Opinion

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Science and the media: 12 - 18 March

MAR 18, 2011

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

The Wall Street Journal‘s early post-Fukushima call for calm concerning nuclear power’s future
Two Washington Post columnists’ early post-Fukushima condemnation of nuclear power
A Wall Street Journal columnist’s prediction that environmentalists will revert to opposing nuclear power
Conflation of Hiroshima devastation and Fukushima harm in an Amy Goodman commentary
Congressional Republicans’ hardening climate-consensus disbelief as assessed in a Nature editorial

Nuclear misgivings proliferate following Japan’s disaster; Wall Street Journal calls for calm and perspective

“The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have dissolved in the crippled cores of Japan’s nuclear reactors.” So began the 14 March, above-the-fold, front-page New York Times article “US Nuclear Push May Be Impeded.”

Also on 14 March, the Chicago Tribune published “Japan’s Crisis May Have Already Derailed ‘Nuclear Renaissance,’” a story line picked up by at least one of the Tribune‘s network of other newspapers. And Cokie Roberts, in her regular Monday morning Q&A on NPR’s Morning Edition, predicted renewed nuclear misgivings in America. Though she didn’t mention engineers or scientists, she dwelled in particular on popular mistrust of authorities, including utilities and government regulators, when it comes to nuclear power.

The Times reports that “even staunch supporters of nuclear power are now advocating a pause in licensing and building new reactors in the United States to make sure that proper safety and evacuation measures are in place,” and that “environmental groups are reassessing their willingness to see nuclear power as a linchpin of any future climate change legislation.” The Times piece states that although President Obama “still sees nuclear power as a major element of future American energy policy . . . he is injecting a new tone of caution into his endorsement.”

The views of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in the matter are being reported widely. The Times notes his caution that “the United States should not overreact to the Japanese nuclear crisis by clamping down on the domestic industry indefinitely” and says as well that “Republicans have loudly complained that the Obama administration did just that after the BP oil spill last spring.”

The Times piece also quotes Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), whom it identifies as “a skeptic of nuclear power who nonetheless supported expansion of nuclear power” in recent legislation. Markey reportedly said, “The unfolding disaster in Japan must produce a seismic shift in how we address nuclear safety here in America.”

The 14 March Wall Street Journal opinion page focuses on this question of renewed nuclear misgivings, and calls for calm and perspective.

The lead editorial carries the headline “Nuclear Overreactions,” with a call-out declaring, “Modern life requires learning from disasters, not fleeing all risk.” The editorial begins as follows:

After a once-in-300-years earthquake, the Japanese have been keeping cool amid the chaos, organizing an enormous relief and rescue operation, and generally earning the world’s admiration. We wish we could say the same for the reaction in the US, where the troubles at Japan’s nuclear reactors have produced an overreaction about the risks of modern life and technology.

Part of the problem is the lack of media proportion about the disaster itself. The quake and tsunami have killed hundreds, and probably thousands, with tens of billions of dollars in damage. The energy released by the quake . . . is equivalent to about 336 megatons of TNT, or 100 more megatons than last year’s quake in Chile and thousands of times the yield of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima. The scale of the tragedy is epic.

Yet the bulk of US media coverage has focused on a nuclear accident whose damage has so far been limited and contained to the plant sites. In simple human terms, the natural destruction of Earth and sea have far surpassed any errors committed by man.

The editorial laments that “more than other energy sources, nuclear plants have had their costs increased by artificial political obstacles and delay. The US hasn’t built a new nuclear plant since 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown, even as older nuclear plants continue to provide 20% of the nation’s electricity.” It reports that the “Tennessee Valley Authority is a couple of years away from completing a reactor at Watts Bar after years of effort” and that “proposals for 20 new reactors to be built over the next 15 to 20 years are in various stages of review in the multiyear approval process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.” America’s “much-ballyhooed ‘nuclear renaissance,’” the editorial predicts, is “a long way off, and it will be longer after events in Japan.”

The piece ends with a few paragraphs about technological risk. “Modern civilization is in the daily business of measuring and mitigating risk, but its advance requires that we continue to take risk. It would compound Japan’s tragedy if the lesson America learns is that we should pursue the illusory and counterproductive goal of eliminating all risk.”

The editorial also points to an op-ed by William Tucker atop the facing page, “Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl,” where the call-out says that the “containment structures appear to be working” and that “the latest reactor designs aren’t vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here.” Tucker emphasizes that the “crisis seems to have been triggered by the failure of diesel generators that provided electricity to cool the reactors once they were shut down,” and that the op-ed “explains that this weakness has been corrected in new nuclear plant designs.”

Tucker, author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey (Bartley, 2008), offers in his op-ed, a technical explanation of “exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.” Here’s the ending:

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.

Washington Post columnists reject nuclear power

Beneath the grossly understated headline “Slow The Nuclear Rush,” a large box on on the Washington Post op-ed page for 15 March pairs the columns of Anne Applebaum and Eugene Robinson. Apparently the editor who wrote that overall headline only skimmed the two columns, for the accurate verb isn’t “slow.”

Applebaum calls not for slowing the nuclear rush, but for killing it. “If the competent and technologically brilliant Japanese can’t build a completely safe reactor,” she asks, “who can?” Nuclear power, she declares, is safe, “except, of course, when it is not.” She seems unimpressed that nuclear-power science and technology are evolving and that future nuclear plants would incorporate new features and approaches. At the end, she declares her “hope that a near-miss prompts people around the world to think twice about the true ‘price’ of nuclear energy, and that it stops the nuclear renaissance dead in its tracks.”

Robinson calls for neither slowing nor stopping the nuclear rush; he simply declares that nuclear power can’t be made safe. The headline on the paper version of his column captures this view: “No fail-safe option.” Nuclear power, he asserts, looks “like a bargain with the devil,” and nuclear fission “is an inherently and uniquely toxic technology.” He does stipulate that it’s possible to engineer nuclear plants that would never suffer breakdowns like those being seen in Japan, but he asserts that it “is also true that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Stuff happens.” Robinson continues:

The problem with nuclear fission is that the stakes are unimaginably high. We can engineer nuclear power plants so that the chance of a Chernobyl-style disaster is almost nil. But we can’t eliminate it completely—nor can we envision every other kind of potential disaster. And where fission reactors are concerned, the worst-case scenario is so dreadful as to be unthinkable.

In a curious comment, Robinson allows that it “seems unlikely that the Fukushima crisis will turn into another Chernobyl, if only because there is a good chance that prevailing winds would blow any radioactive cloud out to sea.” Questions: Is wind direction really a criterion for deciding whether or not to liken the crisis to Chernobyl? Or should that judgment address what the plant does or doesn’t put into the wind in the first place?

Robinson ends his column this way:

As President Obama and Congress move forward with a new generation of nuclear plants, designs will be vetted and perhaps altered. We will be confident that we have taken the lessons of Fukushima into account.

And we will be fooling ourselves, because the one inescapable lesson of Fukushima is that improbable does not mean impossible. Unlikely failures can combine to bring any nuclear fission reactor to the brink of disaster. It can happen here.

Wall Street Journal columnist predicts environmentalist reversal on nuclear power

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr has a long record of deep skepticism about human effects on climate. His 16 March column predicts that the disaster in Japan will—and the following isn’t how he puts it—kill the nuclear renaissance because environmentalists will stupidly reverse their recent advocacy of nuclear power.

Jenkins’s column might merit summarizing. He may disbelieve the global warming consensus, but he shares some views with many who advocate nuclear power.

He expresses respect and appreciation for the on-scene nuclear responders in Japan, but declares that for “the things that matter most—life and safety—the nuclear battle has been a sideshow.” To prove that point, he offers a series of contrasts.

He contrasts the loss of thousands in the tsunami with the human costs, so far, of the nuclear crisis: "[O]ne worker at one nuclear plant is known to have died in a hydrogen explosion and several others have exhibited symptoms of radiation poisoning.”

He offers an environmental degradation contrast:

An infinity of contaminants—sewage, fuels, lubricants, cleaning solvents—have been scattered across the Earth and into aquifers. Radiation releases, meanwhile, haven’t been a serious threat to anyone but the plant’s brave workers.

Then he contrasts Chernobyl with the current crisis. He calls Chernobyl “a uniquely bad nuclear accident” that killed 59 firemen and workers and that, thanks to “the failure to evacuate or take other precautionary steps,” caused “1,800 thyroid cancer cases among children, though fewer than a dozen deaths.” He continues:

Now think about Japan. It suffered its worst earthquake in perhaps 1,100 years, followed by a direct-hit tsunami on two nuclear plants. Plenty of other industrial systems on which the Japanese rely—transportation, energy, water, food, medical, public safety—were overwhelmed and failed. A mostly contained meltdown of one or more reactors would not be the worst event of the month.

Jenkins closes with a question about environmentalists who “haven’t opted for [the] escapism [of] insisting wind and solar” can suffice in the future, and who “have quietly recognized that the only alternative to fossil energy is nuclear.” He asks, “If they believe their climate rhetoric, will environmentalists speak up in favor of nuclear realism or will they succumb to the fund-raising and media lure of antinuclear panic?”

He closes with his own answer: “In the unlikely event the world was ever going to make a concerted dent in CO₂ output, nuclear was the key. Let’s just guess this possibility is now gone, for better or worse.”

Nuclear “worst piece I have seen so far”

This past Thursday in a regional daily, I found what I cherish as the most irresponsible piece of nuclear-power hysteria I’ve seen so far: “Calling time on the nuclear age” by Amy Goodman of the radio show Democracy Now .

In this of all weeks, please consider the difficulty of exceeding all others in spreading that hysteria. After all, we live in a country many thousands of miles across the sea from Japan, yet druggists suddenly can’t keep potassium iodide on the shelves in California.

This piece was crying out for a good rebuttal, but Mark Lynas , a UK science writer, ruined part of my fun by beating me to it.

When I googled for the Goodman piece, I bumped immediately into Lynas’s blog posting entitled “Rebuttal of Amy Goodman scaremongering op-ed on Japanese nuclear crisis.” Concerning the worst piece I have seen so far, Lynas had already written, It’s “the worst piece I have seen so far.”

As Lynas explains, Goodman offers questionable technical comments and worse. But as he also explains, those aren’t the reason she wins the prize.

Goodman wins the prize right in her opening, where she quotes an August 1945 news report on Hiroshima’s devastation, asserts that it “could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today,” and declares that given “the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, [the 1945] grave warning to the world remains all too relevant.”

You read that correctly. It’s a compounded offense. Not only does Goodman brandish Hiroshima in a nuclear-power debate, she falsely conflates Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the 2011 devastation.

At the end of her column, Goodman reverts to this conflation. “The nuclear age dawned not far from Fukushima,” she writes, “when the United States became the sole nation in human history to drop nuclear bombs on another country, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.” To Goodman, this constitutes a “warning” for all of us about nuclear power. As Lynas asks, “Does she understand that it is physically impossible for a nuclear power station to explode like a nuclear weapon?”

It’s often said that participants in political debates must condemn, immediately and on principle, attempts of one side to liken the other to Hitler or the Nazis. Probably nuclear-power advocates have long since learned a similar principle: If the opponents drag in Hiroshima, blow the whistle.

Nature editorial rebukes Republicans

In a Washington Post op-ed last fall , Sherwood Boehlert, former chairman of the House Science Committee, called on his “fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become [their] party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.”

Apparently that plea has been spurned. A recent Talking Points Memo posting , for example, pointed out that all 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have declined “to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists.”

Now the editors of Nature are energetically rebuking the Republican party. Under the headline “Into ignorance ,” they lament Congress’s handling of the issue of the Environmental Protection Agency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Their editorial charges that at a 14 March subcommittee hearing, “anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination to listen to scientists, let alone learn from them.”

The editors call this “an embarrassing display, not just for the Republican Party but also for Congress and the US citizens it represents.” At one point the editors catalog some more criticisms:

One lawmaker last week described scientists as “elitist” and “arrogant” creatures who hide behind “discredited” institutions. Another propagated the myth that in the 1970s the scientific community warned of an imminent ice age. Melting ice caps on Mars served to counter evidence of anthropogenic warming on Earth, and Antarctica was falsely said to be gaining ice. Several scientists were on hand—at the behest of Democrats on the subcommittee—to answer questions and clear things up, but many lawmakers weren’t interested in answers, only in prejudice.

Near the end, the editors assert that it “is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.