Somewhere in its broken bowels the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is still glowing, still leaking, still triggering readings nearby that something is radiologically amiss. So along comes the Committee on Climate Change, established in the UK to advise the government on how to meet greenhouse gas targets, saying a few more atomic power stations are sensible parts of the mix – even better than any rush toward costly, offshore wind farms.

One wonders how well this will go over.

First story I spotted on this is from BBC‘s Richard Black, with “Nuclear ‘cheapest low-carbon option’ for UK energy. ” He filed that Sunday. Today he files a report that would seem to demand cross referencing with the first: “Renewables can fuel society, say world climate advisers.” This one is from a meeting in Abu Dhabi of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes with guarded reassurance that, despite the unspoken-here surge in public doubt over greenhouse effects, the world can drastically cut its carbon emissions via solar, wind, and other renewables.

Two things to note here. First, in a perfect world a reporter like Black, rather than frantically trying to file stories as fast as he can for the daily feed, would have stepped back, chewed on both items, and assayed to blend them into a coherent whole (along with other floccules of energy news).

Second, in each of these pieces he linked, at the bottoms of the stories, to the raw material – the Committee on Climate Change’s report, and the IPCC site and its latest report on renewables. This is worth mentioning as the Spring issue of ScienceWriters, newsletter of the US Nat’l Assoc. of Science Writers, just came in. It has much good stuff in it, including reprint of a plea from Ben Goldacre, a columnist at the UK’s Guardian newspaper, that science journalists include as many links as possible to the raw papers, reports, and other fodder used in writing their stories. I linked to the original Goldacre piece (which also was topic of a Paul Raeburn post here at the tracker.)

Seeing examples of such links to primary sources is refreshing. Many do it. Not enough.

A third thing: both the UK report and IPCC report received wider coverage, which I couldn’t get to (see p.s. below).

And by the way, and circling back to nuclear power, its benefits, its drawbacks, and the leaking Fukushima, before signing off for the day here’s a useful, evergreen update and fact-box type account on that:

• Reuters – Mayumi Negishi, Ten Ed Lyn: : Health risks from troubled Japan nuclear plant; Seems accurate enough. If readers in Britain read it, maybe they won’t be too skeptical of seeing some new nukes built.  But wouldn’t it be better were it to link to some official info sources of further use to the reader?

- Charlie Petit

p.s. Not much of a haul today. The creaky Toshiba laptop and its Windows XP that has served well for six years now is locking up a lot. New machine with TONS of RAM and a faster processor etc. is in the works. Productivity, one hopes, will go up.

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