Skip to main content

Asking the Expert

chinook Dr. David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University offers interesting comments at the New York Times today. It’s a meta story about a expert who has been asked by various media outlets to share his views.

“People are very worried, which is not surprising,” he said. “We want people to be able to make some kind of realistic assessment.”

In the week or so after the earthquake, he did about 30 interviews with reporters, he said, “some good, some dreadful.”

Some interviewers tried to push him to say the danger was much greater than he believed it to be. He resisted, and canceled one appearance when he realized that the host group had a strong anti-nuclear agenda.

Can’t say that’s a big surprise. As for Dr. Brenner:

Asked whether he was for or against nuclear power, he paused, then said, “I think there is a role for safe nuclear power.”

Worth a read. Dr. Brenner engages in speculation about outcomes – it seems to me to early for that, but in all, the story justifies its title: Countering Radiation Fears With Just the Facts.

---

I wrote earlier I would keep my eyes open for some dire nuclear energy editorials. Most we’ve seen have taken a positive though measured view; none have suggested just shutting everything down. So this editorial from the Chinook (Wash.) Observer should do the trick:

Lobbyists for the American atomic-energy industry might just as well resign en masse now and seek work with better prospects — perhaps inventing a perpetual-motion machine or bringing peace to the Middle East.

The rest of it gets a little muddled. Lines like this - “In fact, the latest nuclear equipment is quite safe.” – don’t help the cause, nor does this somewhat muted appreciation of natural gas:

Natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, will be part of the answer. This does not mean we should blithely go along with a liquefied natural gas terminal at Skipanon. It is not sensible to situate giant tanks of a highly explosive substance on a nearby waterfront subject to 9.0 quakes and tsunamis.

But you take what you can get.

Chinook Bay. Nope, no place for anything that can explode.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin