bitmap@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (05/12/84)
<....>
The following is from an editorial, (without permission):
___________________________________________________
Polls of college students and members of the League of Women
Voters in Oregon found that both groups believe that nuclear power
is their No. 1 "present risk of death," outranking motor-vehicle
accidents that kill 50,000 Americans each year and 12 other hazards
that kill more than 1,000 each. Yet scientific studies find that
the number of deaths expected from nuclear power, including
accidents, radioactive waste and everything else, is less than 10 a
year; even the principal anti-nuclear activist organization, the
Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates less than 150. Clearly,
even well-educated segments of the American public are badly
misinformed.
Another poll found that more than 80% of the public believes that
nuclear power is more dangerous than its principal competitor, coal
burning, which is typically estimated to kill 10,000 Americans each
year with its air pollution--some studies estimate 50,000. Every
scientific study (at least 20 including one by UCS) has reached the
opposite conclusion, that coal burning is much more dangerous.
Clearly the 80% is badly misinformed.
As a consequence of this misinformation, we are spending hundreds
of millions of dollars per life saved by protecting people from
radiation, while we are disdaining to spend one-thousandth of that
amount to protect people from disease, automobile accidents and
other common dangers.
This is a tragic situation, unnecessarily killing thousands of
people and wasting billions of dollars every year. Who is to
blame? Since the public gets its nuclear information from the
media, electronic and print, journalism must be the culprit. Let's
see how it has operated.
One of its worst sins is over-coverage. More than 100 accidents
involving transport of radioactive material have received national
media coverage in the past few decades, but the radiation exposure
in all of them combined has less than a 1% chance of causing even a
single death. How does this square with the 300 Americans killed
in accidents every day, with hardly any media coverage? There was
tremendous coverage of the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident
although all investigations have concluded that there was never any
significant danger to the public--the media still haven't
transmitted that message and continue to imply that TMI was a near
miss on disaster.
Another problem with nuclear journalism is the use of
inflammatory language--"deadly radiation", "lethal radioactivity."
Why do we never hear about "deadly" automobiles, or "lethal"
electricitiy that electrocutes 1,200 Americans per year? Or about
"lethal" water that drowns 8,000 each year?
Another journalistic failing is in not trying to help the public
understand the dangers of radiation. The best way to do this,
always used by scientists in trying to enlighten the public, is to
compare the radiation being reported with the much higher radiation
doses we all receive from natural sources of medical X-rays. The
radiation due to an accident in a Rochester, N.Y., nuclear plant
last year was a leading national news story for two days, but with
all that coverage the public never was told that no one got as much
radiation as he gets every day from natural sources.
The media frequently imply that health effects of radiation are
poorly understood by scientists. Actually every involved scientist
recognizes that radiation effects are far better understood than
air pollution, food additives, chemical wastes and almost any
environmental agent. In contrast with the latter examples, all
national and international scientific commissions charged with
estimating the health effects of radiation obtain similar results.
Journalists continually consult a small handful of "renegade"
scientists who have been trying to frighten the public about the
dangers of radiation. They very seldom give well-respected
scientist a chance to rebut their arguments, choosing instead to
use utility executives or government bureaucrats, with the
all-but-open implication that their credibility is suspect.
How can a journalist tell who is a "respected scientist" or what
is a scientific "consensus" on a subject? It's easy. Call a few
randomly chosen high-quality universities, ask to speak to a
professor of radiation health, and pop the question. The results
would be at least 95% consistent in most cases. When journalists
interviewing me question my statements, I always ask them to do
this, but none ever has. The usual journalistic line is that the
scientific community is split--they imply into equal halves--on the
dangers of radiation, with one side dominated by government--or
industry-supported scientists fearful of economic reprisal.
Journalists frequently make implicit judgments on scientific
issues, treating them like political or social issues on which
everyone is entitled to an opinion. They do not recognize that a
scientific consensus is based on vast amounts of data, techniques
and experience, and is normally agreed upon by over 90% of those
possessing these. The public wants and is entitled to be informed
of the scientific consensus, but instead it gets the opinions of
journalists. For example, to the question "Are the estimated
dangers of radiation larger now than they were 10 years ago?" the
scientific consensus is a resounding "no," but the media have told
the public that it is "yes." Note that this is a strictly
scientific question, with no room for political considerations.
But the worst journalistic sin is failure to put risks into
perspective. People can understand new risks only by comparing
them with risks that are familiar. Let's do it here, deriving the
nuclear risk estimates from typical scientific analyses but also
including (in parentheses) those from the anti-nuclear UCS. The
present risk to the average American from the nuclear-power
industry is equivalent to that of smoking one cigarette in one's
life (one cigarette per year according to UCS), of an overweight
person increasing his weight by 0.004 ounces (0.2 ounces), crossing
the street one extra time every three years (every three weeks)
or increasing the national speed limit from 55 to 55.003 (55.13)
miles per hour.
I doubt if 1% of our citizenry recognizes that the risks of
nuclear power are as low as indicated by theses comparisons. By
failing to put these risks into proper perspective, journalists
have failed in their responsibility to inform the American public.
These failures of journalism are costing our nation thousands of
unnecessary deaths and wasting billions of dollars every year.
Moreover, they have quadrupled the inflation-corrected cost of new
electrical power in the U.S., making it twice as expensive as in
Europe or Japan. We can only surmise what economic havoc this will
wreak in the next few decades.
by: Bernard L. Cohen, professor of physics at the
University of Pittsburgh.
author of "Before It's Too Late: A Scientist's Case
for Nuclear Energy" (Plenum, 1983).
___________________________________________________
Sam Hall
decvax!ucbvax!ucbtopaz!bitmapbarry@ames-lm.UUCP (Kenn Barry) (05/14/84)
[*************=8>:) (snort)]
Thank you Sam, and bravo! Media coverage of science-related stories
is generally miserable. Stories on nuclear power are probably the worst
offenders, but most science coverage in the mass media isn't much better.
BTW, whatever happened to Jules Bergman? He wasn't too bad.
[The opinions expressed herein are my own foolishness, and do not
necessarily reflect the views of anyone that matters.]
Kenn Barry
NASA-Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA
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