Beyond Lies

Slashdot ran a story today called “Report Blames NRC For VT Yankee Leak,” and found that the link took us over to Beyond Nuclear. Well, that was that. While some anti-nuclear groups are worth engaging with, Beyond Nuclear is, how shall we say, not. Dishonest and amateurish in its approach, the group has never required much comment from us: our readers – any interested readers – could see through its stuff as though it were made of cheap plastic.

But we did make a note to revisit Slashdot and see if at least some of its readership might be accepting this hooey. Nope.

First, the quote, "Numerous incidents of unplanned releases of radioactivity have been reported to the NRC within the past few months." "These incidents of leaks, overflows and spills have resulted in contamination of areas outside of plant buildings. " is not actually in the article but rather it is in the link from the NRC in 1979 about responding to the leaks. The article then goes on the say "the NRC is capitulating to an industry decision to take almost three more years before announcing an action plan" but the link supporting this is broken, so I can't evaluate it.

That’s from electricprof. See what we mean about amateurish?

NRC page on tritium http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/tritium-radiation-fs.html [nrc.gov]. Even the levels at so called "contaminated wells", assuming you drink from it every day for a year, are negligible compared to other sources of background radiation and even potassium in your body.

From anonymous. This is true, although nuclear plants should never release tritium or add to the “background radiation or potassium.” This did not happen at Vermont Yankee and it did find the leak.

I seem to notice that there is a lot of FUD and misinformation out there (not just from mdsolar and Beyond Nuclear) regarding nuclear power. This is helped in part because of ignorance by the general public. It's important to understand that there is a wide range of radioactive sources. Most of them are naturally occurring, or occur is such small amounts that they present no health hazard.

From SovBob. He goes on to list radiation exposure by x-rays and the like. We agree with the FUD and misinformation part, but we also think the general public is not all that ignorant. In reality, these are just bad arguments not gaining traction – as the commenters themselves prove.

How many times do I have to tell you! It's clean, not dirty! It's the cleanest of them all! Cleaner than coal! Cleaner than gas! Cleaner than oil! Cleaner than those … latte-drinking atheistic hippie socialist wind generators!

Um, well, it is Slashdot (we cleaned this one up a bit). We could have missed it in the sub comments, but we didn’t run into a single anti-nuclear viewpoint or any defense of Beyond Nuclear at all.

From Beyond Nuclear. You really cannot win an argument this way.