Nuclear Opponents Need to Get Their Facts Straight and Prove Them with Data

As a king nerd and complete geek, somehow in 1975, at the urging of my high school biology teacher Mr. Howell, I found myself president of my high school science club. Actually, that was alright by me as then, as it is now, all the hot girls are intelligent anyway and they all wear glasses.

O'Jays - Back Stabbers

For my senior thesis, it wouldn't do for the president of that club to write any old dissertation about boring things like the life cycle of turtles or seagulls, I had to write about frightening and earth shattering events like the great coming crisis of that time: Global Climate Change. Namely, the coming of the next ice-age.


Oh, it wasn't just me who worried about such things, the next great ice age that was going to destroy the earth and ruin our food supply and displace tens of millions of people was big news. It was in all the current magazines and opinion leading publications of the day. The one magazine that really turned my opinion and convinced me, as well as a few million other Americans, that the ice age was real and it was coming was Time Magazine. 


I was so horrified of the coming ice age and how food and fuel prices were going to skyrocket that I was convinced that writing my senior thesis about this coming disaster would surely turn me into a genius student scholar recognized the world over. 


Well, that didn't happen. 


The ice age never came and I never became recognized as a genius scholar excepting upon a purview into a hand held mirror.


Lesson one learned about being skeptical about the news was well learned.

Incredibly, I was one of the few who survived

Time went by and I finally escaped university one day and found myself working - by some miracle and lots of skulduggery - at a broadcasting station. Over the years while working at broadcasting, I became to understand something about hype versus reality when it comes to broadcasting; hype sells. Reality can sell, if it is exciting. If reality isn't exciting, then make it that way. I found the only problem with that method is that the reality, when bent to become exciting, is no longer reality but becomes into the realm of hype.


Many of the episodes of dealing with this hype started for me, if I remember well, in at least 1982 when we were told that HIV/AIDS was going to kill half the population of the world and were also told that some scientists believed that AIDS was transmitted by dirty toilet door handles. 


Another early episode was with the first Gulf War and Saddam Hussein's 4th largest army in the world (which collapsed after a mere four days after the commencement of a land invasion); then there was the bombing of Serbia followed by a plethora of various killer diseases that were going to depopulate the earth (in no particular order: Ebola virus, Dengu fever, Swine flu, Bird flu, SARS, etc.) and, who could forget the next disastrous event that was going to radically change our earth: Man Made Global Warming (AGW).


At first, like everyone else, I believed the polemic about man-made global warming, but, after growing to become skeptical, and from several ridiculous experiences in the mass media, I had learned enough to do some background checking. What I found about AGW soon made me land firmly in the nonbeliever camp.


But saying that back in the early 2000's was pure unadulterated heresy and stupidity as, everyone would soon, and surely, remind you that the science was absolutely decided and 2,500 of the world tops scientists had already agreed. There was nothing more to be discussed.


I wonder where those 2,500 scientists are today?


Still, I didn't buy it. Too many things didn't make sense. 


First off, the absurd idea that the polar ice caps, that are floating on the ocean at the North Pole, upon melting, would cause the sea level to rise. Now that is a completely ridiculous notion. Thank god for my time as president of my high school science club. Any 7th grade student can tell you that ice in a cup of water will displace it's own weight so that when the ice melts, the level of water will not rise. It simply cannot. The weight of the ice has already displaced its own weight. Water is the same weight if it is frozen or if it is liquid, it cannot magically weigh more if it melts.

DOUBLE CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE LARGE VIEW

President of the high school Science Club (back row, fourth from the left) 

The second fact that made me a firm disbeliever in AGW theory was when I was shown data that proved that the surface temperatures on Venus and Mars had risen in conjunction with the rise in temperatures of the earth. Now that was a real head scratcher. Unless Martians and Venusians were driving SUVs on their planets then it doesn't seem possible that green house gases were causing their surface temperatures to rise in parallel with the earth's.


No, I had then become convinced that, as many scientists were beginning to state, that the activity of the sun was responsible for our temperature and climate changes. The case was closed for me when I read that a proponent of AGW had actually made the idiotic claim that the sun's activity had nothing to do with the temperature of the earth. What foolish poppycock. One only need to go outside at night and compare the temperature during the day under the hot sun to be witness as to how much the sun controls temperature on this planet.


AGW, it is usually accompanied by smirks and jokes.


I was absolutely right then and I am proven right now.


Which now brings me to the subject of the day: the nuclear accident at Fukushima and how much this incident is going to change our lives and livelihood. If you talk to one camp, the anti-nuclear crowd (who, incidentally, seems to be the very same crowd who claimed that AGW would destroy the climate and over 50 million of earth's inhabitants would be "Global Warming refugees" by 2010... Which, of course, never happened) you'll hear a shrill and growing shriller prophesy of doom, death and world destruction.


If you listen to what is increasingly being described as the pro-nuclear crowd, you seem to hear a much more level headed debate. At least, that's what it seems like to me.


Perhaps I think this way because I've heard this prophesy of doom are too often and, in too many cases, it seems illogical. contradictory and simply not practical.  


My good friend, Scott M, sends me a recent article from the Guardian UK written by George Monbiot that asks some of the same questions that I ask of the panic and doom crowd. It was the same questions I asked of that crowd concerning AGW, Swine flu, Bird flu and the others. Specifically, "Where is your proof? Show me some facts." 

Here are selected parts from that article entitled, "Nuclear Opponents Have a Moral Duty to Get Their Facts Straight." In this article, George Monbiot takes to task one of the most vocal anti-nuclear activists, Helen Caldicott for making a wide array of unsubstantiated claims:

As governments ponder a disastrous move away from nuclear power, it is vital campaigners don't spread misinformation – but Helen Caldicott fails to interrogate her own claims and sources.

My request to Helen Caldicott was a simple one: I asked her to give me sources for the claims she had made about the effects of radiation. Helen had made a number of startling statements during a television debate, and I wanted to know whether or not they were correct. Scientific claims are only as good as their sources.

Here are three examples of the questions I asked, and the answers she gave me.

At first I asked for general sources for her claims. She sent me nine documents: press releases, newspapers articles and an advertisement. Only one of them was linked to a scientific publication: the BEIR VII report published by the National Academy of Sciences. She urged me to read it. I did so and discovered that, far from supporting her claims, it starkly contradicts them. For example, it says:

• The risk of radiation-induced mutations in sperm and eggs, resulting in heritable disease "is sufficiently small that it has not been detected in humans, even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

• Regarding transmissible genetic damage from the exposure of future parents, such as "spontaneous abortions, congenital malformations, neonatal mortality, still births and the sex ratio of offspring … there is no consistent evidence of an association of any such outcomes with exposure to environmental sources of radiation."

• "On balance, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that rates of childhood leukaemia have increased as a result of radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident".

I began to wonder whether Helen has actually read this report, or was hoping that, at 423 pages, it would scare me away. The PDF costs $46.

She claimed that isotopes of krypton, xenon and argon "can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease". When I asked her for a source, she told me, "This is also described in my book." In fact her book says (p55): "There have never been any epidemiological studies performed on the effects of exposure to the noble gases xenon and krypton." This flatly contradicts her own claim.

When I pressed her for better sources, her publishers wrote to me and said she did not have time to find them. 

Then she appears to suggest that iodine-131 can "continuously irradiate small volumes of cells … over many years". As it has a half life of eight days, this seems unlikely. Again, a source would help to clear the matter up..

Then she makes a remarkable allegation: as a result of a conspiracy hatched with the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1959 the World Health Organisation has "made no more statements on health and radioactivity". This is completely false, as even the quickest search would have shown her.

Helen has still not provided a shred of evidence for her claim that the recent report by another UN agency – the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – into the Chernobyl disaster is "a total cover-up". Twice I have asked her to substantiate this allegation; twice she has replied with accusations about the WHO. Is she aware that these are different agencies?

Finally, George Monbiot comes to the crux of the problem and something that I have stated over and over in this very blog: When people are making wild statements using terms such as "if," "perhaps," "maybe" and "possibly" - as they have been doing lavishly when describing what could or might happen at Fukushima, the only thing intelligent and logical people can and should do is to examine only the facts. He continues:

I believe that journalists should not stand by while misinformation is spread. If there is any value in journalism, it lies in trying to winnow fact from fiction, and helping people to form a more accurate view of the world.

This is an especially difficult time to try to make the case for keeping the dangers of nuclear power in perspective. The frightening events at Fukushima are still unfolding, the disaster has been upgraded to category 7, making it one of the two worst such events on record. But it is just when the case is hardest that it most urgently needs to be made, however much anger this generates. If we don't stick to the facts, if we don't subject all claims to the same degree of scepticism, we could make a bad situation worse.

This is an excellent article and I highly recommend that you go to the source and read it in full here.


As for me, I am all too often placed in the pro-nuclear crowd. It is a title of which I would deny. I am firmly in the camp of the anti-government, anti-war and free market crowd. I am also in the camp of the crowd who wants the truth and not so-called "news" that is based upon conjecture, supposition, hypothesis, theory, thesis, speculation, hunches, or guesswork. Those all have their place but they do not have any place in the news; they do have a pace in talk shows or news stand tabloid sensationalism.


I also believe in the miracles of the free market and what it can do to better our lives through unfettered technology. I have seen facts as to what coal mining and burning coal does to our environment and our health. I know also of the well documented dangers to our health that burning oil causes along with the rape and pillage of the people upon whose land that oil rests.


It seems to me that the only safe and logical choice is to continue with nuclear power and to better our technology and create more of the extremely safe fast breeder types of reactors that have already been developed and tested... Why we are still using 40-year-old technology in our current nuclear reactors is a testament to government interference and the confused - and constantly evolving - stand of the environmentalist movement. First rate airlines have all stopped using 30-year-old aircraft, namely Boeing 747, in their fleets as they are aged and becoming increasingly unreliable. Why in the world do first rate economies still use 40-year-old nuclear reactors when third generation breeders which have been shown and tested as an extremely safe alternative is a mystery. 


So called Alternative energy sources such as solar power and wind turbines are fine for refrigerators, heating bathtubs, and running transistor radios and TV sets. But they could never generate enough power to run a steel mill or a mass transit subway line. Frankly speaking, until now, they are massive and expensive failures.


We need to continue to allow technology make our lives better, in spite of the risks, and until the risks are shown to outweigh the benefits. To this end, nuclear power is our only viable source for the near and foreseeable future. We must strive on to develop completely safe nuclear power for the good of our environment and the betterment of our children's and our children's children's future.

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Couple that with the ongoing problems at Fukushima and we are looking into a future of disastrous consequences. 

Photoshop makes some great propaganda, but the truth is quite different. What is appalling is that some people see this stuff and believe it to be true!

The online technology and culture publication, Spiked, has a brilliant essay about Chernobyl on the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.


Here are some selected parts:


Yesterday was the twenty-fourth anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. That incident has become one of the main obstacles to the expansion of nuclear power, with environmental groups like Greenpeace demanding that we ‘Remember Chernobyl’. Indeed, we should – but we should remember what actually happened, not the nightmarish spectre summoned up by so many greens.


Just before 1.24am, a series of explosions blew the huge metal and concrete safety lid off the reactor, exposing the core. Enormous quantities of radiation poured out. In the next few days, a number of the plant operators and firemen fought heroically to seal the reactor, and many of them died horribly from radiation sickness as a result. 

Radioactive material was scattered far and wide, most notably in the surrounding parts of Ukraine and Belarus, but thousands of miles away, too. In the UK, for example, many sheep are still tested (almost certainly pointlessly) to ensure that no dangerous radioactivity enters the food chain.

Chernobyl was by far the world’s worst nuclear accident. However, official studies suggest that the accident was not as apocalyptic as we have often been led to believe over the past 24 years. According to a report in 2005, produced by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant…" 

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.’

Others claim that the WHO-IAEA report is a gross underestimate. Not surprisingly, considering it is a stalwartly anti-nuclear campaign group, Greenpeace published a report in 2006 claiming that ‘the full consequences of the Chernobyl disaster could top a quarter of a million cancer cases and nearly 100,000 fatal cancers’, with tens of thousands of premature deaths from other causes. However, there is good reason to believe that the WHO-IAEA claims of 50 deaths so far is nearer the mark. Apart from the poor souls who fought to deal with the accident directly, the actual radiation dose received by the population in the countries around the plant was quite small. 

The picture of Chernobyl in many people’s minds is of a nuclear wasteland for miles around. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Injecting some balance into the discussion of the accident and death toll at Chernobyl is not to suggest that this incident was an irrelevance. It was a very serious accident. But the lesson to be learned is not that nuclear power is inherently dangerous. In fact, Chernobyl aside, nuclear power has an astonishingly good safety record. The only other nuclear incidents that any member of the general public can ever remember were an accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, USA in 1979 - which resulted in no deaths at the time and produced an average exposure to radiation for the local population equivalent to a single chest x-ray - and a fire at the Windscale nuclear plant (now called Sellafield) in northern England in 1957, which again passed without immediate casualties (though about 200 cases of cancer were estimated to have been caused as a result in subsequent years).

This all sounds very good and promising for the nuclear power industry. But what is even more shocking is that many leaders of the Green Parties - who were adamantly anti-nuclear - have come out as pro-nuclear one they bothered to research the facts. The article continues:

Ironically, many leading greens have recently come out in support of expanding nuclear power, including James Lovelock, Mark Lynas and former Greenpeace UK director, Stephen Tindale. Another veteran green, Stewart Brand, in his book Whole Earth Discipline, offers a mea culpa for opposing nuclear power for so long. ‘My opinion on nuclear has flipped from anti to pro. The question I ask myself now is, “What took me so long?” I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.’

Finally, Spiked says it better than I ever could with their closing arguments:

Nuclear power is a safe, reliable and developing technology. We should be building new nuclear plants as soon as possible. And the fact that we have rejected nuclear for so long, and are still dithering about it today, has a lot to do with the myth of Chernobyl, its exploitation by anti-modern greens, and its impact on the increasingly risk-averse, investment-shirking governments that rule over us.

What people who want to stop nuclear energy fail to realize is that the economy is bad enough now as it is. The oil and coal industries have raped the environment and have caused untold misery in wars to control those resources. 

The way the current economy is - and will be for the foreseeable future - we cannot afford a world without cheap, clean nuclear power.  To think other wise is just plain foolish.

Can you imagine a near future of gasoline and oil prices hitting new world records - at prices three or four times higher than they are now - not to mention how skyrocketing oil prices will exponentially increase our grocery bills? What are our realistic options? 

Solar, wind and power from things like ethanol and bio-fuels that must be subsidized by you, the taxpayer, are generations away from being efficient and generating more energy per unit than they cost to produce.

The facts should be as plain as day to even the most vehement green. It has been to the leaders of the Green Parties:  T

he very worst thing that could happen to us, the little guy, (that's you and me) is for our gas and electricity costs to skyrocket in the middle of this recession. For the betterment of the environment and for our children's future and for our economic well-being, we need cheap, clean renewable energy.

All of our current alternative energy sources are dirty, destroy the environment and are not cost efficient. The only choice we have is nuclear power. We must continue to develop it and make it into the ultimate safe energy source. We have no other choice. 

Thanks to Michael Distacio of Rock Challenge Japan

Japan's Nuclear Disaster and Wall of Shame Reporting

As you've read here at this blog basically from day one of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident crisis in Japan, the western media has been having a field day with the over the top sensationalist reporting. Please! Click on the video and then read on! You just can't make this stuff up!

SHIRLEY & COMPANY - SHAME SHAME SHAME

Well, now more and more people are starting to go on record taking these clowns to task. It's too bad that too many people consider the news god's gospel truth instead of tabloid sensationalism because that's what it basically is.

Pull up a chair, grab a beer, and get ready for some really humorous stuff.

Thank god, there are many others, besides me, who have been skeptical and suspicious from the start and many more people are finally waking up to the prospect that, once again, the mass media is not to be believed by any stretch of the imagination.


There's a guy who writes a blog called, "Squeeze Box Press." I don't know his name but he gets a hero award from me. In his post of March 17th, 2011 entitled: 

WHY BAD JOURNALISM HAS DRIVEN ME TO DESPERATE ENDS

He explains that he is starting a Wall of Shame to list up all this crap reporting. It is a wonderful read too. He writes: 

In retrospect, I should have had this idea before, but I guess today I just hit critical mass (not sure if it’s appropriate to use a nuclear energy turn of phrase here): one too many pieces of bad journalism.

So I decided to start a wiki Bad Journalism Wall of Shame and invite some of the other people who were frustrated with some of the shoddy, alarmist, and shockingly wrong journalism we’ve seen since last Friday’s Tohoku quake.

I take everything I read with a grain of salt these days, and have for many years.  When I read an article or see a television report that makes sensational claims, I try to fact check on my own, because I no longer trust most journalists to have done it for me.  There are several major areas that journalists particularly suck at:

• Science reporting.  I have a degree in fine arts, and I could write better science articles than most science writers could.  Any journalist who suggested that Fukushima could be “another Chernobyl” should be made to retake his 9th grade science class and then have his journalist license revoked.   Oh wait…
• Reporting on Japan.  JAPAN IS SOOO WEIRD!  JAPANESE PEOPLE HAVE NO EMOTION!  If everything you think you know about Japan was learned from the movies Gung Ho and Mr. Baseball, then maybe you’re not qualified to write an article about Japan.  Also, spending a few days, hell, even a month in Japan (probably in a hotel or furnished apartment, or otherwise isolated location) does not make you an expert on the place.  Nor does interviewing someone who has lived here for a few months (or even year, if living in one of the many gaijin bubbles).
• Disaster reporting.  Two and a half words: Exaggeration and fear-mongering.

This is not new information.  Not to me, and probably not to you.  However, in the aftermath of the quake, all three of these elements joined together to create (to use a term journalists are so fond of using themselves) the “perfect storm”.  News piece after news piece full of inaccuracies, misinterpretations, and just plain lies.  (My favourites are the photos, shown out-of-context.  For instance, showing a photo of a girl in a surgical-style mask and implying that she was wearing it due to radiation, while the reality is that we’re in allergy season here and many people wear masks to keep pollen at bay.)

The worst offenders are the 24-hour news networks.  A few hours into the quake, I stopped looking at them.  The problem there (as we learned during the 9/11 coverage) is that the anchors feel like they have to keep talking to fill dead air, which means that they inevitably end up saying dumbass things.

But no news source gets off scot free.  Some seem to make stuff up, others seem to repeat rumours floating around in the electronic ether, while others interview obvious idiots or crazies and take what they say as gospel truth.  Some, I think, pick information up from another news source, and never bother to check it for accuracy.

This last paragraph is particularly damning and I think right on target. But I am of the opinion that, even more disasterous for everyone is not so much the actual reporting, but the fact that so many people actually believe this stuff! What planet are these people living on?


When will people ever learn? I hear that in the old Soviet Union that the Russian people didn't believe anything that Pravda said because they knew it was propaganda... You'd have thought that western society would have produced more discerning intelligent people... But I guess not.


This guy then goes on to explain what the Wall of Shame is all about: Atrocious, bad, malicious and/or fear mongering reporting going on in the western media and how he wants to put them all on record. He writes:


This Wall of Shame is being assembled by various people, many of whom are on the ground in Japan as residents, not temporarily assigned journalists, who are sick of the sensationalist, overly speculative, and just plain bad reporting that has gone on since the Tohoku quake in Japan on March 11. We feel that contacting each and every publication and reporter every time a bad report shows up independently is not effective, and it is our sincere hope that this will encourage journalists to aspire to a higher (some would say minimal) level of responsibility in their reports. If you would like to add a report of your own, feel free. What can you do if you've read some of the articles listed here and you want to do something? We're compiling a list of press organizations to which you can complain HERE.


I highly recommend that you go to the Wall of Shame and view this artwork in progress. Here are just a few of my favorites (many others are not listed yet):  


Germany's BILD Zeitung gets an award for total nonsense:


Headline titling "Atomic Horror" mit 4 (!) exclamation marks. The picture on the front shows a person with gas mask/some suit against radioactive pollution. In the background a devastated landscape is shown. On first sight it looks like a nuclear desert, however it is a picture from the destruction caused by the Tsunami. 
On the next pages they ask: "And what´s up with the Sushi 
in the restaurants? Can we still eat it"?  (emphasis mine)


Even the alternative media get in on the act of ridiculous reporting with Kurt Nimmo's nonsense in Infowars.com:


Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl;

Fear-Mongering Headline "Japanese Nuclear Meltdown Would Be Hundreds of Times Worse Than Chernobyl" with no supporting evidence;

Grotesque factual errors: "The 480-megawatt Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is a hundred times more powerful than the ill-fated reactor at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine." In fact Chernobyl reactors were 1000 MWe while Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi is 480 MWe, less than half Chernobyl's power.

We're doomed!

Oh, no! Not Scientific American!? Yes. Scientific American too needs to sell ad space. They allow writer Steve Mirsky off his leash to fan the flames of panic:


"Radioactive waste dump for years to come." and "This is going to be like Chernobyl." Scientific American joins the ranks of popular journalism. Added offense severity points for retaining the word 'scientific' in their name. (emphasis mine)


If you are intelligent and sick and tired of the mass media sensationalism (but I repeat myself) you can see much much more at the Wall of Shame: http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame


Thanks so much to the Wall of Shame, Ray Hearn