Talk:ENENews

Although the enenews open forums can sometimes veer off into the domain of ELECHAT (extinction level event talk), the anonymous anti-nuke editors of the popular ENENEWS.com (ENEergy NEWS) provide a good service in their popular digest on nuclear news.

Especially notable are some of the ENENEWS subject forums which included some signed reports which are open to reliability and validity testing. For example the forum on possibly related signs and symptoms of radioactive exposures provides an invaluable anecdotal base for study. Some of the enenews forums can be seen as part of citizen science.

There is a public need for Enenews given the high levels of information blocking, disinformation and suppression of whistleblowers by governments, industries and their nuclear regulatory agents which quickly become apparent to any rational person with open eyes and mind who studies nuclear history. Although there are other sites on nuclear disasters, energy-environment and health physics which are less popular and more technical -- and each with its own agenda and sides on nuclear issues, this doesnt minimize the importance and quality of enenews.

In short, I disagree with the current rationalwiki entry which claims that enenews.com is fear mongering. In fact all rational people should be afraid about nuclear energy, weapons, waste, pollution and its military-industrial sponsors -- very afraid. Yohananw (talk) 15:55, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

To put it in terms you will get, no. WalkerWalkerWalker 18:22, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

The current entry is poor and misinformed. E.g. >"(as if a single reactor could do such a thing)"< Correction: the tsunami caused problems at several nuclear power sites up and down the Japanese main island north east coast, including at Fukushima Daiichi where there are 4 (FOUR) reactors with dire problems -- 3 meltdowns (now melt-throughs) and the fourth with an explosion at its fuel reserve and subsequent (somewhat evacuated and partially mitigated) threat of major fire at its larger fuel pool. Yohananw (talk) 16:26, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

No need to make a forum thread; it's a Saturday, and most people are doing non-wiki-editing things. oʇɐʇoԀʇɐϽʎzznℲ (talk/stalk) 16:43, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

I've corrected the "one reactor"-thing because the objection is still valid: Suggesting widespread irradiation of the Pacific is ludicrous. As for anecdotal evidence, well... And accumulating a collection of anecdotal evidence hardly constitutes citizen science (a term I'd be highly sceptical of when it concerns something as hard to pin down as whatever people think may be caused by Fukushima) not to mention the spotlight fallacy. I'm not a fan of nuclear energy, but that's exactly why I'm wary of sensational claims and fear mongering, because it allows "pro-nuclearists" to paint opposition to nuclear power as an irrational, conspiracy-minded semi-Luddite, hysterical movement, like the anti-vaxxers. In the end, such anti-nuclear propaganda does the cause it wants to serve more harm than good. ScepticWombat (talk) 18:50, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, ok my defence of enenews is I admit weak. As Azby Brown in Safecast forum on 15 Apr 2015 wrote about the need for responsible, valid documented science reporting >"it is very easy to find examples of hysterical and/or misleading fear-mongering. While searching it was hard to know where to stop, in fact. There are sites, like NaturalNews, or EneNews, [etc], for which this represents a reliable revenue stream. … average people seem to be extremely receptive to this and... [so are giving] a lot of totally unfounded ideas undue credibility."< source - https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/safecast-japan/fKZ3xSlOTRI OK - enenews is not a science forum, but a pop-sci news aggregator with an anti-nuke slant , (for me the right side of issues)....--Yohananw (talk) 22:27, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Back again. Enenews posts (not the forums) can sometimes be called alarmist as exaggerating, but not fear-mongering as it's not selling anything. (It's the nuke industry which is selling something.) I added this paragraph to the biased entry. >However, this description as fear-mongering is disputed. (See the Talk page.) Enenews posts include links directly to sources of responsible, authoritative science reports, such as the August 28th, 2015 enenews post on Fukushima's health effects which link to Dr. Ian Fairlie's August 15, 2015 report,"Summing the Health Effects of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster".< PLEASE THINK AND AT LEAST READ LAST PAGE OF Fairlie's report -- before you delete. Yohananw (talk) 13:47, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

not fear-mongering as it's not selling anything - What? you have to be selling something to be a fear-monger? balderdash and codswallop! there are lots of fearmongers around who aren't out to make money from it, although there is usually an agenda. Bicycle^wheel 14:42, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I read your linked report, and from what I can gather Fairlie's a moron. Fairlie states "From the UNSCEAR estimate of 48,000 person Sv, it can be reliably estimated (using a fatal cancer risk factor of 10% per Sv) that about 5,000 fatal cancers will occur in Japan in future from Fukushima’s fallout." The UNSCEAR estimate was total accumulated thyroid dose over the entire population of Japan at the time, approximately 128 million people. 48,000 Sv divided over 128 million people gives an average thyroid dose of ~0.375 mSv per person, or an average 0.00375% increase in cancer risk per person (less than the cancer risk of merely living a year).

The "10% increase in cancer risk per Sv" only applies to individuals, you can't extrapolate it to an entire population like Fairlie does. Fairlie's estimate of 5,000 fatal cancers simply doesn't make sense.

Fairlie also cites a study published by Strahlentelex, a German "elektrosmog" organization, to claim that there was a 20% increase in infant mortality in the Fukushima region after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Not only is Strahlentelex a crank organization ("elektrosmog" isn't a real thing), but as the study's own charts show, infant mortality in Japan was lower in 2012 (the year the article claims the increase was observed in) than it was in 2002.

Fairlie misquotes a comment response in an actual peer-reviewed (albeit open-access) journal to say "some scientists “…a priori exclude the possibility that low dose radiation could increase the risk of cancer. They will therefore not accept studies that challenge their foregone conclusion.”". The actual article did not say "some scientists", but instead said "Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information", the group whose comment they were responding to. Low amounts of radiation, on the order of mSv, while probably not entirely harmless, are negligible; their effects are indistinguishable from those of background radiation.

Even if Fairlie's work wasn't entirely insignificant, the simple fact that ENENews linked to it doesn't redeem the site. Frederick^♠♣♥♦ 04:32, 4 September 2015 (UTC)