Last Wednesday, word leaked out through media channels that President Obama would include
a call for further nuclear arms reduction in a speech has was
scheduled to deliver in Berlin, Germany at the famous Brandenberg Gate. When
Fox News got hold of the story, they figured the best image to twin with a picture of the President would be a shot of a cooling tower at an unnamed nuclear power plant.
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Now you see the cooling tower ... |
Needless to say, while I understand why editors and reporters often conflate nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear energy, it doesn't make it any less annoying when it happens. As we've pointed out in the past, generating nuclear electricity actually contributes to a more peaceful world. The best example of why that's true has to be the
Megatons to Megawatts program, an effort to downblend former Soviet nuclear warheads into reactor fuel. Right now, about half of the electricity generated by our nation’s nuclear energy facilities is from fuel that was once part of the Soviet Union's Cold War nuclear arsenal.
It's a powerful story, and one that's actually part of
Pandora's Promise. Here's Stewart Brand:
Thankfully, the error didn't persist for long thanks to nuclear energy consultant Brian Gutherman:
And then a few minutes later ...
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... And now you don't. |
Thanks to Brian for the heads up, and thanks to Fox News for correcting the error so quickly.
Comments
James Greenidge
Queens NY
There's not a lot of pics or video available commonly for nuclear weapons. Since Fox crowd tends to try to craft a message which is pro-nuclear weapons (or, at least, the opposite of whatever Obama is for, it seems at times) , they don't want to show a nuclear explosion, as that might be a bit alarming and tend to make people watching think maybe Obama is right about arms reductions (and Obama can't be right about anything, at least to Fox News).
So, they try to show something which people readily associate with nuclear, but which doesn't appear to be too scary.
I know, it's sad, and I too wish they wouldn't conflate civilian nuclear power with weapons of mass destruction, but nuclear weapons is just a topic, at least I think, for which there is virtually no footage available.
I don't know, though, there's got to be some pics/videos of ICBM's somewhere, they could use.