ALL IN A NAME

There really is no excuse for some of the nonsense dispensed to the public by the mass media on subjects such as nuclear power. Oscar Wilde once said that, its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that “by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

Perhaps we would have avoided today’s (temporary) hysteria over nuclear power if we had stuck to the precedent that we set when we named the first of the artificial transuranic elements “plutonium.” Instead of being carried away with highfalutin’ names like “californium,” “berkelium,” and “mendelevium” for the ones that came after, we should have continued in the way we’d begun and called them “mickey-mouseium,” “donald-duckium,” and so on. I mean, with that kind of nomenclature, who couldn’t have loved nuclear power?

Does this mean that the Chernobyl reactor was fueled with goofium?