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September 16, 2007
Freakonomics
The Jane Fonda Effect
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Nuclear Energy
In the movie The China Syndrome, Fonda played a California TV reporter filming an upbeat series about the states energy future. While visiting a nuclear power plant, she sees the engineers suddenly panic over what is later called a swift containment of a potentially costly event. When the plants corporate owner tries to cover up the accident, Fondas character persuades one engineer to blow the whistle on the possibility of a meltdown that could render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.
The China Syndrome opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.
Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film he played Fondas cameraman watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from The China Syndrome. While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasnt so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. It was a religious awakening, he recalled in a recent phone interview. I felt it was Gods hand.
Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of The China Syndrome, she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner to turn anti-nuke. I was ecstatic that it was extremely commercially successful, she said. You know the expression We had legs? We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island.
The T.M.I. accident was, according to a 1979 Presidents Commission report, initiated by mechanical malfunctions in the plant and made much worse by a combination of human errors. Although some radiation was released, there was no meltdown through to the other side of the Earth no China syndrome nor, in fact, did the T.M.I. accident produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage except to the plant itself.
What it did produce, stoked by The China Syndrome, was a widespread panic. The nuclear industry, already foundering as a result of economic, regulatory and public pressures, halted plans for further expansion. And so, instead of becoming a nation with clean and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels. Today such plants account for 40 percent of the countrys energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions. Anyone hunting for a global-warming villain cant help blaming those power plants and cant help wondering too about the unintended consequences of Jane Fonda....
K, this reminds me of how, during the Reagan years, liberals managed to knock out confinement of mentally ill folks. When they all ran loose, liberals then blamed Reagan for failing to deal with the homeless problem.
A big problem with liberalism is that it cannot accept a less-than-ideal situation without demanding that it be overhauled or tinkered with, EVEN IF THAT LEADS TO BIGGER PROBLEMS. In other words, they never have the maturity to say, well, this isn't perfect, but messing with it will cause even more problems, so let's just leave it alone. Another example: Yes, capitalism has problems. But communism is the cure that killed the patient.
No one can say exactly what would have happened if
If we had made more nuclear reactors we might have had cleaner and safer fuel.
On the other hand, if we had made more nuclear reactors we might have had several nuclear accidents.
Here is an interesting informational article listing nuclear accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
Admit it, you are nuts
Nope. Just thoughtful and reasonable. Practically everyone else seems to be nuts and reactionary.
In other words no major or critical accident has occurred in the US except in the 1950s at a small military site in Idaho? And further we have even more secure and protection systems today.
Remind me how many accidents have occurred in France and taren't they heavily into Nuclear power?
And K you missed the part where California has not built any new power plants in over 20 years. They had rolling ( may still) just a couple years ago because no one would sell them more energy, they tried to get the Feds to force people to sell them energy and they have also tried to steal water from neighboring States. Remind who runs that State.
One would hope that people would learn, but they don't:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/m...r=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=print
Nope. Just thoughtful and reasonable. Practically everyone else seems to be nuts and reactionary.
My goodness. Have you told teacher yet? She might just give you a gold star.
In other words no major or critical accident has occurred in the US except in the 1950s at a small military site in Idaho? And further we have even more secure and protection systems today.
And K you missed the part where California has not built any new power plants in over 20 years. They had rolling ( may still) just a couple years ago because no one would sell them more energy, they tried to get the Feds to force people to sell them energy and they have also tried to steal water from neighboring States. Remind who runs that State.
Heh, we also don't have that many...could be why.
And what exactly fixed this problem...if you think the cause of it was nuclear power, since the problem is largely gone, they must have built many nuclear plants in the past few years, right?
It isn't fixed, They still haven't built new power plants.
It isn't fixed, They still haven't built new power plants.
