Free Press, Nuclear Industry, Courage and More

The Nation is picking up a story about a nuclear plant problem in Nebraska from news sources in Russia and Pakistan. The story is that flood waters have created a problem for the plant and that the Obama administration has engineered a news blackout on the problem. I don’t know which part of this story is the bigger story.

Read it at The Nation here.

There is also some buzz out there about ocean extinctions. An Hour Ago India – DNA Daily News Analysis – has some pretty good coverage of that story.

I don’t know how worried to get about these stories. There should be some balance between the level of worry and my ability to address the underlying problems. Chicken Little is a cautionary tale about sounding the alarm, as is the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Chicken Little is a story that teaches courage, but maybe courage is sometimes sounding the alarm and risking ridicule?

It’s a real problem with slow-moving disasters that it’s very hard for a person to time the alarm. I live on a particularly dangerous kind of tectonic plate that promises a large earth quake someday (think Fukushima style), but sounding an alarm is difficult to time with earthquakes.

So, a couple of alarms:

• On ocean extinctions, the timing is easier to see. It’s time to sound the alarm. If the oceans aren’t healthy, the planet is not healthy and the oceans are not healthy.

• Nuclear energy – not a good idea. Not safe in the short term or the long term. Ordering a blackout of news coverage does not change that equation. And it is not courageous to order a news blackout, it is cowardly.