Two outlets today nailed issues raised by the behavior of Japan’s government leaders and the utility company whose Fukushima Deiichi power station is suffering multiple losses of control and breached containment, and the behavior of many and perhaps most media in trying to tell the story, warn the public, and stay within the bounds of reason.
And a third writes a look-back on another environmental emergency – an account that may presage what a few wise reporters will be filing about this one a year from now.
First:
Many reporters have already complained bitterly about the opaque and largely content-free official statements in Tokyo from those in charge of emergency operations. Last night I happened to see an angry, frustrated Anderson Cooper telling CNN watchers how hard it is to get even basic information. Such behavior, coupled with what looks like a tight control over plant workers and their managers that isolates them from reporters, leaves the field open for endless speculation and a striking lack of “story.” Nobody yet has given us an eyewitness account from inside the plant (that I’ve seen) of what the tsunami did when it hit the facility – did its waters flow throughout the complex, overtop all the berms, just some of them, was the plant left with a lake inside the compound? Okay, the diesel backups failed. But how? Could not those generators been on a roof , tall platform, or something else dry? And what were conditions like in the control room? One can understand that officials would keep some things and many details mum until sorted out by careful investigation and debriefings. But to have next to zero information and intimate vignette only worsens public anxiety.
- New York Times – Horoko Tabuchi, Ken Belson, Norimitzu Onishi: Dearth of Candor From Japan’s Leadership ;
Second:
Yesterday, a few posts down, we linked to a remarkably stout defense of Japan’s atomic plants and nuclear energy generally from Lewis Page at The Register, an on line technology outlet in the UK. Another, and particularly well-argued, defense of nuclear power and critique of media tendency to hold nuclear accidents to a higher ethical and safety standard than equally or more lethal accidents of other sorts has arrived from Australia:
- Cosmos Magazine – Wilson da Silva (editor) : Opinion: Media Meltdown ; Many in media, he writes, are dealing in balderdash. He asks the right questions and makes the right accusations regarding context and consistency. There is nothing, he writes and rightly to these eyes, inherently evil about nuclear power. We’re heard such sentiments before. That doesn’t mean we can stop listening.
I’ve been exchanging emails with an editor at CurrentMedicine.TV, which I singled out for criticisim yesterday for explicitly declaring that Japan’s nuclear emergency is likely to exceed Chernobyl’s threat to the health of the general population. He, or she (the editor offers no name), feels I am missing the point, and am an antique relic of the bygone print press and its assumption of authority and power to boot, to paraphrase. Guilty as charged on the antique part.
And perhaps somehow these several wrecked reactors will catch fire like Chernobyl’s graphite-moderate, flammable, and uncontained PMBR machine and loft a cumulus cloud into the high troposphere and maybe even stratosphere bearing a big fraction of its accumulate actinide waste, bleeding radiation. As it is, a diffuse and likely harmless plume from the stricken Fukushima reactors is due in California any time. Given what little information Japan’s officials are releasing, it’s impossible to rule out almost anything. But I’d bet against Chernobyl redux.
Third :
For perspective, in this week’s New Yorker by staff writer Raffi Katchadourian is a look-back at the BP Oil Spill. It’s not an apology for BP, but it is a defense of many aspects of the company’s effort and a slap at a lot of the media’s coverage. One wonders how, a year from now, Japan’s nuclear meltdowns and the coverage of them will look. And while Katchadourian appears satisfied that by and large the response by BP was professional and competent, he does not address terribly well its failure to cooperate well with reporters.
Further on the BP’s spill’s aftermath and BP’s (and the government’s) hindrance to research:
- The Scientist – Linda Hooper-Bui: Opinion: Gulf science sputters ; In which one learns that it is nearly impossible for this or other researchers to get samples of the oil spewed from the broken well head. BP just says no, and the gov’t says it’s off-limits in the evidence locker.
Other tidbits on the meltdown:
- Nature / The Great Beyond – Declan Butler: Exclusive: Nuclear test ban agency has valuable radiation monitoring data from Japan nuclear accident – but can’t share them ;
- The Atlantic – Clive Crook: More on the Nuclear Fog ; A cry for mercy as media reports pile on the worry, but information and reliable speculation are scarce. Crook, thank you very much, also provides the link for the next bullet..
- MIT Nuclear Science & Engineering Nuclear Information Hub: I work at MIT and had to learn of this from Clive Crook, and am grateful for that. If any of you reporters covering Japan’s nuclear emergency don’t know about this site, put it on your must-read list now. It explains in great detail a lot of the loose terms and buzzwords in news coverage, and much that does not make the news.
As for breaking news coverage, too much to try to wrap it up, so I’ll stop here on Fukushima Daiichi media performance for today.
– Charlie Petit
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