Here's a funny clip from late last week where CNN's Glenn Beck weighs in on the return of the musicians from the "No Nukes" era:
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
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He is not only wrong he is just plain nasty and cruel. Even he had trouble swallowing his own line as he stammered through this angry monologue.
One of Beck's cruel remark in particular, "nobody died from the TMI accident,not one," is not supported by facts. His writers obviously consulted your shop for this misrepresentation.
UNC at Chapel Hill epidemiologist Dr. Steven Wing looked at the TMI data and found statistically significance increases in lung cancer and leukemia. His peer reviewed work was published in a 1996 volume of the National Institute of Health's prestigous "Environmental Health Perspectives." It is academically unrefuted.
People still die from leukemia and lung cancer.
Beck should apologize for such callous disregard for families who have suffered through such losses until he has conclusive ballistics that their cancers were not caused by the radiation releases from the 1979 accident.
Wing et al., you say? That counts as "facts"? Don't make me laugh!
You know as well as I do that Wing's study was funded by a bunch of lawyers who were involved in a suit related to the TMI accident. Well, the lawyers got what they paid for: Wing manipulated the data to satisfy his predetermined conclusions. Unfortunately, for the lawyers, however, this study did them no good, since it was thrown out of court -- it was blatantly obvious that this study was an unscientific load of manure designed to help the plaintiff's case.
The Wing study was over a decade ago! Surely in that time, some credible organization (hint: NIRS is not a credible organization) has come forward to provide additional supporting evidence or to substantiate Wing et al.'s conclusions. So where is the substantiation? Every credible organization that I can think of has either ignored the Wing study or has dismissed it for using flawed methods.
Nice try, spinmeister. My heart's bleeding for you.
Gunter, it is you who should apologize to all of us for insulting our intelligence.
Obviously, you do not actually read Environmental Health Perspectives. May I direct your attention to:
Evelyn O. Talbott et al. "Mortality among residents of the Three Mile Island accident area: 1979-1992." Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 108, No. 6. (Jun., 2000), pp. 545-552.
He is an epidemiologist, not a lawyer.
Yes, this is a ten year old study on the 1979 meltdown.Surely, if it was concocted solely as a legal scheme it is Columbia University that could have refuted Wing's re-evaluation of Columbia's TMI data. They didnt.
"Oil is $9.63 for a kilowatt-hour, natural gas is $6.75 for a kilowatt-hour, nuclear power is $1.72." And he wasn't just misspeaking, because his ticker then put up "Avg. cost of natural gas in 2006: $6.75 per kilowatt-hour"
Now that's some damn expensive energy!
I assume that wherever he's getting these numbers from, he misread cents as dollars.
However, there are two intentional misrepresentations besides that. First, it seems he is going with just the fuel costs and not the total levelized cost of generation (for nuclear it's actually around 3-5 cents per kWh, all told; for gas it's a ways higher, I forget the exact number). Second, he's comparing nuclear to natural gas an oil, rather than comparing it to natural gas and coal.
Much as I support nuclear power, it's not (yet) cheaper than coal. Carbon taxes and new reactor designs may change that. But it would have broken his talking point of nuclear power being many times cheaper than all the alternatives.
"The mortality surveillance of this cohort does not provide consistent evidence that radioactivity released during the TMI accident has a significant impact on the mortality experience of this cohort to date. However, continued follow-up of these individuals will provide a more comprehensive description of the morbidity and mortality experience of the cohort."
Beck's rant is not the greatest argument in favor of nuclear power. Mr. Beck is in the business of saying controversial things on CNN so that more people will watch his show enabling CNN to charge more for the advertising time. I would do a fact check on anything and everything Beck says before I accepted its credibility.
Tit for tat.
Gunter, I suppose that you have not actually been involved in academic research, because if you had, you would realize that "peer review" means very little. As someone who has seen the process from both sides, I can assure you that the peer review process is there to guarantee only that the paper meets the journal's minimum standards. That is, it's there to keep out the "crackpots." There is no careful review of the actual study or in-depth scrutiny of the data or the results.
Real science has only one test: the test of time. The scientific method inherently depends on reproducibility of results. That is, a hypothesis or a theory is not accepted as valid until it has been demonstrated over and over, preferably by independent researchers.
The fact that you cite one and only one study, out of the many that have been done on the effects of Three Mile Island, clearly indicates to me that you are trying to pull the wool over the eyes of those here who are not knowledgeable about the Three Mile Island accident. (That's called "spin" by the way.) Wing's study was not the last study to be performed. That's why I have asked you about other studies: can you produce even one other study that supports Wing's conclusions? Even one?
That you resort to such grim rhetoric as "people still die from ... cancer" and that you actually call for an apology based on your one study ... well ... that I personally find disgusting. But then again, I should not have expected more. It is the standard type of stunt that is pulled by NIRS.