As a fan of National Public Radio, as someone who knows most of the reporters on All Things Considered by the sound of their voice, and as a reporter who knows how difficult it can be to get a fast-moving highly-technical story right, I tend to cut NPR some slack. But I must say, their story this afternoon about the scope of the disaster appears to have committed a cardinal sin in science reporting — underestimating huge risks.
In the story, called Sizing up Japan's nuclear emergency: No Chernobyl, the reporter quoted experts confidently comparing the risk to that of Three-Mile Island, which devastated the nuclear power industry in the U.S., but did not lay waste to an entire town, as did Chernobyl. The story confidently suggested there had been and would be no large releases of radiation, in part because the reactors had been shut down, and in part because the steel containment vessels were intact and would remain so.
Bzzzzt! Wrong. Just three hours later, in the New York Times it's reported that fuel rods from Reactor #4, which had been turned off long before the tsunami, apparently have partially melted down, the containment vessel at Reactor #2 has been breached, a huge release of radioactivity is feared by experts, and it's possible that all workers at the plant will have to be evacuated, meaning a full-scale Chernobyl catastrophe could still be in the cards.
“We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.”
That's not the reassuring story we heard on NPR.
Kit Stolz 