Real Clear Science: Rachel Maddow's Misleading Report on Fracking

Alex Berezow  via Ace of Spades blog

• what transpired was an unscientific, selective reporting of the facts
• Three Mile Island was indeed scary...but ...the natural background radiation posed a bigger threat to the residents than the small amount of radioactive gas that was purposefully vented following the meltdown. Did Maddow remind her viewers of that fact? No.
• She then proceeded to show the now infamous footage of some guy in Colorado lighting his tap water on fire...Did she mention the University of Texas study which concluded that methane in water wells was probably natural and likely was present in the water prior to shale gas operations? No.
• Maddow then got to the main point of the segment: that fracking causes earthquakes....But a paper published in PNAS, also from the University of Texas, provided more information. Did fracking cause earthquakes? Yes, probably small ones...But, many injection wells (where waste water was injected) did not have any earthquakes at all. The author hypothesizes that earthquakes can only occur if there is a suitable fault nearby. Did Maddow report that? No, of course not.

No mention of molten salt reactors and how these can reduce the risks of water-cooled solid-fueled reactors.

Even if you think the current technology is unsafe, you have to admit that this is an improvement.  Why not consider that?

Rush Limbaugh may think that this is accepting the premise that nuclear technology isn't safe.  But no matter what you do, you are going to get people who are afraid of it because they don't understand it.  Then you run the risk that an accident will occur and then you will have a public relations disaster on your hands.  It will only confirm what the fear mongers have been pushing all along.

Why not remove that as a possibility and upgrade the reactors to molten-salt reactors?

It's kinda dumb not to.