Payne: Media meltdown ( The Michigan View 3.24.11)

Posted by hpayne on March 24, 2011

After Japan’s devastating March 11 earthquake, mainstream media headlines warned of an epic meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant threatening the future of nuclear power. In fact, what the world witnessed was a meltdown in MSM credibility. Like the recent hysteria over the Toyota “instant acceleration” and global warming, the Fukushima plant crisis exposed a media ignorant of basic technical facts, unwilling to consult engineering experts, and eager to panic the public with incomplete reporting.

In short, the Fukushima nuclear episode is evidence that — when it comes to reporting on scientific issues — mainstream outlets from the New York Times to CNN to the Associated Press are no more credible than National Enquirer reports of alien abductions.

The media-political assault on nukes will have profound consequences for Michigan, a state that relies on cheap, reliable energy to power its industrial base, including four nuclear reactors. With the zealously anti-carbon Granholm and Obama Administrations crippling coal generation, utilities have won re-monopolization of state energy markets in order to afford expensive nuke construction to meet future global warming regulations. But this week’s media panic will further set back an industry that hasn’t built a U.S. nuke plant in over 30 years.

On March 15, the United Kingdom’s chief independent scientific advisor, John Beddington, informed the British Embassy in Tokyo that radiation from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant was a local, not national (much less international) problem.

Beddington’s conclusions echoed those made by MIT mechanical engineer Josef Oehmen — and nuclear engineers around the world — just one day after the tsunami wiped out backup power to the plant. The consensus? Fukushima’s construction and radiation hazards were well known and of concern only to citizens within a 12-mile radius of the plant.

Yet, few of these experts’ voices were heard in the mainstream media.

Instead, American and European viewers were fed a steady diet of panic and warnings of a nuclear Armageddon that threatened millions from Tokyo, 150 miles to Fukushima’s south, to the West Coast of the United States and beyond.

Rather than watch-dogging the public interest, media outlets became megaphones for irresponsible comments by pols from European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger (“an apocalypse!”) to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Yukiya Amano (Japan was racing an “extremely serious disaster”). The Associated Press reported on authorities acting “frantically to avert an environmental catastrophe.” The New York Times warned of “contaminated food.” The London Financial Times feared a “food safety crisis” and winds “carrying radiation to Tokyo.” The Drudge Report featured a London Daily Telegraph headline warning “Just 48 hours to avoid another Chernobyl.'”

All these reports lacked scientific foundation. The press might as well have reported “Three-headed baby snatchers land from Mars!”

Scientist Beddington explained that the only people likely to receive doses of radiation with health consequences were on-site Fukushima workers. He emphasized that the population outside of the 12-mile evacuation zone need not worry about contamination.

“The first thing to say about that is do we have any concerns now in terms of human health? Only in the immediate vicinity of the reactors,” said Beddington. Indeed, the success of the plant’s redundant safety systems against a historic one-two punch of 9.0 quake and 30-foot tsunami is a success. Not a single life has been lost due to radiation release.

While MSM outlets raged about radiation releases, they uniformly failed to put radiation in context. But humans are constantly exposed to radiation. Average human background radiation exposure is 3,750 microsieverts per year. A CAT scan alone amounts to 7,000 microsieverts and adverse health effects from radiation exposure have not been detected under 100,000 microsieverts. Only one worker has received that dose at Fukushima.

Beyond the plant, radiation dosage briefly spiked as high as 5 microsieverts per hour in Tokai village, which is close to the plant. Otherwise, background radiation has been a steady 0.036 – 0.056 microsieverts reports World Nuclear News, a reliable nuclear news site.

These crucial numbers have been nonexistent in MSM coverage.

The media hysteria was eerily reminiscent of the stampede to convict Toyota of electronically-induced instant acceleration just a year ago. Media headlines trumpeted Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s unsupportable claim that “Toyotas are unsafe” and whipped up a daily frenzy over Toyota mishaps. Toyota engineers protested that electronics were not the issue but their voices of reason went unheard.

An exhaustive, year-long NASA-led investigation confirmed that the MSM fear-mongering was baseless. Significantly, however, the media engaged in no soul-searching to assess why they had gotten the story so wrong. They simply moved on to the next panic.

Not surprisingly, engineers hold the media in contempt. Disgusted by press reports of Fukushima, MIT mechanical engineer Oehmen took to the Web to explain basic facts and point an accusatory finger at the media.

“I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors,” he wrote March 12. “By ‘not free of errors’ I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are built and operated. I have read a three-page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.”

If any institution should have touted the facts of nuclear energy it should have been pols and media allies who have spent the last 20 years panicking people about global warming’s threats of devastating weather patterns and species extinction.

The most reliable non-carbon energy source is nuclear, yet the media’s savaging of the technology last week exposed a press agenda that is not just anti-carbon — but anti-industry. In an age when the industrialized world is dependent on high tech to sustain its high standard of living, a Luddite press is a liability.

The media must educate itself. In the meantime, MSM panics like climate change, auto defects, and nuclear apocalypse should be ignored.

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