Newfie wrote:Came across this, might explain a lot.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.market ... 3C5E6F97B5
Well it was a good joke, gave me a belly laugh!
I mean seriously, to claim that ABC/NBC/CBS are middle of the road unbiased information sources? Seriously? Those 'news' organizations are solidly in the 'democratic party organ' camp of reporting. When was the last time you saw any of them say a nice thing about any politician who was not a Democrat or aligning themselves with Democratic Party talking points? Sure they throw out occasional 'rah rah' stories about non-Democrat politicians, if they happen to be aligning with the Democrats and 'reaching across the aisle', but that is a very long distance from being 'unbiased and neutral'.
HOW you report the facts can be terribly mislead no matter what those facts are. Yes it is a fact that person X claims Y, but that doesn't mean the claim of person X are valid and factual. For example here are two facts. 1) Intense radiation can make you very sick or kill you. 2) Plutonium 239 found in spent nuclear fuel has a half life of 24,000 years so it will detectable in fuel for 240,000 years. Those two facts, without context, leave the average person with the impression that spent nuclear fuel is deadly dangerous for 240,000 years. In reality however it isn't radiation that makes Plutonium dangerous, a 24,000 year halflife is long enough you can play catch with a lump of it with no radiological effect. However like Arsenic, Lead or other heavy metals it is a chemical poison. You don't want to eat, snort, or rub it in open wounds especially as a powder.
Proper unbiased reporting would be clear about the fact that the part of Spent Nuclear Fuel that is a radio-logical hazard are the isotopes with SHORT half lives that cause INTENSE radiation. Things like Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 with half lives of 28 and 30 years respectively are actually short enough to make you sick in high doses, and the shorter lives isotopes get progressively more deadly. HOWEVER because they are intensely radioactive they also pass the 10 half life mark relatively quickly, in this case 280-300 years. So in reality the part of spent nuclear fuel that is a radiation danger fades away in under 300 years, most of it within 30 years. This means storing spent fuel is not a task requiring a vault able to last 240,000 years as is so often claimed, but rather 300 years which is trivial in terms of human achievement.
So whether you are talking politics or science, the 'big three' national news media sources fail badly at the test of being accurate and unbiased, yet whomever created that chart gives them the max score. That says a lot more about the entity creating the chart than it does about the entities on the chart itself, IMO.