Even trusted quality news sources get things wrong occasionally, so it’s important to set them right — especially on nuclear power.
Most of the time, The Independentis a really decent news outlet — although it’s now online only, since its lauch in 1986 it has been one of the few UK broadsheet newspapers to provide an alternative perspective to the mainstream media narrative and has consistently produced excellent journalism.
But sometimes even the best journalists can get things wrong — particularly in the case of nuclear power, where the same old myths get recycled again and again and tend to go unchallenged because they’ve simply become part of ‘common sense’.
This was very much the case with this piece, which was published by The Independentearlier this month. In it, the author, Donnachadh McCarthy, runs through a gamut of familiar anti-nuclear arguments, which I won’t bother to repeat here as they have been conclusively debunked many times (check the link if you want to read them for yourself).
It’s important to challenge news outlets when they get things wrong — after all, The Independent and channels like it have a huge reach and are trusted by many people. And it’s through the work of such journalists as George Monbiot and Mark Lynas — and more specifically, their courage to admit that they were wrong about their anti-nuclear positions — that I myself came to support the technology.
So, on behalf of Generation Atomic, I switched my email account to whatever the electronic equivalent of green ink is (Comic sans? Don’t worry, I didn’t use that) and fired off the following missive:
“Dear Editor,
“Donnachadh McCarthy’s ill-informed piece on the proposed Sizewell C nuclear power plant (‘A new nuclear power plant at Sizewell is the wrong choice for a zero carbon Britain’, 8 February) certainly flaunts the author’s green credentials — if only by recycling a lot of old, tired and mostly untrue arguments.
“For example, he neglects to mention that the EPR reactors at Taishan in China — which are the same type as those being built at Hinkley Point and proposed at Sizewell — are now operational. Nuclear waste can’t explode, as McCarthy claims, and we’ve known the best way to deal with it for decades — namely, by recycling it into new zero-carbon energy. What could be greener than that?
“Moreover, nuclear adds clean power to the grid faster than renewables — France decarbonised its grid in roughly two decades using mostly nuclear, whereas after 20 years of the Energiewende, Germany is one of the worst CO2 emitters in Europe and has some of the most expensive electricity prices.
“Sizewell C will prevent over half a billion tons of CO2 being emitted over its 60-year lifetime once it becomes operational in 2031 (not 2040, as McCarthy claims), and will do so more reliably than renewables. Given that even the International Panel on Climate Change believes nuclear power will play a vital role in the fight against climate change, isn’t it time those who say they want to stop dangerous global heating should get behind the technology?”
Pretty good I thought, if a little long. But sadly it wasn’t published — which is understandable, given that the COVID-19 pandemic and its many ramifications is likely (and understandably) uppermost in the minds of the general public and news editors alike.
Nevertheless, it’s important to keep pushing back against the tide of misinformation and point out where professional journalists are wrong about nuclear. Do it often enough and perhaps they’ll change their minds — hey, it’s what we do…
