US nuke regulators weaken safety rules for aging plants

[DJ@Retired]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110620/ap_on_re_us/us_aging_nukes_part1

[flblasted]

This article and the comments that accompany it are a great example of what happens when the media and general public try to analyze in a short time what people in the industry spend years and decades learning and improving.  They don't understand the engineering process, they don't understand the risk analysis, and they don't understand the tremendous amount of scrutiny that this industry is under imposed by the NRC and imposed by itself. 

I'm all for freedom of information and transparency but this is just the media trying to portray nuclear power in a light that it doesn't belong in and the public is in no position to know better about it. 

I'm not saying we're perfect, far from it, but this article is just junk reporting.

[DJ@Retired]

I agree with you. That's why I post this crap. We need to help are Newspapers out. With a little truth now and again.

[RDTroja]

Years ago (25? Yikes!) I was on the Board of Directors of the Michigan Chapter of the American Nuclear Society and we were trying to address exactly this issue... trying to get the press better informed about Nuclear Power so they would stop printing things that were just plain false. I was amazed at the lack of knowledge and lack of effort by the press to get informed. We invited reporters to our meetings to learn... they rarely came and would not believe us when we gave them the facts. It was easier to just get information from the source at hand (usually anti-nuke) than to check facts if they even cared to find out we existed. They didn't even know that they didn't know.

Besides, they are in the business of making money for the newspapers and sensation sells the news. The facts about Nuclear Power are boring. The lies are not.

(On an ironic note, the spell checker tried to turn 'anti-nuke' into 'antique.' How appropriate is that?)