There’s a new show in town, and its name is 16×9 – The Bigger Picture. Global hails it as a “hard hitting weekly investigative news magazine format that promises to deliver the bigger picture — a dynamic new current affairs show with flare.” You can probably tell that it’s a sensationalist show making a big deal out of little things.
The latest episode’s segment on nuclear reactors on university campuses reinforces my opinion that this show is only here to instill fear in people.
The show’s producers call the reactor on the McMaster campus “an ominous” building and let you believe that nothing good comes out of there. The first “issue” they mention is the lack of personnel manning the parking booths at the entrances to campus. The producers (I’m guessing) expect a person to be checking ID at the entrance to the campus and ask them about their business at the reactor. Needless to say this is (at best) a dumb thing to expect. The campus is a public place with over 25,000 people living, learning and working here. If checking 25,000 pieces of ID on a daily basis sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Even when the parking booths were manned, you could just drive by them and not stop. This is a non-issue. University campuses are public places, a fact they conveniently do not mention, and open to the public. 16×9 seems to forget that they were allowed to film on campus without requiring authorization precisely because of this fact.
Next (still within the first 5 minutes of the segment) they go on to compare the 5 MW reactor here with a 500 MW reactor at the Pickering Power plant, pointing out the difference in security level. Let me get this straight: you expect the same security level at a 5 MW reactor as at a reactor ONE HUNDRED TIMES ITS SIZE? Does that really make sense to you, Garofalo?
Of course no such segment could be complete without a scientist giving us facts (whether or not they pertain to the subject matter is another story). The scientist 16×9 interviewed mentions that in the correct geometric arrangement, uranium can be used in an atomic bomb. Of course, by telling us this, the 16×9 producers imply the material from the McMaster reactor is dangerous and capable of being used in a bomb. Really? I can make a bomb out of bleach and ammonia, are you going to go to Canadian Tire for your next expose?
At this point (about 7 minutes in) the video crashed Firefox and it was just as well. I had had enough of this fear mongering they call “ground-breaking investigations.”
