"development of... irrational, popular fear of radioactivity"

["Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@aecl.ca>]

FYI :
posted at
http://www.cap.ca/pic/current/opinion-J00.htm

Physics in Canada - Vol. 56, No. 1, 2000 January/February

The Centennial of the Atomic Reformation
Lawrence Cranberg, Consulting Physicist, 
Austin Texas 
Since Greek antiquity, and until the discovery of radioactivity by Henri
Becquerel, of atomic transmutation by Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy,
and the valuable researches of Pierre and Marie Curie at the turn of the
last century, it was unquestioned dogma that the elements of the universe
were few in number and their constituent atoms were everlasting. Such a
conception gave a comfortingly simple view of the universe that it was, at
its atomic core, permanently stable. It was this basic idea that
Becquerel-Rutherford-Soddy overturned in favor of a a universe that was in
constant transformation down to its atomic constituents. It was an idea of
the universe that was on the surface destabilizing, but it was also
liberating because it enlarged our conception of what we could accomplish
with the materials provided by Nature. And accomplish we did as the 20th
century amply proved in the evolution of nuclear science and of its
applications.