Environmentalists charge PBS show biased toward nuke power

Monday, April 21, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

A PBS "Frontline" special on nuclear power has created a cloud of controversy even before it's aired on Earth Day.

The program, "Nuclear Reaction," airs at 10 p.m. Tuesday on KLVX Channel 10.

Environmental groups have attacked the program as an "unbalanced, retrogressive, inaccurate and misleading" portrayal produced by Jon Palfreman.

"Ralph Nader and I were interviewed for this show," said Bill Magavern, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project. "Based on the press release and our interaction with them, the producers went into the project with closed minds, having already decided that Americans have an irrational fear of nuclear power and that we need to stop worrying and learn to love atomic energy."

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes opens the program on top of Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the only U.S. site under study for a high-level nuclear waste dump.

"I find it extraordinary that half a century after the discovery of this new source of energy, I am standing on what may become its burial ground," Rhodes says in "Nuclear Reaction."

If Yucca Mountain is approved as the dump for the nation's most radioactive materials, the gigantic hole in the ground must keep commercial and defense nuclear wastes intact longer than 10,000 years.

But burying nuclear waste is not the answer, Rhodes said in a telephone interview last week. "Yucca Mountain doesn't make sense," he said.

Why bury irradiated reactor fuel when it has so much more energy to burn? That was the question the scientists he interviewed for the documentary asked, Rhodes said.

"It goes against the whole reason of nuclear technology," he said. That aim was to recycle the uranium and plutonium or burn it up in advanced nuclear reactors as technology progressed, thus producing inexhaustible electricity.

Rhodes blamed former President Jimmy Carter for refusing to allow nuclear fuel reprocessing, fearing nuclear weapons proliferation. "Commercial nuclear power has borne the brunt of a deep-seated dread of nuclear weapons," he said.

The program interviews ordinary people who lived around Three Mile Island, the U.S. reactor in Pennsylvania that went awry in 1979. Rhodes also interviews French people who live with the fact of reactors in their back yards and beaches.

Rhodes said the issue needs to be discussed by the American public. "I think technologies need to be judged on their merits or their risks," he said, citing an estimated 30,000 deaths from coal-fired power plants each year.

"Where are all the bodies from nuclear power?" Rhodes asked. "Show me the bodies."

In the Chernobyl segment of the program, the official death count released by Mikhail Gorbachev is given as 31 firefighters.

But the Ukranian government has reported 8,000 people died, most of them young helpers cleaning up the former Soviet Union's major farming area, according to Scott Denman, director of the Safe Energy Communication Council.

"We sent 'Frontline' producer David Fanning a 10-page list of scientists, doctors and experts, including Dr. John Gofman (physician and physicist) and Henry Kendall, founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists," Denman said. "None of them was ever contacted.

"It's absolutely reprehensible what the film says."

And as far as a body count, four people died and eight were scalded after a main feedwater pipe burst at the Surry nuclear power plant Unit 2 near Williamsburg, Va., on Dec. 9, 1986, Denman said.

The scope of the documentary pits nuclear industry experts against ordinary people and relies on anecdotal evidence, he noted.

Nuclear power may fail due to its enormous expense under more utility competition, Denman said. France jumped-started its nuclear power program after the 1970s oil crisis, but its state-owned electric utility faces a $30 billion debt. Plans for developing a waste disposal site have been delayed until after 2006.

"There's a sense this documentary is an obituary of nuclear power," Rhodes said. "I don't have any strong feelings one way or another. I think technologies need to be judged on their merits or their risks."