Thursday, August 23, 2007

Faux liberal NPR shows true colors

Action Alert
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3164

NPR Touts Pro-Nuke 'Environmentalists'
Network's own nuclear links undisclosed

8/22/07

An August 15 NPR Morning Edition segment touted the benefits of nuclear power, suggesting it was gaining popularity with many environmentalists who once opposed it.

The segment was an interview with Fortune magazine editor David Whitford, who has written a series of articles about the debate over nuclear power. The piece was introduced by NPR anchor John Ydstie, who asserted that "with fossil fuel carbon emissions in the environmental bull's-eye, nuclear power is starting to shake off its bad reputation." Whitford elaborated on the claim that nuclear power's image is improving: "There are many environmentalists now who began their careers opposed to nuclear power who are now reconsidering nuclear power in the face of global warming."

But Whitford cited just one such environmentalist, Stewart Brand, describing him simply as the creator of the 60s and 70's publication, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and calling him "sort of the original off-the-grid environmentalist." In fact, Brand is currently a businessman, a co-founder and leader of the corporate consulting group Global Business Network (GBN). GBN numbers, among the 192 clients named on its website, more than a dozen corporations and governmental agencies involved in the production or promotion of nuclear energy: General Electric, Bechtel, Duke Power, Siemens-Westinghouse, Fluor, Electric Power Research Institute, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, �lectricit� de France, Iberdrola, Vattenfall, Sydkraft (now E.ON Sweden) and Sandia National Labratories. Some of these, including GE, Bechtel, Duke Power and Westinghouse, are receiving government subsidies to develop the next generation of nuclear power plants, according to a Department of Energy report. Brand's financial links with the industry went unmentioned in the NPR segment.

Brand is one of a small number of former nuclear critics who have become prominent nuclear advocates (Alternet, 03/16/07). But it is a stretch to suggest, as Whitford does, that a handful of former nuclear foes with no current ties to leading environmental groups--and often with financial links to the nuclear industry--constitute "some division within the movement."

In fact, leading environmental groups including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council all agree that nuclear power, with its huge safety, security and cost issues, is not the solution to climate change. A 2005 letter released by Public Citizen and signed by nearly 300 groups opposed congressional subsidies for the nuclear industry:

As national and local environmental, consumer and safe energy organizations, we have serious and substantive concerns about nuclear energy. While we are committed to tackling the challenge of global warming, we flatly reject the argument that increased investment in nuclear capacity is an acceptable or necessary solution.


Instead of a story about a growing fervor for nuclear power among some environmentalists, the story is really one about a growing fervor to resurrect nuclear power among corporate and political elites, aided by a handful of mainly environmentalists-for-hire.

This kind of one-sided coverage is characteristic of NPR's recent reporting on the nuclear industry. In the six stories NPR has broadcast over the past 90 days about the future of nuclear power production in the U.S., NPR's sources included only three opponents of nuclear power plants, versus eights sources touting the safety, environmental friendliness and financial benefits of nuclear energy. Moreover, only one of the three opponents was an expert on the topic, while NPR cast seven of the eight sources speaking in favor of nuclear power as authorities. This period saw an accident at the largest power plant in the world - in Japan (NPR's All Things Considered, 7/19/07) - which was the subject of three additional NPR stories. Yet, even in this coverage of the accident, no experts critical of nuclear power were cited.

One factor that is relevant to NPR's cheerleading for nuclear power is its own financial links to the industry. According to NPR's website, between 1993 and 2005, the public radio service received between $250,000 and $500,000 from Constellation Energy, which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction. During the same period, another nuclear operator, Sempra Energy, donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to NPR. This potential conflict of interest was not disclosed in the August 15 segment, or in any other of NPR's recent largely industry-friendly reports. (NPR has in the past insisted that the corporate "underwriting" money it receives has no bearing on its coverage--a defense that would seem to undercut the rationale for NPR's existence as a noncommercial broadcaster.)

In his interview with Whitford, NPR's Ydstie asked the Fortune editor, "What are the forces that are aligning that make the industry optimistic that there's going to be a revival?" Whitford didn't mention one-sided reporting that fails to disclose its financial ties to the industry as factors that help the industry "shake off its bad reputation" and clear the ground for a nuclear revival.

ACTION: Please contact NPR to suggest that future reports on nuclear power include the consensus view of the environmental movement, and that such reports disclose NPR's financial ties to the industry.

CONTACT: Assistant to the Ombudsman, Chantal de la Rionda, through NPR's website: http://www.npr.org/templates/contact/index.php?columnId=2781901.

3 comments:

  1. Real environmentalists always favored nuclear energy. Anti-nukes always were phonies and poseurs. They lied about nuclear energy, the cleanest and safest energy source there is. They never proved their points, but succeeded in blocking it through endless lawsuits, taking advantage of a legal system that never makes lawyers stop as long as there are fees to collect.

    The result, which was easily foreseen, is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from pollution, irreversible harm to the environment, and even a change in the climate.

    It's almost a miracle that some anti-nukes have come to understand what a terrible mistake they've made. All the other phonies will keep lying until the planet is totally uninhabitable.

    Consider what nuclear gets us:

    (1) An electricity source that doesn’t depend on wind or sunlight or the limited amount of energy storage available, and emits virtually no greenhouse gases. It could reduce CO2 emissions by 40%.

    (2) An energy-efficient way to produce hydrogen, which could be used directly in automobiles and trucks or added to biofuels to make their production higher by a factor of three. Presently, transportation accounts for about 33% of CO2 emissions; all of that could be eliminated through conservation, electrification, and alternate fuels.

    (3) A huge reduction in air pollution, lowered trade deficits, and freedom from Middle-East involvements.

    People who don't understand this don't understand the environment.

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  2. Ahhh, hah-aha-aha-aha-aha!

    What, you're serious? Good god, man, what about the radioactive waste? 10,000,000 year half-life! Dumping it on the poor and indigenous?

    What about the possibility of melt-down?!

    Are you employed by the nuclear industry, because otherwise, we'll have to dub you "Los Uninformed"!

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  3. Thanks for responding. I'll answer your questions in order.

    10 million years? Check your references. But it's true: wastes last a long time. Compare that with the wastes from coal-burning plants, which are many times more dangerous and last forever. Anyway, the official plan is to deposit the wastes in a stable geological structure where they will be isolated from the environment until they have lost their toxicity. It's odd, but typical, that people who call themselves environmentalists have not supported similar measures for the toxic wastes from manufacturing photovoltaic panels. But that's the official plan. What really will happen is different, of course. The spent-fuel wastes are immensely valuable; recycling multiplies their energy value by a factor of twenty. Ultimately, the small, less-dangerous, residual waste probably will be buried safely, but there also is technology available now for transmuting them into other, less noxious, materials.

    Here's a question for you: what harm have nuclear wastes ever caused? Why is that, with all the terrible pollution problems in the world, anti-nukes focus myopically on the only waste product that's never had an adverse effect on the environment?

    We can talk about melt-downs if you like. For some decades, meltdowns have been the holy grail of anti-nukes, allowing them to wallow in self-righteousness, describing a kind of radioactive apocalypse. Then the accident at Three Mile Island proved that they had made it all up. The accident resulted in a full meltdown that had no safety or health effects on anyone. Compare that with the effects of a routine coalmine accident or refinery fire. Compare it with the thousands of Americans who die every month from coal-fired pollution. Even the accident at Chernobyl showed that an unsafely-built and unsafely-operated reactor with essentially no operating safety features could only, in the worst case, cause a disaster that ranks among routine disasters that occur year in and year out.

    I'm not employed in the nuclear industry, but I was a long time ago. I have an interesting perspective because I was in California when an anti-nuclear initiative was being debated. Simultaneously, I was taking environmental-studies classes at a local university. So I got to see both sides of the issue. What I saw was total disregard for the truth on the part of the anti-nukes. Faced with the realities of environmental science, they simply invented "facts" to support their views, knowing that by the time the truth could be established they would gone, safe from accountability. On the pro-nuke side I saw an insistence on saying only what could be proved. In the end, the initiative failed, not so much because the voters supported nuclear energy, but because the initiative was blatantly dishonest.

    For all their self-adulation, the truth about anti-nukes is that they can't be trusted.

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