Usually when people say, “only in this crazy place where I live,” they mean it affectionately. But we mean it in a completely different way when we say, “Only in New Jersey would they pump radioactive waste through 10 miles of sewer main under the heart of a county and into the local river – upstream, mind you, from the entire state of Delaware.”

Yes, starting in June or July, the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority plans to take ground water contaminated by uranium and radium at the GEMS Landfill in Gloucester Township and, essentially, flush it down the toilet.

They'll dilute it, pump an average of 200,000 gallons of it a day for the next 10 years into the regular sewage in the county pipes, and pass it through the treatment plant in Camden and into the Delaware. Some officials convincingly argue that, after all this watering down, the output won't raise the river's radiation level much more than it already is. But this, for some reason, doesn't make me feel any better about things in general.

Still, state and federal officials say the radioactive concentration at GEMS threatens nearby lakes and drinking water. We have to get rid of this material somehow, and there's no really good way to do it.

Adding to the New Jersey-ness of it all, no one even knows how the uranium and radium got there in the first place. We just happen to have it lying around at some local Superfund site. Terrorists seeking nuclear materials need only pick a vacant lot in New Jersey and start licking rocks until they find one that burns.

Voters and elected representatives are starting to have, so to speak, a meltdown over this. But our options are limited. So perhaps we should try looking upon radiation as our friend – a miraculous natural conversion of matter into energy that happens to cause bone cancer.

To help understand why, let's review Einstein's formula, E=mc2: m stands for mass, the physical bulk of a solid object; c is the speed of light – 670 million miles an hour, which it is thought to be almost 5-miles-per-hour faster than I drive on the Turnpike. And just to lighten things up, let's say E stands for the E! True Hollywood Story.

The formula indicates two amazing things: that E! True Hollywood Story is the essential building block of the universe (and not, as formerly believed, Larry King Live), and that even the dullest inanimate object contains enormous potential for a E! True Hollywood Story – the speed of light times itself, or 448.9 quadrillion units of show business gossip. If all the atoms are split open at once, a simple one-pound lump of coal contains enough entertainment value to destroy an entire city.

In a radioactive substance, however, atoms are emitting a relatively small amount of radiation, light and nuclei. And since there are 448.9 quadrillion whatevers worth of the E! True Hollywood Story (or rather, energy), one radioactive pebble can merrily cause cancer for thousands of years.

This could set off panic. But according to the Nuclear Energy Institute of Washington D.C., we're all affected by radiation all the time anyway, and man-made waves are only a small part of it.

Fifty-five percent of the radiation to which the average American is exposed comes from natural radon trapped in their homes, and 11 percent just comes from our own bodies. The rest comes from rocks, soil and other building materials from the earth; cosmic radiation from outer space; consumer products; medical procedures; and, as I see it, this one really unpleasant roommate I had in college.

That leaves less than 1 percent that comes from “other” sources, such as toxic waste. Ergo, we have plenty of leeway to pump this stuff into our patient and accommodating waterways, through which it can fan out and do hilarious things to the fish.

And from there? Perhaps our newly enriched river can flow by Cumberland County, allowing farmers there to produce an ear of corn with a bandwidth of 47 megahertz. Then we'll point to that, too, and say, “Only in New Jersey.”

Or, to be more accurate, “Only in New Jersey, and anyplace downstream from it.”