By Mark Taliano
Sesame Street, television’s teacher to countless kids, was once banned in England. It was thought that the technical wizardry of the well-constructed shows would dissuade kids from reading. And they may have been right. Books don’t have flashy lights, nice music, fast scene changes, and so on.
Mainstream media, on the other hand, hasn’t been banned, but it does feature a great deal of technical wizardry that often glues us to the set. This fixation of form over substance comes with a price though: depth, context, and perspective are lost. There’s a formula for this media technique, and it’s called Jolts Per Minute.
Give the audience enough “jolts,” including fast scene changes, quick editing, sex, and violence, and they’ll continue to watch the show. Rock videos are really good at it, but so are regular news shows, and they’re getting better all the time. (As an experiment, turn on the news, and count the number of jolts — scene changes, editing, violence, loud music etc. in a minute. You might be surprised.)
Less surprising is the fact that too much of today’s media is controlled by too few owners. As a result, the media, including the news, is often entertaining, but too frequently, the construct of “reality” presented lacks the substance that we need. It’s like a high calorie, low nutrient diet.
True, the mainstream media needs to captivate a broad-based audience to sell products, but it wouldn’t hurt to change the point of view sometimes, and add more substance, even if the constraint is JPM and the need to keep people watching.
Here are some jolts I’d like to see, with optional dialogue (more savings):
Instead of the regular G-20 mayhem shots (which serve business interests all too well), I’d take a bird’s-eye shot of the flaming police car and Black Bloc protestors, but then zoom out for context, showing small violent flashes dominated by a sea of peaceful protestors trying unsuccessfully to be heard.
Flight of The Valkryries, would suit a scene of business people kneeling at the altar of stock market arrows pointing heavenward, followed by a sobering clip of manufacturing industries leaving town. Bruce Springsteen’s ‘My Hometown might serve as the soundtrack.
I’d show footage of the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, juxtaposed with a scene of Mr. Hudak promising to put a moratorium on wind farms. The Symphonie Pastorale might work here.
Preening dictators in military outfits would get people’s attention, but I’d follow the “preening” scenes with images of murdered protestors and oily sea ducks.
Of course, a scene from any local hospital emergency room on any given day would contrast nicely with shots of publicly funded hospitals in Europe or Cuba.
To press the envelope further, I’d show a clip of a heavily made up FOX news person interviewing someone defending the perceived necessity of massive bailouts, followed by a clip of Amy Goodman interviewing Naomi Klein about the Shock Doctrine.
Finally, I’d show a space shot of our blue earth, followed by a shot of a cloudy earth dominated by extreme capitalists with dollar signs in their eyes. No sound track required.
It’d be nice to shake things up a bit, and it may even get people buying more books and drinking fewer beers, even if the beer cost a buck and the book cost much more.
Mark Taliano is a Niagara resident and frequent contributor of commentary to Niagara At Large.
(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest and concern to residents in our greater Niagara region and beyond.)
Niagara At Large 
Kewl Mark! You definitely have a career in visual journalism!
How about one with us looking at 4 ceiling lights with 2 labelled ‘nuclear’, 1 ‘coal’ and 1 ‘renewable’ and the caption “How can I cut back?”?
Now, can you think of a few ways to get them to ask more detailed questions to fit into their 6-second jolts?
Especially details about how OPG’s plans to evacuate Southern Ontario if ever they have a nuclear failure…. Or for that matter, how they plan to store Pickering’s spent fuel rods & de-commissioned plant when they close it ~2020.
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Excellent points Lorne. Do they even have an evacuation plan? Apparently, insurance companies won’t cover nuclear radiation in their policies — too risky.
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Here’s an interesting report with MUCH more detail than Ontario journalists are reporting, maybe because the UK had a major nuclear disaster in 1957 (to be fair, the Ontario CANDU system is likely safer, but nuclear engineers everywhere seem to suffer from hubris [pride]):
“A CLOUD OF MISTRUST NOW SPREADS ROUND THE WORLD”
After decades of lies, nuclear reassurances now fall on deaf ears
Special report for The Independent by Michael McCarthy, Wednesday, 16 March 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/four-explosions-two-fires-and-a-cloud-of-nuclear-mistrust-spreads-around-the-world-2242988.html
It is unprecedented: 4 atomic reactors in dire trouble at once, 3 threatening meltdown from overheating, and a 4th hit by a fire in its storage pond for radioactive spent fuel.
All day yesterday, dire reports continued to circulate about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, faced with disaster after Japan’s tsunami knocked out its cooling systems. -snip-
But perhaps the most alarming thing was that although Naoto Kan, Japan’s Prime Minister, once again appealed for calm, there are many – in Japan and beyond – who are no longer prepared to be reassured.
The scale of the alarm is the remarkable thing: how it has gone round the world
– Angela Merkel has imposed a moratorium on nuclear energy;
– in France, there are calls for a referendum;
how it’s even displaced the terrible story of Japan’s tsunami itself from the front-page headlines. But then, public alarm about nuclear safety, as the Fukushima emergency proves, is very easy to raise – and, as the Japanese authorities are now discovering, very hard to calm.
The reason is an industry which from its inception, more than half a century ago, has taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that happens, cover-ups and downright lies often follow close behind. The sense of crisis surrounding Japan’s stricken nuclear reactors is exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an emergency, public trust in the promoters of atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, in Japan – pick your country – people have not been told the truth (and have frequently been told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures.
To understand the mania for secrecy, we have to go back to nuclear power’s origins. This was not a technology dreamt up as a replacement for coal-fired power stations; this is a military technology, conceived in a life-or-death struggle, which has been modified for civilian purposes. -snip-
Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a birthmark, and, indeed, for 10 years after the first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it remained a covert military technology, although first the Russians, and then the British, followed the Americans in developing it. Britain built a pair of atomic reactors at Windscale on the Cumbrian coast, which produced (as a fission product) plutonium, the material used in the first British nuclear weapon. That was exploded off the coast of Australia in 1952. And it was in one of these reactors that the world’s first really serious nuclear accident occurred: the Windscale fire of October 1957. The reactor’s core, made of graphite, caught light, melted and burned substantial amounts of the uranium fuel, and released large amounts of radioactivity. It was the most serious nuclear calamity until Chernobyl nearly 30 years later, but the British government did all it could to minimise its significance, trying at first to keep it a complete secret (the local fire brigade was not notified for 24 hours) and keeping the official report confidential until 1988 [30 years later].
It was to be the first of many such nuclear alarms and cover-ups …. -snip-
– at the US atomic weapons plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado … from the 1950s to the 1980s.
– In Russia, the province of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals … in the 1950s, and in 1967 -snip-
– in Japan … Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Asia’s biggest utility … in 2002 … disclosed they had covered up a large series of cracks and other damage to reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period.
– … the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Japan more than two years ago that strong earthquakes would pose “serious problems”….
– Even Chernobyl, the world’s most publicised nuclear accident, was at first hidden from the world by what was then the Soviet Union, and might have remained hidden had its plume of escaping radioactivity not been detected by scientists in Sweden.
-snip-
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Excellent article. It’s probable that nobody knows the extent of contamination occurring at the Japanese plants, since the radiation detectors etc. were destroyed by the explosions.
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A huge rethink on nuclear power is needed, why do we need to spend billions of dollars on these nuclear power plants ,we never recoup the huge outlays of taxpayers cash, it is time to think smaller, there are small units much like those in submarines and aircraft carriers, that use use Thorium not Uranium as fuel, they are the size of a hot tub and can be underground, and added to as more power is needed, one unit produces enough pwer to serve 30,000 people, (same size of Fort Erie) for ten years, the Russians and Americans are woking to market these units as an alternative to what we are doing now.a huge expensive grid is not needed.
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Interesting idea George, but ‘your’ thorium breeder reactors only last ~TEN years instead of the ~FORTY years of our current CANDU’s.
What will you do to store their Nuclear Waste and De-commissioned Plants, which will be underground, polluting Fort Erie’s ground water for several Thousand years? (What’s the half-life of Thorium’s products of nuclear decay, U233 for one?)
-w-
Wouldn’t it be better to have your decentralised grid with individual Renewable Energy (Wind, Solar, Geothermal, etc) on most of our homes & businesses, plus a few ‘farms’ with storage equipment (compressed air, Vanadium Redox Batteries, flywheels, etc)?
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George, here’s a 2006 article about Thorium reactors:
Is thorium the answer to our energy crisis?
It could power the planet for thousands of years, the reactors would never blow up and the waste is relatively clean. So is thorium the nuclear fuel of the future?
Helen Brown reports, Wednesday, 13 December 2006
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-thorium-the-answer-to-our-energy-crisis-428279.html
-snip- thorium – a silvery white metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder – could solve all these problems. As Lillestol points out, thorium is “three times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust, and produces 250 times more energy per unit of weight than uranium in the present reactors”. Unlike a uranium reactor, a thorium power station would produce no plutonium. Consequently, the waste produced from burning thorium in a reactor would not be such a security risk if it fell into the wrong hands, and the spent fuel rods are dramatically less radioactive than conventional nuclear waste. Dr Paul Norman of the University of Birmingham’s Physics department talks in terms of “HUNDREDS of years of radioactivity as opposed to THOUSANDS”.
LW> Still a longer time than those roman soldiers have been standing guard over British nuclear waste, eh?
Furthermore, thorium requires an accelerator-driven system (or ADS) reactor, and these have significant differences from reactors commonly used for uranium. When a uranium-235 atom splits, it releases a wave of high-energy neutrons which can then collide with other U-235 atoms, releasing more neutrons. This is the chain reaction responsible for the explosive power of an atom bomb, and when out of control, it is also the force that can drive a disastrous meltown in a reactor’s core.
But in an ADS reactor, that chain reaction cannot get out of control. “The technology for building such a reactor became ripe some 10 years ago. It uses an external beam of protons to kick-start the reactions,” says Lillestol. The thorium does not then continue the reaction on its own – it needs the external beam of protons to keep it running. To stop the reaction, and close down a power station, all that would be needed to be done would be to pull the plug on that external beam of protons.
“In the first step, the protons enter into molten lead where a large number of neutrons are produced,” continues Lillestol. “These neutrons enter into the thorium blanket. In fact the proton accelerator has to have a rather intense proton beam, and such accelerators could not be built 10 years ago. This is no longer considered to be a major obstacle.”
-snip-
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George: Here’s a contrary opinion about Thorium:
“Norm Rubin: Thorium not the miracle solution nuclear advocates claim”
Posted on March 29, 2011 by energyprbe,
(March 29, 2011) Energy Probe director of nuclear research Norm Rubin in the Toronto Star and The Week discussing why thorium is not the solution to the high costs of nuclear energy.
Thorium pitches are really just “appeals for public funding,” he says: “Thorium reactors are only one of a significant number of long-term dreams to plant soybeans in Antarctica with the help of nuclear sun lamps. There is almost no limit to the dreams you can have with an endless, too-cheap-to-meter source of clean, benign, what-could-possibly-go-wrong energy.”
Needless to say, Rubin is not impressed. Not just with LFTRs, but with nuclear power plants in general.
“Thorium doesn’t eliminate the problems,” he contends. “If the nuclear industry’s problem was affording uranium, then switching to thorium might solve their problem. But that’s not their problem. The fuel cost in today’s reactors is a tiny fraction of the total cost. That’s not what is giving the Ontario government sticker shock about the next two reactors at Darlington. They’re solving a non-problem by substituting a cheaper fuel for uranium. Unless they solve the big problems, they’ve got a curiosity there instead of a practical solution to anybody’s problems.”
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B.P spent 20 million in 1999 to increase efficiencies. At the end of three years, they had saved 650 million. 630 million on a 20 million investment isn’t bad.
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