ERRORS in rebuttal to "Pandora's Promise"

[caraher]

17. Well, I think we all get that The Nation is not a technical journal

and I can appreciate that one can form political opinions on one's own.

But knowing the "facts" require investigation, and the infotainment industry does a poor job supporting investigative journalism. I count on publications like The Nation to bring things to my attention that I hadn't known about before. And when The Nation publishes something I think is wrong - and I've definitely seen that happen - I tend to be disappointed in them, rather than thinking, "Well, what do I expect, it's "The Nation," after all..."

So I thought I'd ask what you do read, given that you seemed to react to "The Nation" the way I would to, say, FOX News... It seemed like the kind of thing someone who didn't think that our country is better off, overall, with Democrats in elected office than Republicans might say.

Some of your gripes with the piece are inappropriately pendantic given its purpose, which is not to teach nuclear physics but to discuss nuclear power in light of the film. So when Hertsgaard says "fission produces plutonium," you have to use an obstinately literal interpretation to generate your ERROR!. As you yourself demonstrate, any fission reactor with U-238 in its fuel rods will produce plutonium, which only supports the main purpose of the sentence - establishing that ordinary fission reactors always produce some Pu-239. His statement is no more in error than to speak of "electricity generated from fission," a perfectly acceptable shorthand for the many processes that happen in a reactor between the fission reaction and electricity flowing across a power line.

Moreover, while historically concern on Iran has focused on enrichment, there is new concern about their possibly working the plutonium route as well, as Hertszgaard suggests.

The sodium issue is a matter of both you and Hertsgaard selecting only the facets of the situation that suit your respective cases. You just look silly pretending his beef is that the coolant is a liquid metal, because it's more the fact that liquid sodium burns that he's concerned about - and you do concede his claim that "nearly all of the world’s sodium-cooled reactors have suffered fires" is factually accurate. I've worked with small quantities of liquid metals many times, including liquid sodium, and there's a very different level of risk associated with liquid sodium compared to, say, molten aluminum or electrical solder - both of which merely solidify, rather than catching fire, if you spill them. This is not to say liquid sodium cannot be used safely as a coolant as a fact of engineering practice, but it does mean that there's one more important risk factor to consider in building a plant.

Finally, referring to this published conversation between Hertsgaard and Terry Tempest-Williams as a "rebuttal" shows a very mistaken understanding of the nature of the piece. While there's no doubt that Hertsgaard's rhetorical purpose is anti-nuclear, Williams persistently tells Hertsgaard that the film did cause a reassessment of nuclear in her mind, even after hearing his criticisms. For all your purported devotion to "facts," your gripes with Hertsgaard boil down to things like speculation about what was on Kerry's mind when IFR got canceled and nit-picking word choice in a transcript of a conversation.