Dueling B.N.L. Forums

As they have in the past, the supporters and opponents of Brookhaven National Laboratory will hold dueling forums next week.

Next Thursday, a Nobel prizewinning physicist will give a lecture to celebrate the lab's 50th anniversary and the following day the founders of Standing for Truth about Radiation and others will address the soil and groundwater contamination around the lab.

T.D. Lee won the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for research he did at the lab the year before. His talk, at 4 p.m. in the lab's Breckner Hall, will include his "impressions of Brookhaven Lab from the 1950s to the present, and provide a personal view of its role in the 21st century," according to a press release.

Guild Hall Discussion

This year, Dr. Lee was appointed a director of the RIKEN-B.N.L. Research Center, a collaboration between American and Japanese theoretical physicists. The center will include studies done at the lab's relativistic heavy ion collider, a new accelerator now under construction.

At 8 p.m. on Dec. 5, the STAR founders will host a panel discussion at Guild Hall on the chemical and radioactive contamination traced to the lab.

Jan Schlichtmann, a Massachusetts lawyer and anti-pollution activist, will moderate. His successful lawsuit on behalf of eight families in Woburn City, where the water supply was polluted, is the subject of a bestselling book, "A Civil Action," and a film in the making.

Four Panelists

The panelists will include Dr. Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and anti-nuclear power activist who founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr. Jay Gould, who is studying the level of strontium-90 in baby teeth collected on Long Island and across the country, Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a national advocacy group, and Dr. William Weida, an economics professor studying the conversion of nuclear facilities for the Global Resource Action Center.

Both the panel discussion and Dr. Lee's lecture are free and open to the public.