ABSTRACT
One of the big cases in the government career concerned the nearly completed Shoreham Nuclear Power Station on Long Island. Local residents were very upset about what they saw as a safety threat. Many Shoreham opponents, so fearful about nuclear generation of electricity, used natural gas for heating—a far more dangerous energy source. In fact, unlike atomic power, gas brings a highly toxic substance right into people's homes. Popular media promote this culture of fear. When children are snatched, it's actually almost always by relatives, not strangers. Abductions by pedophiles and school shootings are vanishingly rare, but the news media make us phobic about such things. Even seemingly well-founded fears can be wrong. The 1990s saw a big scare when thousands of women with silicone breast implants got seriously ill. Many people worry about chemical residues on food and pay extra for "organic" produce supposedly free of it.
