The Worldwatch Institute is another outfit that is being palmed off by the press as a reputable institution, though it is a rather crude propaganda kitchen smearing nuclear power and extolling the Lovinsian ideas of running the USA on windmills and sunbeams, as readers may remember from past reviews of their trash. Their chief hack C. Flavin has now come out with "Reassessing nuclear power: fallout from Chernobyl"
¾the tired old hoaxes about the Cher-nobyl containment structure, the imminent demise of nuclear power, the "problem" of decommissioning (they devote a special report to this bogey, which I have often shown groundless [AtE Nov 80, Dec 80, May 82]), etc.I already regret the precious space that I have given to this junk, but the sidelight here is something that has annoyed me for years: the inane statements by Alvin Weinberg, which are quite under-standably and endlessly used by the antinukes. It was he who coined the phrase "Faustian bargain," oblivious to the fact that we now bury electricity-generated wastes in human lungs; it was he who dignified Lovins's puerile concoctions with references to quantum mechanics; and in the present instance, Flavin quotes his statement "The ultimate question is, can we accept a technology whose safety is measured probabilistically?"
I challenge Dr Weinberg to name a single technology whose safety is not measured probabilistically: even the chair he sits on has a finite probability of collapsing, and unlike Mr Flavin, he cannot plead in-competence. But the more pertinent point about that chair is that it is not one chair, but two chairs that he tries to sit on. On one hand, he cozies up to the antinukes with this type of statement, which he must know to be false just as he must know how it will delight them; on the other, he plays the Grand Old Man from Oak Ridge and has himself celebrated in anthologies by the American Nuclear Society.
Alas, he is not the only scientist whose butt bears the imprint of two chairs. Hans Bethe is another one who well knows the great health and safety advantages of nuclear power over fossil fuels and hydro, and who used to speak out about them, undeterred by the cowardice of the PR departments of the utilities and the nuclear industry. Yet he was not ashamed to put his signature, the signature of a Nobel Prize winner, next to that of a creature like Henry Ken-dall, the evil spirit of the UCS, whose "scientists" go out of their way to cover up the comparison. That damnable act would have been damnable even if it had been committed for a noble purpose. But it was not even that
¾it was one of the UCS' appeals for playing foot-sie with the Soviet Nazis.The risk of sitting on two chairs is indeed probabilistic: the statistics of history show that those who try to sit on them most often end up falling flat on the floor between them.
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Vol. 14, No. 11
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 14, No. 11 Date: November 30, 2004 10:00 AM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Doctored data
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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