Media meltdown over nuclear threat

A week last Friday, in response to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the Science Media Centre dropped every other story and started issuing comments from experts on earthquakes and tsunamis, warning them to prepare for days of back-to-back interviews. We forewarned our public health experts that the media interest would soon turn to them and planned to line up our trauma experts and psychologists.

Then there were explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Suddenly, this was the only game in town as far as the media was concerned.

By the following Tuesday, there was only one earthquake expert sitting alongside five nuclear scientists at our emergency briefing - and none of the 40 reporters who crammed into the SMC were interested in him. In just a few days, the main story had changed from the actual catastrophe of Japan to the imminent threat of a nuclear 'apocalypse', 'meltdown' and 'another Chernobyl'.

Most broadcasters had one or two reporters focusing on the earthquake, compared to five or six talking about the threat from the nuclear plant. The personal stories that usually have me in tears for days after a tragedy like this were comparatively rare, as journalists competed to summon the most alarming language possible to describe the nuclear 'meltdown'. Terrifying headlines talked of a deadly radiation cloud descending on Tokyo, before drifting across the oceans to menace the United States. 

One tabloid's Japan coverage was typical. Under the title "Japan's Horror: Battle to Stop Nuclear Meltdown", the double-page spread included three articles by different reporters on the nuclear threat: "Now Food's Nuked", "Dangers Might Get a Lot Worse" and "Despair of Victims in Nuke Zone". The only piece about the earthquake itself was the story of a Brit who had a miraculous escape.

Even if the damage done to the Fukushima nuclear power plant had delivered the nightmare scenario of 'Another Chernobyl' predicted by many in the media, I would still have qualms about the speed with which the pending nuclear 'catastrophe' seemed to take over from the actual 'catastrophe'. But what made this focus more unsettling was that an entirely different story was being told at the SMC. 

As we obligingly stood down our tsunami experts to find nuclear scientists, we started to gather comments and access the combined expertise of many scientists and engineers who have decades of experience of nuclear accidents, detailed knowledge of how these plants work and an understanding of what radiation can do to the human body and surrounding environment. As with all good scientists and academics, there were differences of emphasis and differences of opinion, but I think a fair reading of the consensus would go something like this:

- This was a very, very serious situation

- The Japanese operators appeared to have done a tremendous job in controlling it

- It was not another Chernobyl

- Almost everything reported to have happened was what experts would have expected to happen in a 40-year-old plant faced with the combined impacts of the earthquake and tsunami

- The Japanese authorities did everything right in relation to protecting the local population, setting the exclusion zone, handing out iodine tablets etc.

- The health risks to anyone in Tokyo from a radiation leak at the plant in Fukushima are really very small indeed.

So why did the best estimates of the best experts give way to another narrative? Why did so many responsible broadcasters and editors not allow the facts to get in the way of a good story? Why did almost every section of our media lead daily reports with 'another Chernobyl' or the coming apocalypse, when none of Britain's leading scientists or the Chief Scientific Adviser were in any way confirming that assessment?

It's tempting to return to my days studying journalism at college and indulge in discussion of 'news values' and 'framing'. But I shall leave that to media studies academics who I hope will look closely at this case study. Instead, I will look at the reasons that matter to the SMC. I think one reason why the more measured and cautious reactions from SMC's experts were disregarded by sections of the media was that they are nuclear experts and therefore seen to be 'pro' nuclear, with a vested interest in playing down the threat.

This hunch was confirmed by a senior BBC reporter who suggested, just as he was about to sit and listen to the nuclear experts we had assembled for him, "Your guys are all nuclear experts so they are bound to play this down."

Now let's be clear here: I do not believe the UK's media should ever arrive at the SMC to get THE word from the scientific priesthood handed down on tablets of stone. Nor do I think science reporters should ever leave their scepticism at the door. When they enter here they are generally getting the view of mainstream science and we are not known for our mavericks or minority voices. But to suggest that all 'nuclear' experts have a vested interest in playing down a nuclear accident is pretty strong stuff and I don't think it stands up to even the mildest enquiry. Let me give you some reasons:

1. Many of the experts we put up have spent much of their working lives sounding the alarm about other nuclear incidents. Only a few years ago, Richard Wakeford, now a visiting professor in epidemiology at the University of Manchester, sat in the SMC alongside John Garland, formerly of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, to report on a new study showing that the fallout from the UK's most serious nuclear accident at Windscale remains with us today.

2. Some of the experts we put up cannot even be generalised as 'nuclear experts'. Many are engineers or materials scientists or experts in radiation or nuclear physics who do not work on nuclear power issues but can answer some of the technical questions being asked by the media. You would be hard pushed to find any vested interests in relation to nuclear power.

3. Those experts that can be classified as 'nuclear experts' have often spent their working lives developing new approaches to improving safety at power plants. Unlike other industries where research and development creates new products, R&D in these academic nuclear institutes is aimed at scientifically underpinning safety cases. In terms of vested interests, you could just as easily assume that the SMC's nuclear scientists have an interest in exaggerating the risks of nuclear accidents in order to justify more funding for research on safety. Indeed, I imagine that nuclear safety experts are just about to receive a substantial injection of new funding as many governments, including our own, are calling for additional safety reviews of nuclear new-build.

4. Familiarity with the field does not equate to prejudice. In one sense, the BBC journalist who suggested that all our experts were biased has a point. It would be rare to find an academic who has devoted his life to the study of nuclear power and is 'anti-nuclear' - but only as rare as it would be to find a stem cell expert who is anti stem cell research, a plant scientist who is against genetically modified crops, or a nanotechnology researcher who opposes the use of nanotechnology. These experts know the evidence and especially the risks; they study them. Furthermore, being broadly in favour of nuclear power is very different from setting out to play down a serious incident.

5. I acknowledge my BBC friend's point that some of our nuclear science experts have industry links, but I disagree entirely that this is, by definition, a compromising position. Yes, many of the academics working at the Dalton Institute at Manchester University, or the new National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), have worked in the nuclear industry at some stage or have close links with the industry now. Indeed, much of the research being done in this area is happening at the request of the industry and government, who need new skills and new expertise to feed into the challenges posed by nuclear new-build. But to say that these links mean that nuclear scientists cannot be trusted is to say that we cannot trust medical scientists and clinicians who work on cures for cancer and heart disease because they rely on big pharma to commercialise their discoveries. If we are going to write off scientists for having links with industry, we would have few scientists left to trust.

There is also a risk that editors only see vested interests on the side of industry. Some media had the good grace to specify that John Large, one of the experts doing back-to-back interviews and predicting a death toll higher than that from Chernobyl, has been appointed by Greenpeace to assess events in Japan. Many others neglected to tell us that - which gave the false impression that nuclear experts were at odds with each other, when actually the level of agreement was striking. 

And while, as a press officer, I have nothing but admiration for those anti-nuclear campaigners who have seized on this tragedy to put the case against nuclear power, it would seem that people who have always argued against nuclear power also have a vested interest - in their case, in an overly negative interpretation of events in Japan.

Of course, the media did not need to make up their apocalyptic headlines with politicians around. How can previously unheard of academics from Manchester or Surrey compete with the French government telling its nationals to leave Tokyo and German chancellor Angela Merkel putting German's nuclear programme on hold? Then there was Günther Oettinger, the EU's energy chief, who told the European parliament that the situation was out of control. "We are somewhere between a disaster and a major disaster," he said. "There could be further catastrophic events, which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island." He said it was impossible to "exclude the worst", adding: "There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen." 

Before I conclude, let me establish what I am not saying:

I am not saying that the situation in Fukushima should not have been reported - and indeed given considerable prominence. In the absence of any reliable flow of information from TEPCO and the Japanese authorities, the media's role was to ask the difficult questions about what was actually happening behind the wall of silence.

I am not saying there was no good reporting: there was lots of good reporting, especially from the specialists, though several privately reported unprecedented pressures from their editors for a more alarmist narrative.

Fergus Walsh's reports on the human safety impacts stood out for being measured. Richard Black's coverage for the BBC website went into great depth. The FT's Andrew Jack and Daily Mail'sMichael Hanlon wrote pieces on the dangers of over-exaggerating the risks, and Kate Kelland at Reuters emphasised the wider context of the disaster. I could go on. And clearly the fact that the SMC set up over 300 interviews with the best experts shows there was an appetite for good science.

And I am not saying that scientists should be deferred to as the sole voice of truth on these occasions.

What I am saying is that, when almost all of the scientists who have worked on nuclear for decades are saying something that conflicts with alarmist statements by world leaders, the media should ensure that the scientists' words are a prominent part of the story. On several days last week, it was almost impossible to find this important caveat in any of the headlines and amongst the acres of reporting on the 'deepening crisis' - even on Wednesday after journalists had packed into the Centre to listen to the cautious message of the experts.

Of course the worst case scenario could still happen at Fukushima and, given that our scientists were happy to elaborate on that to eager journalists, I know just how grim that would be for the people of Japan. If it did, the SMC would continue to make the best experts available, but it would not change my view about the reporting. Terrifying people who have just been subjected to the most terrifying events they will ever face needs to be justified by compelling evidence. 

Luckily, those caught up in the real catastrophe were mostly able to keep the perspective that our media's editors seemed to have lost. Thus, a friend in Japan emailed to say:

"Of course the fact that the tsunami damage in general has been so catastrophic helps keep Fukushima in some kind of perspective."

Fiona Fox is Director of the Science Media Centre, an independent press office working on the front line between national news media and science on controversial issues.