With Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, et al. in Rochester, there was a lot of research on everything optical. Some of the materials used in producing film was not exactly benign, although it rarely exploded like some of the early film stock. My concern was that public safety people in Monroe County didn’t know about a potential radioactive hazard, and weren’t prepared to deal with it if there was a problem. It is the sort of thing that fire and police officials want to know about before something happens. They at least want to know who to call to deal with it.

You make the same valid point, Ellroon – who is responsible for it, and what do you do with it when it no longer serves any purpose?

Actually, Jams, George Eastman’s last big project to make health care affordable for everyone in Monroe County by forcing the health insurance people and health care providers to control costs. It was a rare person in the county who wasn’t covered, and a rare job that didn’t throw in a Blue Cross – Blue Shield plan for even part-time workers. Sadly, no one ever expanded what he did, and it has collapsed after his passing, and the passing of most of the large corporations that called Rochester home, Kodak just being the last.

The real shame, Badtux, is that Kodak owns some of the earliest and most basic patents for digital imaging technology, but the corporate decision makers didn’t want to invest any money in anything that was a threat to their cash-cow film business. Xerox ignored everything that their Palo Alto Research Center was doing because it wasn’t important to their copier business. These are the people everyone is supposed to respect because they are ‘the job creators’?!

My suspicion is that the weapons-grade uranium was the least of what Kodak had down there in that basement. If someone had wanted to build a dirty bomb, Kodak had the fixin’s for it. But nowadays we have digital technology for all that stuff, and digital is a dime a dozen… so Kodak is bankrupt, and Intel is a money machine. So it goes.