Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/story/153904/nukespeak%3A_the_selling_of_nuclear_technology_from_the_manhattan_project_to_fukushima/

Global Warming Opens a Door

None of the nuclear industry’s public relations campaigns during the 1980s were able to wrest the industry from the quagmire of the Dark Age. Just when the accident at Three Mile island was finally beginning to fade into the past, along came the 1986 meltdown of the Russian reactor at Chernobyl.

The imagery from Chernobyl was far more horrifying than anything from Three Mile island. All in all, the images brought back all of the fears unleashed with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the events that cast such a pall over the early development of nuclear power.

But in 1988, a flicker of hope appeared, when the issue of fossil-fuel driven climate change jumped onto the public agenda with the dramatic Senate testimony from climate scientist James Hansen to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on June 23, 1988.

For proponents of nuclear power, the growing alarm in the scientific community about climate change and global warming provided an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to reframe the virtues of nuclear power. A nuclear physics degree wasn’t needed to understand that the operation of a nuclear plant did not produce the vast quantities of carbon dioxide that poured out of the stacks of coal plants.

[bananas]

1. k&r - it's been nothing but greenwashing, astroturf, and bribery.

It's a shame so many have fallen for this corporate PR campaign.

[marmar]

2. Agreed.

nt