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Same Old Anti-Nukes, Same Old Song and Dance

By Eric McErlain
In today's Clarion Ledger, anti-nuclear activist Ruth Pullen trots out all the old familiar tropes about why America should reject expansion of nuclear energy. There are plenty of things to quibble with, but there's one particular passage that caught my attention:
Current studies indicate increased cancers and infant mortality in the vicinity of nuclear plants . . .
Now, as we saw on Friday, we're more than prepared to counter arguments like this one that have no scientific basis whatsover, and how anti-nukes deliberately juggle and distort data in such a way that would get a college freshman thrown out of Econ 101. Moreover, in the case we covered last week, Joseph Mangano's arguments have been consistently rejected by any and all public health agencies that ever reviewed them.

A number of thoughts struck me while reading: First, I couldn't help but notice the paucity of actual facts and figures. Here we are, more than a decade into the age of the Internet. Pullen was able to have these claim published in a daily newspaper, yet didn't provide a link to an online source that includes the data that buttresses her claim.

It's more than likely that such an online source doesn't exist. No matter, but when it comes to public debate, there should be a more rigorous burden of proof applied.

So here's the challenge to Ms. Pullen: Where's the data beef in this air sandwich?

UPDATE: Thanks to Alan Smith at Entergy for passing along a Public Citizen fact sheet that was apparently the source for the op ed piece. We're looking it over right now.

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