Page 4 University Daily Kansan, February 25, 1982
Opinion
One good man dies
On Tuesday, an old man died.
His name was Oscar S. Stauffer, and to some, his death might not have deserved the page-one display it received in many Kansas newspapers.
But during his life, Stauffer was important both to Kansas and to the University of Kansas.
After all, Stauffer was 95 years old, and he had been ill. Five year ago, he said he expected and did not fear, death.
Stauffer began his career as a $6-a-week reporter for William White On the Emporia Gazette. When his career ended, Stauffer was owner and chairman of an 11-state newspaper and broadcast group. He helped mastermind Alf Landon's 1932 campaign for governor, and Landon's success in the 1935 Republican primary.
have made a better showing against Franklin Delano Roosevelt if all those big city politicians hadn't taken the reins of the campaign away from Stauffer.
Later, Landon always said he would
Stauffer began his long association with KU somewhat reluctantly. In 1910, White had to fire him and offer him tuition money to convince him to enroll at the University.
He served on the Kansas Board of Regents for an unprecedented 26 years.
Stauffer did enroll. And he never forgot KU. Over the years, StauFFER helped pay tuition for hundreds of KU students. And last year, he donated $1 million to help renovate Flint Hall.
But besides being an important man, and a generous man, Oscar S. Stauffer was a good man.
For that, if for nothing else, he deserves recognition.
Pancake Tuesday races put competition in perspective
"Bong . . bong . . bong . .
The parish church bell was ringing for Shrive
uday service and unpertun Fanny Pigglesbottom
had been to the church.
"Crickey!" she exclaimed, "‘Tis time for confessing a ready, an m' my flippin' cakes in the oven!’ She pressed her palms to her cheeks and scrunched her forehead. 'Well I canna leave ‘em to burn, can I now?' she declared.
With that, good Mrs. Pigglesboro grabbed the skillet out of the fire with a mitt and scuttered off to the old Norman church. In her rush not to be late she forgot to set the skillet down.
Of course the sight of a squat, old woman dashing through the streets of Olney, England.
BEN IONES
with smock, frock and an occasional cake or two
flying, was the result of unaffected earnestness
of the air.
So the men lingering outside the church doors to share a pipeful and talk crops chorted heartily when Mrs. Pigglesbottom puffed up the path with cakes in pan.
And every year from then on, the Oleyn townwomen remembered their dear neighbor by re-enacting her Shrove Tuesday race, to the enjoyment of all. As years passed, the harried sense of obligation displayed toward both hearth and altar by the legendary Mrs. Pigglesbottom (a made-up name; her real one has fallen out of the frying pan of history) grew into one of those local British traditions that honor colloquial characters for their inadvertent absurdity.
More than 500 years after that first run, Olinet townwomen still don frocks and bonnets to scurry with their skillets from the triangular shape of the bell-shaped bell. They a praewer book and a buss from the sexton.
Since 1951, when the Liberal, Kan., Jaycees president read in a magazine about the race and challenged the vicar of Olney on behalf of their respective townwomen, the two towns have run the race concurrently and exchanged letters. In 1972, a lawyer prayed book, but this year the towns exchanged engraved plates for the race, which was run two days ago.
The race receives some good-natured coverage by the national British newspapers, which reinforces a British notion, gotten from "Gunsmoke" and "The Wizard of Oz," of Kansas as the most typical state in the United States. The race also makes a modest but firm link with the popularization of patchwork haphazardry, was made of patchwork haphazardry, and a vivacious steeddaughter of that society.
The British are not necessarily more reserved, but their glee must be grounded in convention before they can let go of their day-to-day dignity. The British have a great contest that provides a perfect format for a fête.
The culture we inherited from Mother Britain is more full of these nonsensical institutions than we realize. Part of the delight of preserving rituals such as murder race is in reminding us of a liberal ideology.
In both countries, the race is a lighthearted remnant of a time when communities invented their own fun, and diversity in entertainment close as the county boundary or the shire border.
They were days of yore when participants rivaled onlookers in number. The contests may have been more motley, but they undoubtedly were more fun. As races and other activities grew in stature, the runners and doers dwindled in proportion to the spectators. The shrinking ratio magnified into distortion the importance of competition.
Spectators began to over-emphasize a contest's outcome to release their own frustrations at not being in the contest. Athletic events now attain such a fervor that instead of laughing at our mistakes, we are mortified by them. At least in Oiney and Liberal, part of the fun still comes from accidentally dropping the pancake out of the skillet.
The citizens who line the streets of the two towns cheer the women with encouragement and enthusiasm. It is difficult to imagine them filling the air with anything like the barrage of obsences and resentment that rained down from old House during the KU-KA-state game Saturday.
Sebastian Coe may be a more exciting runner, but we need the bustling Fanny Pigglessbodies of the "Pancake Tuesday" races and other whimsical events just to keep it clear that no ritual is too sacred, no runner's wreath more glorious than the bonnet of an ordinary housewife who has carried her stone-cold pancake to victory on Shrove Tuesday.
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KANSAN
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The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
Letters Policy
U.S. wastes time on 'radwaste' plan
Nuclear plants have been, and are probably will continue "on line" no matter how many days we take off work to stand in front of the gates of places like Diahlo Canyon, waiting only for disappointing and sometimes physically threatening rebuits.
The more serious question, but less heartening one, is the problem of the "disposal," or isolation from the biosphere, of high level radioactive wastes.
But so far, the process of solving this problem has been complicated and slow.
Radioactive waste comes in two types: spent fuel and reprocessed waste. Both start as uranium-oxide pellets sealed in metal tubes. The pellets contain uranium, the spent fuel — presently 8,000 tons worth — is either kept in storage pools at the reactor site, or reprocessed to extract isotopes such as plutonium for military weapons production. The mostly liquid defense wastes — 75 million gallons — in steel tanks at three nuclear power plants in West Valley, New York.
Twenty-two million gallons of that defense waste, generated by the E. i. Du pont de Nemours and Company-operated Savannah River Plant in Aiken, South Carolina, will be the Department of Energy's "guinea pig" for its efforts to use its multibarrier mined-repository strategy.
Du Pont, the DOE, NRC, EPA and multiple other factions are increasingly involved in research and discussion—including internationally-on what disposal strategy is both adequate and feasible. They immediately ruled out such exotic radwaste disposal schemes as burial in the polar ice caps or on a subantarctic shelf in a new space. The DOE has officially endorsed the mining of deep geological vaults, the mined-repository strategy.
The DOE's timetable calls for sinking exploratory shafts at three selected sites during
One site, the DOE's Hanford Reservation, astride the Columbia River in Washington State, lies on a basalt syncline—basis is a dense, dark-colored volcanic rock. The Cold Creek syncline contains a 50-meter wide basalt bed about 1,000 meters below the surface.
However, water-bearing layers above and below the basalt, and the irregular formation basalt formations take, has caused discussion about either potential channels of water flow exist.
The second site is on federal weapons-testing land in Southern Nevada, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas.
Leakage
There the vaults would be mined in Yucca
Mountain area tuff, a light-colored rock of
compassive fragments and ash, which
Welded tuff is a high density rock that dissipates heat well, and non-welded tuff is a low-density ion-collecting rock. Some researchers believe a repository mined in a welded tuff formation surrounded by non-welded tuff could cool the hot waste and form a barrier capable of absorbing migrating radionuclides.
But that region of the country is geologically complicated; additional research is needed to understand the conditions.
W.J. ANDREWS
stability, and the tuff's response to continuous heating by waste products.
Yet, studies at the Nevada Test Site have
instead speded up to meet the new DOE
schedule.
Haste for waste.
Salt has always been a candidate for rad waste disposal, especially since its plasticity makes it less susceptible to fissures and other corrosion. The ware created by evaporation of prehistoric sea ice.
But salt is susceptible to fresh water and brine inclusions. At one test drilling site a brine pocket surprised engineers. It was located just below a proposed repository bed and contained 1.1 million gallons of fluid, though the fluid was found to have been stagnant—no new fluid had entered or left the pocket for at least 800,000 years. There is concern that undetected brine pockets could encroach and weaken a salt repository.
As yet, geophysical sensing techniques can detect only features where brine pockets might have occurred, causing scientists concern over which pockets are and what their effect might be.
Salt talks.
So now, instead of concentrating on testing known sites of these selected rock types, scientists are gathering data in other areas, with the beds capable of sustaining a mined repository.
But after the exploratory shafts, a test evaluation facility will be built, and the "guines pig" defense wastes are scheduled to be placed in it by 1980.
The waste itself will be melted together with borosilicate glass and placed in special
canisters. These "hot packages" will then be sealed within the mined repository.
The borsilicate medium won out—unofficially—over SYNROC, a synthetic rock which requires extra technology for practical use. It is also needed to melt the waste and SYNROC together.
However, this process of "hot package" burial is viable only for wastes that have been reprocessed, such as defense waste. The reprocessed washes have a reduced remaining "hot" life of 250 to 1,000 years, whereas unreprocessed spent fuel has an extended "hot" life of 300 years depending on the specific waste; for example, Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
We haven't even a process yet to stabilize the not-so-hot waste. But the French do.
Since 1969 France has been vitrifying wastes—metting them into the borosilicate glass—with a pilot plant, and in 1978 opened its full-scale AVM vitrification facility.
The French vitrify their waste, and plan to store it in air cooled wells until the waste can be safely buried. This eliminates the danger of extended heating that could occur if many hot water tanks were not used. It also gives them a longer lead time to research and prepare an adequate geologic repository.
Belgium, West Germany, and the United Kingdom have all decided to buy the French process. But not the U.S. We still have to wait for that. The U.S. is eager to overate the aggressively marketed SYNROC.
But while the DOE picks their glass, time is running out.
According to a recent General Accounting Office report, some defense wastes have been stored for thirty-five years, already outlasting, and in some cases leaking from their obsolete storage tanks. And by the year 2000, the 8,000 present tons of commercial waste will have increased ninefold to almost one million cubic feet.
What are they going to do with it all?
It's obviously going to take a long time to mine and engineer a repository, even if everything goes right. Why not look at what's at hand, like the French, and safely store the waste that we do have, at least isolating it from the biosphere temporarily? Why doesn't the United States buy the French system, the AVM, as our western allies have dope?
The French are already six years ahead of us on paper; they plan to complete their repository by 1992. And now we are fourth in line, even if we do buy their system.
We are ironically wasting waste time. I can almost hear the DOE's apology now, "Sorry we were doing it wrong."
Yea, we know . . . drip, drip, drip.
Letters to the Editor
Reagan at least trying different approach
To the Editor:
In a letter in the Feb. 18 University Daily Kansan, Harry G, Shaffer, professor of economics and Soviet and East European studies, told us about President Reagan's State of the Union address last month. I was quite glad that he outlined the address because, frankly, I missed it. I'm not sure about his economic comments, however.
Although I am not an authority on economics, as I'm sure the professor is, it is rather apparent to me that the economics that he has been teaching in his classes have not done any good reviving the American economy for several years.
I agree with Shaffer on his comments about the poor—initially riggana's economic policies are good, but he doesn't understand them.
I wonder if Shaffer believes that established economic rules are the only ones that can work, just as there is only one way to prove a geometric ream. Reagan is trying something that hasn't been done in American economics since he invoked Velvet was president. He's trying something new!
Clayton J. Samuelsen,
Prairie Village junior
is going to be tough all over. I would say that the social(ist) programs that help the poor are being misused all over the country and need to be cut. I doubt if Shaffer would agree, so I won't say it.
In a final comment, I can only take a quote of Reagan's from earlier this month. "Put up, or lie."
To the Editor:
Choice is simple
I was thoroughly lifted by the poor journalism in her column about the decimated Iranian boy. Now, once again, I was raised from the murky shallows of uncountess to learn that Secretary Clinton had given us gas and oil. In the process, he is saving the most important animal of all—man.
I read Jolyne Waltz's columns with a craving and eagerly await the next issue of the University Daily Kansas so I may flip through the pages to read her hard-binding satires.
I don't believe either of her columns would have been written had they been better researched. In regard to her latest journalistic work, there are two serious points that need to be brought out.
First, lands used for oil and gas production are no longer the dirty oil gushers of the past. The wells are clean and are barely noticed by the ecology after they are in place. Granted, the land may be partially harmed, but not to the extent that it can't be repaired.
Second, everyone has two choices. Next time they are home they can turn off all appliances that have even the slightest connection to oil or heat, and leave them on in the kitchen, eating cold TV dinners in front of a cook proclaiming that they're doing their part to oppose Watt and his policies. Or, everyone can use all their appliances, keep quiet and work around them. And that are both cheap and non-deterrimental to nature.
Take your pick.
Andy Bynum,
Leavenworth freshman