A Debit to Fortune and columnist Elizabeth Spiers for getting too aglow about nuclear power—and propagating the industry’s spin.
With energy prices roaring to new records, the business press ought to be writing about energy sources that make sense in the context of price, cleanliness, and safety. That’s what Spiers does here, but in making her pitch for nuclear she goes too far on its safety and blows up—or at least gives acute radiation sickness to—her argument.
The piece reads uncomfortably like something straight out of the nuke-industry spin room, downplaying the dangers of nuclear power, most egregiously by saying that just thirty-six people died in the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
But irrational fear of improbable safety breaches is responsible for most opposition to nuclear power in this country. The unlikely culprit? Pop culture. We’ve seen ‘The China Syndrome,’ and we worry that nuclear-reactor employees may be bumbling Homer Simpsons, capable of accidentally pushing the red button. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island—the former of which killed 36 people and the latter of which killed none—have become so outsized in the American imagination that our perception of actual risk has been completely distorted.
Beyond the silliness of saying that a TV show (however awesome) is more responsible for nuclear-power fears than Chernobyl, any honest discussion of the subject must acknowledge that the Chernobyl death toll has been the subject of bitter debate for two decades. Spiers’ piece pretends this isn’t so and uses a nuke-industry death count that ignores what makes nuclear accidents so insidious: the deadly long-term effects of radiation exposure.
The ultimate toll of Chernobyl is hard to quantify, especially because most of these deaths haven’t even happened yet. Still, the United Nations estimates the accident will be responsible for between 4,000 and 9,000 cancer deaths. Greenpeace predicts the toll will be much higher at 93,000 (or even more if one includes causes of death besides cancer.)
It’s a shame to scoff at the enormous human costs of Chernobyl by low-balling its human toll with industry spin. Add to that the more than 300,000 people relocated because of the accident (the area is still off limits for inhabitants in an eighteen-mile radius)—not to mention the environmental damage—and Spiers’ column—and Fortune’s fact-checking—look even more indefensible.
Even supporters of nuclear power must acknowledge its problems and its history. Not doing so only weakens their case.
Elinore Longobardi is a Fellow and staff writer of The Audit, the business-press section of Columbia Journalism Review.