“The narrative itself is an argument, right? How you tell a story is why the story matters. Who comes first, who gets to speak?

– Bathsheba Demuth, in Episode 3 of the podcast, “Drafting the Past.”

PROVIDENCE – Our narratives are shifting, much like tectonic plates, undermining the status quo of how history gets told and, equally important – who gets to document what has happened. Have you felt the tremors?

The changing narratives are being played out in real time: it is not just that the coldest place on the planet, the eastern Antarctic ice shelf, experienced temperatures last week some 70 degrees warmer than normal. Can you spell climate change?

Political turmoil and upheaval is also busy shaking our geopolitical foundations. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s willingness to commit atrocities against civilians have put us on the edge of World War III.

The Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of the first Black woman as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice will occur next week, at a time when racial divisions are being exploited by those who would raise bogus issues such as critical race theory in education. Our demographics are changing, despite efforts to cling to white supremacy.

And, there is a continuing  flood of misinformation being promoted in the continuing struggle to invest in public health strategies to contain the virulent COVID pandemic, as our national toll nears 1 million dead during the last two years.

It seems trite to quote W.B. Yeats from his poem written in 1939: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

There is the imagined pain of the truckers’ convoy driving in circles around Washington, D.C., and there is the real trauma of the citizens of Kyiv resisting the armed invasion by Russia, with bombardments targeting civilians. Which is more tangible to the American voters? In time of higher gas and diesel prices, who is paying to support the truckers to drive around and around Washington, D.C.? What credit card is in their wallets?

Here in Rhode Island, the tectonic plates of the political status quo are rapidly shifting underneath our foundations, too.

• A merger proposed by Rhode Island’s two largest health systems was rejected, an action taken by R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha, in his legal role as the state’s public health advocate. [See link below to ConvergenceRI story, “Getting to no.”]

• The long-term failure by the state to raise Medicaid reimbursement rates, destroying the safety net for the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders as well as jeopardizing the financial sustainability of Women & Infants Hospital, where 80 percent of the state’s babies are born, has triggered an uprising by community providers that is forcing the R.I. General Assembly to get involved in rate-setting. [See link below to ConvergenceRI story, “Rate setting becomes a legislative priority.”] How that plays out in the FY 2023 budget spending plans remains an unanswered question. Will voters vote out of concern for their poor health outcomes?

• The failure by the state to invest in affordable housing during the last decade is being challenged on the ground by a renewed focus on the need to address homelessness, despite the abundant promises of more investments. The reality is that any new housing start requires 24 to 36 months between groundbreaking and tenants turning the key in the lock of their new home. [See link below to ConvergenceRI story, “When new affordable housing rises from the ashes.”]

The last best chance to fix plastics
In the recent book, Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, captures the changing flow in narrative. Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown, like her writing colleagues, science writers Rebecca Altman and Sandra Steingraber, are reshaping the narrative of our world, attempting to bend its arc in what poet Irish Seamus Heaney once described as “the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.”

Demuth, Altman and Steingraber have offered up a different narrative – one, unfortunately, that despite op-eds in The Washington Post and articles in The Atlantic and Orion magazine, has had a hard time breaking through the political consciousness of news reporting in Rhode Island. Can you imagine Demuth and Altman being guests on WPRI’s “Newsmakers,” or ABC6’s “In the Arena,” or The Public Radio’s “Political Roundtable?” Why not?

Altman’s most recent work, co-written with Tridibesh Dey, “The world has one big chance to fix plastics,” in The Atlantic, explores the opportunity created by the United Nations Environmental Assembly passing a resolution mandating the creation of a multilateral treaty to address plastic pollution.

[Editor’s Note: Altman’s writing endeavors have been frequently featured in ConvergenceRI, the most recent being an interview following the publication of her work, “Upriver.” See link below to ConvergenceRI story, “A conversation with the next Rachel Carson.”]

As Altman and Dey wrote in The Atlantic: The treaty’s strength will come from how negotiators resolve a few key issues. One is whether the treaty will limit pollution by limiting production – to close the tap, as so evocatively signaled by the sculpture, by the artist Benjamin Von Wong, installed outside the UNEA meetings, a floating spigot with a 40-foot torrent of locally gleaned plastic waste. [See first image.]

Altman and Dey continued: The rate of world plastics production exceeds 400 million metric tons per annum – more plastics have been produced in the past 20 years than in the five decades following World War II.

Further, they wrote: Short-term plastics, which include packaging, now account for about 40 percent of plastics made each year. Absent global controls, plastic production continues to trend upward; by the end of the decade, it is projected to hit 600 million metric tons a year, and 800 million metric tons by 2040. Plastic makers as well as the oil and gas industries, which supply plastics’ feed stocks, will likely fight production limits – especially as oil and gas companies look to plastics as an area of growth.

Clearly, the issue of plastics proliferation – driven by oil and gas companies, turning up in our oceans, in our rivers, in our air, and in our bodies – should be more of a principal focus of news coverage in Rhode Island, at a time when the state and its economic development agency, CommerceRI, is busily promoting the potential of the “Blue Economy” to restore prosperity to Rhode Island. [See link below to ConvergenceRi story, “What does public health have to do with future prosperity in RI?”]

Burying the lede
The problem, of course, is that there are still many entrenched defenders of the status quo. It was surprising and disappointing to view the recent story produced by RI PBS Weekly, entitled Green Seeker: Nuclear Option. "Americans have come to associate nuclear power with meltdowns and mushroom clouds. But does this low-carbon energy deserve a second look?" asks the teaser for the program.

When the 10-minute program was highlighted on Twitter, I watched it, and I had an immediate reaction, which I tweeted in response on March 7, 2022: “What a problematic journalistic enterprise, shilling for the nuclear power industry: the economics of nukes have never worked: there is no solution to waste storage; most of the nukes in New England have troubled histories, at Vermont Yankee, Plymouth, Millstone, Seabrook.”

The RI PBS Weekly story prominently featured an attorney, Kaitlin Rekola, who is employed by the Nuclear Energy Institute – but which the program never identified as the principal marketing and information agency promoting the nuclear industry in the U.S. Her actual position, it turns out, is “Senior Staff Counsel,” according to her LinkedIn page. [Her only apparent connection to Rhode Island was that she graduated from Roger Williams University Law School.]

Rekola is interviewed in the RI PBS news show, playing with her two children, while voicing her concern about climate change threatening their future. The program also says that she is a member of “Women In Nuclear.” What the program doesn’t mention is the fact that “Women in Nuclear” is a division of the Nuclear Energy Institute and that Rekola is listed as program manager for “Women In Nuclear.”

Translated, it is Rekola’s job to “shill” for the nuclear industry – shill as defined as “an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others” by the Oxford Languages online dictionary.

By making her the “star” of the RI PBS Weekly segment, without properly identifying her professional role, RI PBS was using its weekly news platform to “shill” for the nuclear industry, in ConvergenceRI’s opinion. What does that say about RI PBS and its role of preserving the narrative of the status quo?

There were many, many other problems with the way that the RI PBS Weekly news program framed the segment. But the overall premise of the show, with an improperly identified Rekola as the primary advocate, was that nuclear power offered a carbon-free alternative to promote a cleaner energy future – as an alternative to natural gas and renewable sources.

The show also featured an employee of Dominion Energy, the owners of the Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford, Conn., talking about the hope that smaller nuclear power plants, like one being planned in Wyoming, offered a future of the commercial nuclear power industry.

As a counterpoint, the show did include responses from Ed Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who voiced concerns about the safety record of nuclear power plants. In the juxtaposition of images, Rekola won hands down, appearing as an attractive, sympathetic mother, shown playing with her two children, while Lyman came across as the balding male technocrat, whose answers often seemed to be spoken in halting phrases.

My tweet provoked an immediate response from Lylah M. Alphonse, the editor of The Boston Globe’s Rhode Island edition, who countered my tweet by claiming: “The report doesn’t “shill” anything, it offers a look at several different perspectives. My commentary about it is in a separate clip, but it may address some of the points you’ve brought up.”

Alphonse’s commentary did not address my concerns, in my opinion, after watching it.  And, rather than engage in an extended argument on Twitter, I decided to put into words what was missing from the story – and from Alphonse’s commentary.

What got left out of the nuclear narrative?
The biggest problem with the RI PBS Weekly segment was what got left out of its narrative – the fact that most of the commercial nuclear power plants in New England that were built in the last 60 years to generate electricity for consumers have been shut down and decommissioned, leaving scads of high-level nuclear waste stored on site, with no place to go, because there is no national repository.

These defunct nuclear power plants include:

• Pilgrim in Plymouth, Mass., [shut down in 2019, in the process of being decommissioned]

• Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. [shut down in 2014, in the process of being decommissioned]

• Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, Me. [shut down in 1996, decommissioned in 2005]

• Yankee Rowe in Rowe, Mass. [shut down in 1992, decommissioned in 2007].

All have been shut down, victims of failing infrastructure and fatigue in their pipes and concrete, making them too expensive to repair and to operate, rather than “too cheap to meter.”

[Editor’s Note: A planned twin nuclear reactor in Montague, Mass., was never built, because the economics didn’t work, abandoned by Northeast Utilities in 1980.]

For whatever reason, the RI PBS show makes no mention of what happened to the rest of the nuclear power plants in New England.

The RI PBS show also makes no mention of the nuclear power plant now operating in Seabrook, N.H., which despite being licensed to operate through March 15, 2050, has had to address serious questions about the stability of its concrete structure. Critics have raised repeated concerned about “concrete degradation sometimes called concrete cancer” at Seabrook, according to a CBS Boston I-Team report that aired on Oct. 5, 2021.

The owners of the plant, NextEra, called the condition, “Alkali-silica reaction,” a well-understood condition. “We have demonstrated, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed repeatedly, that Seabrook’s structures are robust, safe, and fully capable of performing their design functions.” [A planned second nuclear power plant at the site was never built, for economic reasons.]

Millstone
The one operating nuclear power station featured in the RI PBS show was Millstone, in Waterford, Conn. Originally, there were three nuclear power plants, but Millstone 1 was shutdown in 1996 following multiple equipment failures, and it permanently ceased operations in 1998. For whatever reason, there was no mention of Millstone 1 and its problematic shutdown in the RI PBS Weekly news segment.

There was also no mention in the program of the nuclear power plant’s problematic history with regulators.

• In 1999, then owner Northeast Utilities agreed to pay $10 million in fines for 25 counts of lying to federal investigators and for having falsified environmental reports. A subsidiary paid an additional $5 million for having made 19 false statements to federal regulators regarding the promotion of unqualified plant operators between 1992 and 1996.

Instead, what we are shown in the RI PBS news show is a simulated control room used as a training ground for nuclear operators.

The other big problem with the narrative
The other major problem with the RI PBS show’s skewed narrative is the way in which it sets up a binary choice about New England and Rhode Island’s energy future, as if the choice were coal and natural gas power generation plants versus new and continued investments in nuclear power as the only alternatives to the region’s energy future to address climate change.

One of the major “developments” – unreported by many news media – is the transformative role that behind-the-meter solar installations are having on reducing peak demand in New England.

As ConvergenceRI reported in May of 2019: Today, the real revolution that is occurring in energy production, it seems to me, is still mostly unheralded and under-reported: the change in managing peak demand on the electric grid in New England, where behind-the-meter solar and wind has proven to be a game-changer, lowering and delaying peak demand in the summer, when it is highest and most costly, achieving great savings for all consumers on the electricity grid. Those numbers come from ISO-New England, the agency charged with managing the Big Grid.

Let’s do the numbers, as NPR’s “Marketplace” says:

• During the summer of 2018, during the heat wave from June 29 through July 5, peak demand for electricity was cut by some 2,000 megawatts produced from behind-the-meter photovoltaic arrays on homes and businesses. The panels provided these 2,000 megawatts of electricity on a daily basis, lowering peak demand on the grid, and making the hour of peak demand occur later in the day.

“This reduces the number of hours that dirtier and more expensive peaker plants must run, avoiding fossil fuel emissions,” explained Joe LaRusso, in a thread of 22 tweets on July 20. “The result? Lower-cost electricity for all New England electric customers.” [See link below to ConvergenceRI story, “Behind the meter solar is transforming the utility market.”]

In 2026, New England ISO projects that behind-the-meter solar and energy efficiency measures will reduce summer peak demand from more than 34,500 megawatts to approximately 29,000 megawatts, a reduction of some 6,000 megawatts. Summer peak demand is the major factor in what drives the cost of electricity in New England. Reductions in peak demand result in savings for consumers.

Translated, ramping up behind-the-meter solar installations and energy efficient investments can serve as a major factor in reducing the demand for electricity.

That, combined with the development of off-shore wind capability, may cancel out the need for any new nuclear power plant construction in New England.

A second big omission
The other big omission in the way that RI PBS constructed its narrative around framing nuclear power as a “green alternative” in a time of climate change threats is in its failure to acknowledge the restructuring of the electric industry in 1997 – and how it enabled utilities to off-load the stranded costs of their investments in nuclear power plants that were increasingly unable to be passed on to consumers through the rate base.

Further, in Massachusetts, the new law created a renewable portfolio standard to promote the development of renewable energy resources – a standard that did not include natural gas or nuclear power as such alternatives.

Here in Rhode Island, there has been a lot of promises about how to reduce fossil fuel emissions to meet goals under the recent Climate Act legislation enacted in 2021. One of the biggest issues is how the electricity being produced by the James Bay Hydroelectric Project in the province of Quebec will be treated – a source of commercial electricity that dwarfs the potential for the remaining two nuclear power stations operating in New England. But that is a story for another day. Also left iout of the equation is the growing off-shore wind industry in the U.S.

To come full circle, unless Rhode Island, New England, U.S., and the world address ways to control the manufacture and spread of plastics, we cannot address the threat of climate change. Plastics depend on the production of feedstocks from the fossil fuel industry, where “fracking” of natural gas leads to “cracking” of chemical compounds used in the production of plastics.

Instead of promoting – in my words, shilling – for the nuclear industry, RI PBS would do better to report on the narratives that Rhode Island-based science writers such as Rebecca Altman and Bathsheba Demuth are creating.