Nuclear Meltdown in Media Newsrooms #nuclearfacts

As we have pointed out before, the News media of today prefers Scary! Now! stories over balanced factual reportiing (it plays to the Run From Danger bit of our Cave-Brain). This is massively amplified by the Social Media SuperMegaphone (we first remarked on this in the Swine Flu Epidemic on Twitter) and its happened again with the saga of the Japanese nuclear reactor that had a cooling system failure after the Earthquake/Tsunami (first jump on our graph) . Suddenly, nuclear power Experts were popping up all over the Meedja, chosen (it seemed to me) chiefly for their ability to advance the "Scary! Now! Doom!" storyline, reaching its zenith with even the (usually) very balanced and sceptical BBC Radio 4 Today morning news program having its own Nuclear Meltdown Morning on Tuesday 15th.

I think the tipping point in Radiation Fervour however was reached this morning when one of said Experts opined that:

The “nuclear safety culture” has failed in Japan, says nuclear safety consultant

I am no fan of Nuclear Power (mainly due to the industry's need for large subsidies and inability to answer the question of how to store spent fuel for the next 1000 years) but at this point I think all but the most fervent ant-nukes were starting to say "hang about - one monster earthquake + one monster tsunami = a small radiation spill - surely that is evidence of the opposite of failure of safety culture"

And the internet being what it is, on Twitter the #nuclearfacts p*sstake was born, matching the Meedja absurd fact for absurd fact, wth the exception that these aren't pretending to be true. Some classics, for your enjoyment:

- Nuclear stations are more efficient at the equator where opposing coriolis forces stop the electrons spinning. #nuclearfacts

- CERN scientists plan to construct a giant tube linking all nuclear reactors in order to create a Huge Hadron Collider #nuclearfacts

- All nuclear reactors contain, at their core, a small black cat. Or perhaps they don’t. Don’t look! #nuclearfacts

- Primark reporting panic buying of lyrca-mix purple jogging trousers. #nuclearfacts

- I always thought "Turning Japanese" was 2nd best song about wanking. Going back to listen for allusion to unspent fuel rods #nuclearfacts [Plutonium in your pencil? - Ed]

- The suffix '-ium' from both Plutonium and Uranium is Greek for "ooh, scary!" #nuclearfacts

And as @nevali (who started the thread) notes:

You can become irradiated simply by watching news footage of a nuclear power station. The longer you watch, higher the risk. #nuclearfacts

That is our Official Health Warning for the Day.

(Serious point - as a Mechanical Engineer, I have some appreciation of the extreme difficulty the guys are having in bringing that station in Japan under control, and I think the real story is how well they have coped so far. I think most people without technical backgrounds have little idea of the huge forces involved, and the problems they must be facing hour by hour with having to bootstrap stuff together following a tsunami and an earthquake and destruction of most of the basic utility and parts supply infrastructure. As we wrote yesterday, putting a reactor on land reclaim at sea level was not the smartest idea, but the people on the ground there now, like the soldiers in Afghanistan, are not the ones who make the dumb decisions. Also, it's not over - they could still lose this one, in which case the Dead Guys are not the armchair quarterbacks in the newsrooms - though I did see a suggestion (on Twitter, where else) that leaks in the radiation shield could be plugged by stuffing in clueless news reporters.....)

Update - it's the 21st of march, the reactors are still critical but getting better and I have seen the first BBC story saying that the Tsunami/Earthquake is the bigger issue.... and as my colleagoe Dave Short points out, no electricty will kill far more in a cold climate