Posted on 04/13/2011 10:03:31 AM PDT by neverdem
The New York Times is proving that, when it comes to nuclear power, it isn't a one-note newspaper. Not every anti-nuclear story has to be written by Matt Wald. The paper has versatility -- this time reporters Jo Becker and William J. Broad get into it.
"Doubts Growing About U.S. Plan for Plutonium," said the page-one, column-one headline yesterday. Whose doubts? Well, it turns out they all belong to Edwin Lyman, resident lamenter at the Union for Concerned Scientists who has nothing but doubts about nuclear. Lyman is a lugubrious presence at every nuclear event in Washington, ruing that the technology was ever invented and predicting gloom and doom to all if it is pursued. Nothing new there.
What's news is that Lyman -- and ipso facto, the Times -- are using the revival of anti-nuclear sentiment after Fukushima to set their sites on a grand prize, the weapons reprocessing plant now under construction in South Carolina.
"Eleven years after the government awarded a construction contract, the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion," moans the Times. "The vast concrete and steel structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies. Now, the nuclear crisis in Japan has intensified a long-running conflict over the project's rationale.… [C]ritics say there is an increasing likelihood that the South Carolina project will fail to go forward and will become what a leading opponent, Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls a 'plant to nowhere.' That would leave the United States without a clear path for the disposal of its surplus plutonium." (Lyman is in fact the only opponent mentioned in the story.)
No such yarn would be complete without a scandal and Lyman has one. It involves...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Then they need to quit crying & worrying about the spent rod storage pools at every nuclear plant in the U.S.!!!
How much energy and felled trees does the publishing of the NYTimes consume? Part of my lament stems from the fact that fewer and fewer (if any) people bother to read it.
Oh, well. This country is going to hell on a public bullet train, anyway.
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