The success of the blog you are now reading is only one proof that the internet, and the still-newish social media form known as the "blog" can be sources of solid technical and historical information, particularly when a subject whose details are so irreversibly technical as are those of nuclear energy. However, this blog.. and others like it linked from it.. are not the norm in their bias by far. This does not only the nuclear industry, but the country as a whole, a disservice.
The speed at which information travels on the internet is exceeded only by the speed at which misinformation travels on it. Just a few days ago, a compressed video showing an hour's worth of the Fukuichi Live Camera at the Fukushima Daiichi site, and which clearly shows a fog bank rolling in to the site, was widely circulated on anti-nuclear sites and deliberately mislabeled as having depicted some sort of explosion on the site. While this blog was (as far as I know) the first to make note of this, albeit in the 'comments' section of the then- most recent post, and refute the claim that this was an explosion, the much higher propensity of people to seek out anti-nuclear sites for information seems to have temporarily overrun any real effort on the part of the public to discover what had actually been depicted. High page views on this site (and a major spike in the APR YouTube Channel, and which carried a comment on the video but did not reproduce it) indicate that many did in fact eventually seek out an educated and informed point of view, and as of this moment the "Fukushima Explosion Video" flap seems to have been put to bed.
This spread of information is sort of a first-level attack against proponents of nuclear energy, if you will; while much of the traffic all over the internet concerning this 'event' was probably just people trying to find out what had happened (and which were being referred around direct linked anti-nuclear sites once finding one of them) the effect overall wasn't being pushed or directed, it seems, by any one person, site or group. However, recently this author discovered himself in a sort of second-level event in which he was prevented from making further comments on an anti-nuclear site, which constitutes a real, and active, anti-nuclear attempt to squash information.
To be brief, the site "ProPublica.org" ran a story about Fort Calhoun which was so riddled with misinformation, and written so clearly anti-nuclear (using all the old tricks our friend Fintan Dunne points out so well) that I was forced to comment. I took issues with a number of things, but the most glaring to me was the fact that the anti-nuclear crowd could not even get the actual reactor vendor's identity correct.
For those unfamiliar, reactor vendor = the company which designed and built the reactor and primary plant.
You'd think that would be easy. Try the NRC site, or WNA's Reactor Database.
After making one post, I was prevented from posting again at all -- all my attempts to simply give these people the FACTS were stopped. Note to you over there at ProPublica dot org: That plant is STILL a Combustion Engineering plant, and not a Westinghouse plant. We all know who ended up with CE's nuclear business. When the plant was built, they were COMPETITORS. But you'll ignore this and go back to writing things like "Nuke Plant Threatened By, And Threatening Contamination Of, Missouri River" and "Could Ft. Calhoun be the next TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima/Krakatoa/Nameless Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs?"
Further working against us, as a third level of assault, is that cadre of both former and newly self-appointed experts who spew anti-nuclear vitriol to anyone who will pay them to stand at a podium or in front of a camera. Academic types, with long hair and who are Asian, seem to be high on this list. Others, disgruntled former nuclear industry execs, and perhaps some "Access Terminated After Failing Readiness For Duty Test" types too, also fill out the TV / radio / newspaper articles with such stupidity as the recent assertion that there was prompt criticality achieved in Fukushima Daiichi's spent fuel pools.
That's one of the dumbest things I've ever read. No, really. It really is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Not just criticality -- but PROMPT criticality.
Really??!!
There has been so much MISinformation printed and televised and radio-waved about Fukushima Daiichi that many of us don't even know where to begin to tackle it all; we take the anti-nuclear horsefeathers as they come, but whenever you clean up a pile of them here comes another. Can we even think about backing up far enough to ask the simple question "What's the problem here?" Sure we can.
One of the problems is the repetition of misinformation, such as I mentioned before. Some of it is old -- how many of us are tired of hearing that Three Mile Island killed off nuclear energy in this country? The plain fact is that orders for new nuclear plants reached a first peak in the 60's, then nose dived in 1969. There was then a major resurgence of orders, which then shut off again in 1978. That's before TMI-2 happened. While TMI-2's repercussions did lead to massive delays and plant cancellations among plants on order at the time, the shutoff of new plant orders had already occurred. You might call it a one-two punch, but both events matter and to say that TMI-2 all of a sudden by itself halted nuclear progress in this country is overly simplistic, short-sighted and wrong. (I would suggest the anti-nuclear crowd read the reports on TMI and see how many of the issues were institutional rather than mechanical, just for a beginning on what TMI really implied to the industry.)
It seems to this author that the repetition of misinformation -- some of it old, from any given newspaper's file stories -- is perhaps because, for a number of reasons, nuclear energy has largely dropped off the radar screen of public awareness. We tend not to have any type of continuity of information about nuclear energy -- its history, and development in general in this country, or even local development. It's not in our educational system, it's not in the papers or the Saturday Evening Post or on TV because there's no continuing progress.
It's telling when the public has much better knowledge about and is more conversant with the theory of global warming, and various associated theorized mechanisms for altering / worsening / improving its effects, than it is knowledgeable about or conversant with nuclear energy which has been an established technology in this country for over half a century. It's especially telling when we see that people with nuclear backgrounds will explain matters and entertain criticism, whereas those who advance the cause of global warming most avidly are the climate scientists who tell us that no one but climate scientists can really judge whether global warming is a fact or not. For whatever reason, the public trusts those who cannot provide proof about their position over those who can provide concrete facts.
There was indeed a time when there WAS a continuity of information, of sorts, about nuclear energy. Press releases were made about very many events such as contract awards, groundbreaking ceremonies, reactor plant startups, first generation on the grid and so forth. Utility companies, both publicly owned (fewer in number, contrary to popular belief) and privately owned formed consortiums with no small amount of press to construct pilot or experimental plants together to help defray the plant cost (in the AEC Power Demonstration Reactor Program, the AEC bore part of the expense too) and develop operating experience in concert with the reactor vendor and the AEC. All this was publicized widely, in many ways.
Above, commemorative tray in APRA collection. This detail shot shows the CVTR or Carolinas-Virginia Tube Reactor, a heavy water moderated and cooled reactor built at Parr Shoals SC under the Atomic Energy Commission's 3rd round of the Power Demonstration Reactor Program. Carolinas-Virginia Nuclear Power Associates, Inc. was a partnership of Carolina Power & Light, Duke Power, South Carolina Electric & Gas, and Virginia Electric and Power Company. All of these companies later ordered conventional (and much larger) light water nuclear plants after gaining experience together on this project. Our point here is that persons reading about one of these later plants might also have read in a local paper something along the lines of "this plant is being built with several years' experience in the joint operation of the CVTR plant at Parr Shoals, SC behind the company." The reader might then have said "Oh, you know, I do recall the news about that plant a few years ago .. there were a number of stories about it" and this would then give the reader the perception - correctly so - that the new plants would be built, operated and managed standing on the shoulders of the previous experience. It is this sort of thing that I mean by continuity.
What we have now is only the continued haggard attempts of the anti-nuclear crowd to report every burned out light bulb and cracked floor tile at every nuclear facility in the United States, and even abroad. This is the only thing that sells papers. Prior to Fukushima Daiichi, though, the anti-nuclear crowd was either very quiet, or else very out-shouted by the environmentalists who feared AGW (that's Anthropogenic Global Warming, for those who don't know, or man-made global warming) would doom us quickly and that nuclear -- given its really safe track record, which it is -- would be one of the ways to stop it. What's happened now it seems is that the environmentalists have gotten quiet, instead of standing up for their cause against the rabid anti-nuclear crowd. (Yes, there's some crossover, but you get the idea.)
Of course, the last paragraph's opening statement is true only if you consider the big media. As pointed out at the beginning of this post, the new media -- blogs, and YouTube too but mostly blogs -- are fighting the fight FOR nuclear power, right out on the front lines. The front lines of information are now the internet, and it's actually a lot harder, if you think about it, for the anti-nuclear crowd to get away with its old game. The big city newspapers and glossy-print newsstand magazines don't have the ability to get responsive comments out to all the readers instantly like blogs and online news sites do. While this gets their anti-nuclear message out faster and wider, it also allows instantaneous damage control by the pro-nuclear crowd (until their comments are banned, in which case the offending site will probably get called out for this on a really popular pro-nuclear blog.) This one fact may show that the pro-nuclear writers have a really good weapon, which is fact, and a good target to hit, which is the comment section of misleading, or just plain wrong, news items and blog entries.
That right there is the answer to "What's the problem?" and to "What do we do about it?" We fight to get the facts out. Very luckily for us, there are a number of pro-nuclear folks who are very heavily involved in this area; they're mostly linked over on the right of the Atomic Power Review home page. Further, many of these folks are united in a project that will launch sometime soon with the direct purpose of undoing one of the problems I've noted above -- the lack of nuclear literacy, as it were, in the US public. It may even penetrate the educational system -- if we are lucky.
Right now, we have as many answers to "What do we do about the level of knowledge concerning nuclear energy" in the US as we do to "What were all the failures, errors and issues at Fukushima Daiichi?" All of this is new, and both are playing out at the same time. The nuclear renaissance in this country is riding and falling with the tide of information, and misinformation, surrounding the accident and the US nuclear establishment's response to it. Hopefully with this post I've cleared away a bit of the fog surrounding the information issue so that we can move forward. If the journalists at large have truth in focus, rather than sales, they'll take note of what I've written here. If not, they'll continue using the same play book .. and we'll call them on it wherever we see it.
6:51 PM Eastern Friday June 17, 2011
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW
NOTE: FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI UPDATE TO FOLLOW SATURDAY.
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