More on Frontline from NY Times

[Judd Sills <sillsj@GAT.COM>]

April 22, 1997

'Frontline' Examines Pop Culture's Role in Nuclear Fears

By WALTER GOODMAN

"Frontline" takes on the anti-nuclear-power industry. Richard Rhodes, the 
author of "The Making of the Atom Bomb," brings in scientists and 
engineers to make a provocative case that nuclear energy, now being 
abandoned by the United States, is safer, cleaner and more efficient 
than the coal, oil and natural gas on which the nation continues to 
rely. 

If that goes against what you have read or heard, "Nuclear Reaction" 
blames fear-mongering by environmentalists (Ralph Nader to the fore), 
Hollywood studios (there's a clip from "The China Syndrome") and 
television news deliverers (yes, even Walter Cronkite). 

The nation's fears, rooted in memories of atom bombs, were heightened by 
the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power plant, when errors led 
to a partial meltdown of a reactor. 

But Dr. John Moulder, a radiation biologist relied on by Rhodes, reminds 
us that there were no injuries or deaths and the amount of radiation 
emitted was much less than people in the area receive regularly from 
nature. 

The experts called on in this show agree that nothing approaching the 
1986 disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine could happen at America's 
reactors, which are more safely built. And even at Chernobyl, where the 
explosion and fire killed 31 people almost immediately, Rhodes calls the 
death toll "surprisingly low." While noting that some children developed 
thyroid disease, he says that so far leukemia and adult cancers have not 
measurably increased. 

Specialists in risk analysis blame popular culture, with its nightmarish 
images of nuclear destruction, for the public's misapprehension that 
nuclear power is more harmful than, say, coal. 

Rhodes finds a very different attitude in France, which obtains 75 
percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Some of the 
nuclear-friendliness is attributable to France's lack of other energy 
resources, which leaves the country little choice. But public education 
seems to be playing a part, too. 

Observing the high cost of nuclear power and the continuing headache of 
what to do with long-lived nuclear waste, the program suggests that a 
rational approach to these problems is obstructed by the prevailing 
anxiety over anything connected with the word nuclear. 

Rhodes says, "We haven't needed nuclear power in America, so we enjoy 
the luxury of investing it with our nuclear fears." 

Explosive reactions to "Nuclear Reaction" are to be expected from the 
anti-nuclear cadres. Fine. Let's hope they will make their case with 
scientific evidence, as Rhodes does, rather than with the toxic imagery 
that has contaminated the debate. 



PRODUCTION NOTES: 

'FRONTLINE' 

Nuclear Reaction 

9 p.m. ET Tuesday on PBS 

Jon Palfreman, producer; Richard Rhodes, correspondent. Produced by 
Frontline: Michael Sullivan, executive producer; David Fanning, senior 
executive producer. 

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company 
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