The "Luddite reaction" represents a naive and uninformed objection to this technology. The point I was trying to make is that there are very sound reasons from a public policy and management point of view to be suspicious of this technique, and that its financial and practical benefits have been highly exaggerated to investors. One of the items the businessman brought up in his op-ed piece was that no agriculturalists in Florida had expressed any enthusiasm in investing in this technology, the money all came from private speculators who did not understand the industry.

As for the Xray alternative, which would be much safer since it would not involve thousands of highly dangerous radioactive sources scattered all over the country, and moving about on public transport, I'm not knowledeable enough to know if we can generate xrays of sufficient potency to do industrial scale food processing.

Recall that microbes are highly resistant to radiation, to have sources powerful enough to sterilize food in a matter of seconds to support throughputs required by the agricultural sector requires very powerful sources. I know radio-isotopes that can do this are available, but xrays, at several orders of magnitude less energy, may just not be economical or even feasible. But I really don't know this for a fact.