This is some weak evidence. The first guy appears to be a commentator, not an employee of CNN. The next guy, a reporter, says "People are split on the cleanliness of coal."
If you're making the point that CNN is biased in favor of clean coal, you need more than this!
The fact that the Military has kept us safe, and the Intelligence they have gathered is keeping us from terrorists killing us here, makes me wonder why all the fuss is going on over how a few of these bottom dwellers were treated. They are not human beings as we know them. Leave our government alone and let them do what they are doing now. Do even you and your liberal line really have rather had Al Gore in office on Sept. 11th. The Democrats have not been exactly expert at showing us how to fight terrorism.
Do what ever it takes, and keep these bottom feeders where they belong, which isn't here.
The official explanationand denial reads like a smear job of the Florida chapter and an advertisement for Clorox. Without some details and references to the "internal disagreement" we can't draw a complete picture and might as well conclude that Florida had been censored for "saying negative things about companies" or some other nonsense. Information is better than accusations.
A few weeks back, Ms. Roth -- the managing editor of <i>Fuel Cycle Week</i>, a nuclear industry trade publication -- emailed the office with her complaints, above. I thought visitors to our website might want to see my response to her, so here it is:
Dear Ms. Roth,
Thanks for writing, though I think your comments misinterpret my article. My aim was to report on some of the presentations at NEI's annual meeting -- what people were talking about, and the language they used -- and to contrast that with the language and concerns of environmental advocacy groups.
It is simply a fact that Penn, Schoen's Craig Smith was advising the audience on "messaging" around nuclear issues, and that he stressed the usefulness of using terms like "recycling" in order to decrease public resistance to new nuclear power plants. The "spent fuel" vs "radioactive waste" was a comparison of nuclear industry and environmentalist language on that topic. And it was Mr. Bowman himself who discussed subsidies (and the negative connotations of that word) in the context of the loan guarantee program. (As an aside, my understanding is that while the nuclear industry does cover the administrative costs of the loan guarantee program, there is concern that the program may wind up costing taxpayers, because the nuclear industry has historically high rates of defaults, compared to other industries that benefit from similar programs.)
The new reactor technology / fuel efficiency topic that you mention was not discussed at the NEI meeting. Also, I made no claims about Gwyneth Cravens being "covertly recruited" and did not question her intelligence or sincerity. I was simply pointing out that she fit a demographic that Mr. Smith had identified as being key to NEI's ongoing outreach. It's naive not to realize Ms. Cravens' PR worth to NEI, especially given the group's extensive PR efforts. While it's certainly NEI's right to do public and media outreach, some of its PR efforts have been deceptive -- in particular, the frequent failure to disclose NEI's funding of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and its co-chairs. Such efforts do not further public understanding or the policy debates on important energy issues.
In addition, the terms "treehuggers" and "anti's" were used in a dismissive way, and are generally not used in respectful discourse. I also have never heard environmentalists call for executions of mining executives, and would be shocked and appalled if any group endorsed such extreme and hateful language.
In closing, I would encourage you to add your comments to the article on our website. The direct link is:
https://www.prwatch.org/node/7316
Sincerely,
Diane
Your article on the NEI conference is so full of willful misunderstandings and misinformation I almost don't know where to start. I can't cover the whole gamut but will here offer a few really obvious bloopers that a little bit of background research might have kept out of your story.
--No one is trying to whitewash anything by using the term "spent fuel". There is a difference between spent fuel and nuclear waste. Utility execs would be expected to talk about the material they deal with all the time--unburned nuclear fuel that emerges from the fuel assemblies of their nuclear power plants--and not the other kinds of nuclear and radioactive waste out there. You might want to look up the different classes of radioactive waste before you accuse someone of trying to cover something up by using a specific term.
--The Department of Energy loan guarantee program does not subsidize nuclear power generation. New and innovative energy technologies of all kinds, including the so-called renewable sources, apply for and receive loan guarantees from the Department of Energy from the same program. But no other industry applying for these loan guarantees is accused of seeking subsidies. That may be because the program in reality is not a subsidy. Antinuclear lobbyists commonly spread that misinformation around in their public communications.
--Recycling spent fuel, i.e., the generation of new fuel out of spent fuel, is a very real technology that has been used without mishap in Europe for decades. It is actually not the same as reprocessing, but is the second part of the reprocessing technology. In other words, it is a more specific term. We do not have that technology here in the U.S. because of the irrational policies the U.S. adopted on nuclear in the late 1970s. So we have a major technology gap to overcome. Overcoming that gap in development is the "challenge" the gentleman you quoted was referring to. He was not saying that spent fuel is somehow unusable, or that recycling does not really exist. What's more, contrary to your misguided reporting, it is legitimate and not an obfuscation or lie to use the specific term "recycle" in discussing the use of spent fuel in public communications. There is nothing wrong with using a term that is an accurate description of the technology.
BTW, I notice you did not touch on the fact that new reactor technology is far more efficient in burning fuel, thereby producing far less waste than the current generation of reactors, but if all you read about the subject is what antinuclear groups put out, you probably don't know that. Antinuclear activists never mention this aspect of modern nuclear technology. I don't know if it's pure ignorance on their part or whether they know and simply suppress it. Maybe you can turn your skeptical eye on their misinformation campaigns. They have based so much of their funding campaigns on antinuclear propaganda that they cannot change now, even in the face of the climate emergency that is upon us.
--Regarding Gwyneth Cravens, you write as if NEI covertly recruited her as a nuclear advocate because she fits some kind of demographic. Isn't that shortchanging her motives and intellect just a little bit? Have you read what she has written about her process of investigation and research? Do you think she has been the least bit dishonest or less than candid about what she learned?
Instead you chose to focus on her use of terms about the opponents of nuclear energy, like "antis", which is not really an insult but an abbreviation. "Treehuggers" is a term some pronuclear environmentalists proudly use to describe themselves. So whether those are negative terms is subject to interpretation, but, as all through the rest of your article, you choose to take the most negative possible interpretation.
By the way, do you castigate the language of antinuclear lobbyists who suggest, among other things, that uranium mining executives should be executed for crimes against humanity? Don't you think their PR has some problems? Why don't you write an article about that?
Nancy E. Roth
Washington, DC
This is some weak evidence. The first guy appears to be a commentator, not an employee of CNN. The next guy, a reporter, says "People are split on the cleanliness of coal."
If you're making the point that CNN is biased in favor of clean coal, you need more than this!
The fact that the Military has kept us safe, and the Intelligence they have gathered is keeping us from terrorists killing us here, makes me wonder why all the fuss is going on over how a few of these bottom dwellers were treated. They are not human beings as we know them. Leave our government alone and let them do what they are doing now. Do even you and your liberal line really have rather had Al Gore in office on Sept. 11th. The Democrats have not been exactly expert at showing us how to fight terrorism.
Do what ever it takes, and keep these bottom feeders where they belong, which isn't here.
The official explanationand denial reads like a smear job of the Florida chapter and an advertisement for Clorox. Without some details and references to the "internal disagreement" we can't draw a complete picture and might as well conclude that Florida had been censored for "saying negative things about companies" or some other nonsense. Information is better than accusations.
Google turns up:
and more articles. The more you look into this, the more what the National people did stinks.
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