a hospital although, again, instead of having people
it had animals inside and we saw the operation on this extraordinary animal
with a very long face?’

David Jones, director of London Zoo: ‘The aardvark.’

Hugh Rossi, the committee’s chairman asked: ‘You mentioned that there
are 8000 animals at the zoo at the moment. Is that right?’

Jones: ‘Yes, there are 8000, other than the little creepy crawlies,
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* * *

Where would we be without vitamin C? It has saved the world from colds
(or not, as the case may be). Now it is doing its bit for poultry. Australian
hens, it appears, often drink water from underground sources. And they often
lay fragile eggs. But not for much longer.

Derrick Belnave and his colleagues in the Department of Animal Science
at the University of Sydney have established that the presence of sodium
chloride-salt in other words-in borehole water reduces the activity of a
vital enzyme in the shell gland of the laying hen. The result is shells
that crack easily. But when ascorbic acid is added to saline drinking water
as soon as the hens become fertile, the shells are fine. It doesn’t work
on older hens because the shell gland is damaged irreversibly. Perhaps Linus
Pauling needs to rewrite his book: Vitamin C and the Common Chick?

* * *

Auspace an Australian company that makes gadgets to go on satellites,
has developed an integrated-circuit board for use with the US Global Positioning
System. It says that the board has been ‘ruggedised for tough applications’.
Is that Rugged Union or Rugged League?

* * *

The event: the 10th World Congress of Sexology. The session: Family
planning today and tomorrow. The first lecture: ‘Feeling their way: teenage
experiences with birth control.’