NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt Wald Last week, NEI's Matt Wald gave a short talk to the NEI Lawyers Committee on why the media covers nuclear energy the way it does . After spending 33 years working for the New York Times , it's clear he knows of what he speaks. Here's a short excerpt: Most reporters and editors can’t tell the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour and many of them don’t know why they’d want to tell the difference. That makes it unlikely they’re going to give a clear picture to their readers or viewers. Add onto that some fuzzy thinking among the general public, that includes ideas like, “electricity is a human right and therefore ought to be free,” and you’ve got a recipe for mis-communications. Nuclear comes out badly not because it’s nuclear, but because of several overarching attitudes in newsrooms. One is that editors like disagreements, he said/she said. It’s an easy way to structure a news story. But the editors and reporters have rather limited ability to ...

Mathematically, risk is expressed as Probability times Consequences. Following a tragic accident, however, public discourse focuses only on consequences. This is understandable - after the accident, we take no comfort in knowing that it was very unlikely to occur. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, which exploded 27 days ago, the consequences have been horrific: 11 souls lost, millions of gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, and millions of dollars in lost income for businesses dependent on the waters of the Gulf. Staggering as this toll is, for the companies and industry involved the damage to reputation and credibility may be just as great. Against the focus on earthshaking consequences, risk communicator David Ropeik reminds readers of the Huffington Post that: [F]ocusing on these high profile events...can distract us from greater risks...[We] are creating vast dead zones in the oceans off our urban coasts where runoff laced with fertilizers is feeding the growth of masiv...