Like most everyone, I’ve been glued to the coverage of the Japanese earthquakes, the tsunami and the unfolding catastrophic aftermath. The cost in human terms is incalculable, and the economic costs will probably top those of any other single event.
The problems at Japan’s nuclear plants quickly became the overriding story this past weekend. This is understandable, I guess, given the fact that our society has been trained to react with horror at the thought of even a rad of radiation being released into the atmosphere.
The media is participating in an orgy of speculation over worst-case scenarios. The early experts on the U.S. networks seemed to do their best to feed the frenzy with comments along the lines of “Of course, we don’t really know anything yet, but if there is a full meltdown, and the main containment vessel is breached, and then the core melts through the containment building… (pause for dramatic effect)… then we’d have massive, widespread contamination on an unimaginable scale.” Such discussions continued with increasingly dire predictions of death and disease, and subtle insinuations that everyone in authority is lying in order to soft-peddle the horrible truth.
I watched this coverage agog at the way these experts were spinning every known and unknown factor in such a way as to spawn maximum FUD (Fear, Uncertainly & Doubt) about the crisis. I did a little impromptu research and found that all three of the talking heads I saw prominently featured are from groups which are fundamentally opposed to nuclear power. They have an agenda.
I gotta hand it to the PR honchos at these groups. Getting their talking heads positioned as experts in the field and nabbing hours of network TV face time is one hell of a coup and has really helped their cause. But has it served the truth? Not so much, in my opinion. These people absolutely should be heard, but they certainly should not be the sole source of technical information on this crisis.
This reminds me of a family gathering I attended in the summer of 1999. I was eating my 17th hotdog when the word “mainframe” wafted unexpectedly from a conversation amongst a group of aunts and uncles. As I moved closer, I heard them talking about how much money they were planning to pull out of the bank and how much gasoline, water and food they were going to buy in the run-up to Y2K.
I jumped into the conversation and told them that there really won’t be many, if any, problems. They didn’t seem to believe me, so I pressed on by reminding them that I had been working in the computer industry for almost 8 years at the time. I also pointed out that I worked for IBM – in their mainframe division – so I knew what the problem was, and what had been done to fix it. But they still weren’t convinced.
I finally asked who or what had them so thoroughly convinced that Y2K was going to be a disaster. They promptly told me that TV news and sermons by their parish priest were their information sources, and that they implicitly believed them. After a few more efforts, I gave up and let them return to their doomsday planning.
I’m not trying to make light of what’s happening in Japan, but I want to point out that the information we’re seeing in the media right now is veering toward the hysterical side of the house. We’re also seeing parties with agendas attempting to use this crisis to push those agendas. Just a few hours after the quake, people were attempting to blame it on man-made global warming. How long until it’s blamed on smoking? Or humans eating too much meat?
Some of the very best reporting on the Japanese nuclear plant situation has appeared in The Register. Rik Myslewski, Lester Haines and Lewis Page have been writing stories that lay out what happened, why, and the implications in typical Register style – but with better technical grounding than I’ve seen in most other places. Who woulda thunk that the snark-filled Register would produce stuff like this?