Nuclear Push Poll

I was just on the receiving end of the most blatant and egregious push poll you can imagine. For those of you not familiar with the term, a push poll is essentially an advertisement disguised as an opinion poll. For example, in a congressional race an unscrupulous candidate might commission an attack poll with questions such as “If you knew that congressman John Spineless voted for a bill to lower penalties for child molesters, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?”

The phone rang just after the dinner hour and a woman identified herself as working for the Charlton Research Group.

She asked a few questions about my demographics, plus some questions about how much I knew about the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and its corporate owner, Entergy. There were a few questions about the recent collapse of part of the Vermont Yankee cooling towers. Then the woman started in with a seemingly endless stream of propaganda.

"Entergy has won the Blah-blah-blah Corporate Responsibility Award for an unprecedented sixth year in a row, blah blah blah. Does this make you feel more or less positive about the relicensing of Vermont Yankee? Somewhat or strongly?" "Vermont Yankee provides 218 high paying jobs amounting to (some millions) in payroll per year in Vermont. Does this make you feel more or less positive about relicensing Vermont Yankee?" And so on, and so on, with seemingly endless “Isn’t Entergy wonderful?” questions about baseload power, redundant safety systems, their security force, carbon savings, needing cheap power to keep jobs and our kids in Vermont and on and on. I was waiting for something like “Since Entergy’s CEO is God’s anointed representative on earth…..”

At one point I called the game and pointed out what was going on. The woman on the other end, obviously just trying to make a minimal buck making phone calls, asked me to be patient and told me that my opinion was important. The stream of propaganda was fascinating as well as frustrating, so I persevered.

She had asked me my opinion of relicensing at the beginning, and asked me again at the end, testing the effect of the propaganda assault. Nope. Strongly oppose.

After wishing her a good evening I did a web search on the Charlton Group. They have an impressive client list, including oil companies, chemical companies, agribusiness, tobacco interests, and timber companies. They also have done work for organizations with names such as “Alliance for Reasonable Regulations,” and “Association of California Tort Reform.” In other words, corporate astroturf efforts to gut environmental laws and trample ordinary people. There were a few friendly names in there such as the American Lung Association, but it was mostly corporate PR.

Part of the Charlton Research portfolio is “Issue Management” and “Crisis Management.” I suppose that with a cooling tower collapse in the news and relicensing in play Entergy decided that some crisis management was needed. In practice the “poll” was a clumsy effort. I got fed up with the nonsense less than half way through. I imagine that most Vermonters would lose patience as well.

The State and the power companies need to recognize that Vermont Yankee is a stopgap power source at best. It is a present liability in terms of operational safety and a future liability in terms of radioactive waste storage. Eventually people will realize that our grandchildren’s’ grandchildren will still be tending to those spent fuel rods in Vernon. An aging, overstressed nuclear reactor is not an asset, no matter how many push polls Entergy buys.