I was struck by this headline in the Washington Post (7/10/11):

Loss of Support for Nuclear Power Threatens Japan's Economy

There are probably a lot of things that are threatening the Japanese economy--a massive, deadly earthquake and tsunami, for instance. Or the massive nuclear disaster that resulted from that tsunami.

The news here is that Japanese officials are doing inspections of their nuclear reactors--as they've always done. The problem, apparently, is that they're doing more than that:

Under ordinary circumstances, these shutdowns would be temporary. Instead, they loom as an urgent problem for Japan, whose government--itself divided over nuclear policy--has not yet mustered the political will or the popular support necessary to restart reactors once they are idled.

The "problem" is that the government is also doing stress tests to make sure the reactors can survive major disruptions. That doesn't sound like a bad idea, given the horrendous disaster that they've just suffered. The Post describes the government's decision to call for these tests as "undermining its cause," apparently because this contradicted an earlier claim that the reactors were safe.

The problem, as defined by the Post, is a lack of political support for nuclear power, inspired by a government that wants to increase the country's reliance on safe renewable energy.  That position is what the Post is saying "threatens" the country's economy. Others might argue that a massive nuclear disaster is to blame.

While the Fukushima nuclear disaster has gotten plenty of attention on network programming, the debate has consistently overlooked the most fundamental question of whether nuclear power can be harnessed safely (FAIR Blog, 3/14/11). In asking why this question remains muted, a look at their boards of directors reveals that all three major broadcast networks share at least two members with companies that produce or transmit nuclear energy.

With nuclear powerhouse General Electric as co-owner of NBC, it's not surprising that GE's CEO Jeffery Immelt and CFO Keith Sherin both sit as directors on the network's board. But it's not the only network whose board has nuclear energy connections: ABC's directors include a representative from Halliburton as well as from Edison Mission Energy. Not to be outdone, CBS, a former subsidiary of the energy giant Westinghouse, seats three board members from the nuclear energy industry's Southern Company, NSTAR and Consolidated Edison.

Can nuclear power be harnessed safely? The livelihood of these network board members depends on answering the question in the affirmative.

The radioactive plume from Japan wafting from west to east across the U.S. is absolutely nothing to worry about, writes William J. Broad in a New York Times report today ("Radiation Over U.S. Is Harmless, Officials Say," 3/22/11) about the radiation threats posed by the Japanese nuclear plant disaster. Broad writes:

Health experts said that the plume's radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey of thousands of miles and that--at least for now, with concentrations so low--its presence will have no health consequences in the United States. In a similar way, faint radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread around the globe and reached the West Coast in 10 days, its levels detectable but minuscule.

There are two things wrong with Broad's report:

One, he doesn't quote or even name any health experts in the piece. When he later elaborates on the claim that radiation from Fukushima will have no health consequences in the United States, he cites the Department of Energy--better known for its promotion of nuclear power than for its health expertise.

Two, in saying that small amounts of radiation are safe, Broad seems to be embracing the industry-favored threshold model of radiation risks. That view holds that below a certain level of radiation exposure, no health danger is posed.

But this is at odds with the National Academy of Sciences and several other science associations that hold there is no such threshold, and that any exposure poses some additional risk of cancer: the greater the exposure, the greater the risk. The linear, no threshold model isn't universally embraced, but is the prevailing view in scientific circles.

At the very least, if Broad is going to cite an industry-favored way of viewing radiation dangers, one that downplays the threat, isn't he obliged to explain that that is what it is, and that it is contradicted by much of the scientific establishment?

At a time when the Japanese prime minister is describing his country's nuclear crisis and the growing threat of radiation exposure as "very grave," it must have been comforting for Fox News watchers to turn on the O'Reilly Factor last night (3/17/11) to see Ann Coulter telling them that radiation is actually good for you.

Yes, Coulter told O'Reilly viewers, the evidence was right there in the media, including in the newspaper she'd once hoped would be targeted with a terror attack:

I'm citing a stunning number of physicists and from the New York Times and the Times of London, there is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.

The New York Times science section, for example, a few years ago reported on a study from Canada where all these women who had had tuberculosis got an inordinate number of chest X-rays. Their breast cancer rate was lower than the general population.

There were apartments put up in Taiwan in 1993 that accidentally contained an inordinate amount of cobalt-60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years 10,000 occupants of these buildings, being hit with five times what the government says is the minimum amount you should be hit with, the number of cancer cases they had about 10,000 occupants was only five cases.

Now, for the general population in that same age group, a group of 10,000 Taiwanese should have gotten about 170 cases of cancer.

I'm sure you'll be surprised to find that it takes minutes to debunk Coulter's scientific declarations on radiation. That "pro-radiation" Times science piece (11/27/01), for instance, does cite research finding that low-dose radiation can have beneficial effects-- only to note that it has been generally dismissed by scientists as flawed:

Now, some scientists even say low radiation doses may be beneficial. They theorize that these doses protect against cancer by activating cells' natural defense mechanisms. As evidence, they cite studies, like one in Canada of tuberculosis patients who had multiple chest X-rays and one of nuclear workers in the United States. The tuberculosis patients, some analyses said, had fewer cases of breast cancer than would be expected and the nuclear workers had a lower mortality rate than would be expected.

Dr. Boice said these studies were flawed by statistical pitfalls, and when a committee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement evaluated this and other studies on beneficial effects, it was not convinced. The group, headed by Dr. Upton of New Jersey, wrote that the data ''do not exclude'' the hypothesis. But, it added, ''the prevailing evidence has generally been interpreted as insufficient to support this view.''

And that Taiwan study demonstrating that radioactive cobalt-60 built into an Taiwan apartment building protected the inhabitants from cancer? It contained a "major flaw" in that it failed to control for age--where a subsequent study that did control for age found an  increased incidence of cancer associated to the apartment building. As a summary of the literature on Wikipedia puts it:

In popular treatments of radiation hormesis, a study of the inhabitants of apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention. The building materials had been accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 but the study found cancer mortality rates 96.4 percent lower than in the population as a whole. However, this study compared the relatively young irradiated population with the much older general population of Taiwan, which is a major flaw. A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found a significant exposure-dependent increase in cancer in the irradiated population, particularly leukemia in men and thyroid cancer in women, though this trend is only detected amongst those who were first exposed before the age of 30.

So as an increasingly critical situation in Japan demands more accurate and useful information about radiation, the Fox News Channel's biggest show featured the ignorance of Ann Coulter. Just another reason why studies have found Fox News watchers more misinformed on the issues of the day than consumers of other corporate media outlets.