New Yorker's Specter should check the facts

Read Linda Pentz Gunter's response to the New Yorker blog piece by Michael Specter.

A response to the New Yorker blog piece, Time To Go Nuclear, by Michael Specter, which like the film it glorifies, fails to look further than the sound bites for factual verification.

An excerpt:

"In unquestioningly accepting that the “environmental credentials” of the protagonists in Pandora’s Promise “are beyond dispute” Michael Specter then laps up the rest of the film’s rhetoric apparently without a moment’s research to ascertain whether any of it is even true.

First, the film promotes its “cast” as former leaders of the anti-nuclear movement, which none of them ever was. Second, it rather changes the definition of “environmentalist” to ascribe this term to individuals who support an extractive, polluting and cancer-causing industry like nuclear energy, capable of catastrophic accidents that can render vast areas permanent sacrifice zones. Add that to some of the protagonists’ support of natural gas fracking, so-called “clean coal” and genetically modified organisms, and the more appropriate description would be “former environmentalists who now support nuclear power.”

Specter then buys into a whole host of sound bites articulated in the film that have no basis in scientific or medical reality."  Read the rest.