How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups

"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton, which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue.

The magazine was rightly bemoaning the tendency of news outlets to present former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who support nuclear power, without noting that both are paid spokespeople for a group bankrolled by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). NEI represents nuclear power plant operators, plant designers, fuel suppliers and other sectors of the nuclear power industry. Hill & Knowlton is NEI's public relations firm, though it's not the only firm working to build support for nuclear power.

Thanks in part to an ongoing, multifaceted PR push -- along with very real concerns about energy prices, rising energy demand, aging infrastructure, sustainability and global warming -- nuclear power is attracting serious attention from reporters and policymakers alike. The question is whether a vital public debate over energy choices is being skewed by deep-pocketed interests with a dog in the fight.

The dangers of such distortions are especially acute at the state and local levels. That's where efforts to extend the licenses of existing nuclear power plants, to maintain or expand nuclear waste storage facilities, and to site new proposed nuclear power plants, are made or broken. And that's where pro-nuclear campaigners appear to be focusing, adopting the mantle and tactics of community groups while steadfastly refusing to provide details on their operations.

Persistence Pays Off

All manner of businesses promote themselves every day, but the nuclear power industry's need for good PR is tremendous. No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the United States since 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island meltdown. The Yucca Mountain national repository for nuclear waste -- originally scheduled to open in 1998 -- is now slated to begin accepting waste in March 2017. Experienced nuclear engineers are becoming scarce; nearly 30 percent of the industry's workforce "will be eligible to retire within five years," the Scripps Howard News Service reported in April 2006. And even with what one Forbes columnist described as "all this corporate welfare," potential "investors remain wary of construction risks" for new nuclear power plants, explained an energy sector analyst.

The industry's future is so precarious that Exelon Nuclear's head of project development warned attendees of the Electric Power 2005 conference, "Inaction is synonymous with being phased out." That's why years of effort -- not to mention millions of dollars -- have been invested in nuclear power's PR rebirth as "clean, green and safe."

The nuclear power industry has been promoting itself as part of the solution to global warming for a decade. Industry representatives appeared en masse at a 1998 climate change conference in Buenos Aires, according to environmental consultant Alan Tate. "They inundated the international negotiators, including with what appeared to be a number of front groups like Students for Nuclear Power," he told reporter Liz Minchin. By 2005, nuclear industry spokespeople were "giving much more polished performances at climate meetings and negotiations."

Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power station

Entergy, which owns and operates 10 U.S. nuclear power plants, has worked with the PR giant Burson-Marsteller for at least five years. In April 2002, Entergy's communications director told O'Dwyer's PR Daily that the firm had been hired "mainly for the Indian Point issues" -- the security and environmental concerns raised by the company's Indian Point nuclear power plant, located outside New York City -- "but its work now includes handling the overall image of the company." In 2003, Entergy created the "Coalition Against Shutting Down Vermont's Electricity Options" and spent $200,000 to oppose a citizen campaign to close the company's Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in 2012.