More & More Evidence Exposing 'Cozy' Relationships Between Pro Nuclear Lobby & Universities

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2004-04-16/206880/

From the article:

Strong words.

But they're not Landsberger's. Nor are the other 633 words that appeared in the Statesman that morning under Landsberger's byline. "It was something which was written for me," Landsberger told me later on the phone. "I agreed with it, I went over it, read it a couple of times, took all of 15, 20 minutes."

The op-ed was ginned up, assembly-line style, by a Washington, D.C., public relations firm that the nuclear power lobby retains to tilt public opinion in favor of the stalled Yucca Mountain project. (Unmentioned in Landsberger's plea for official rectitude are the myriad of unresolved scientific, technical, and legal questions about the viability of burying high-level waste in Nevada.) Besides reading and approving the column, all Landsberger did to take credit for authorship was insert his name and position at UT, and forward it via e-mail to the Statesman – even that address provided by the PR firm. (He also sent the column to several other Texas newspapers, none of which printed it.)

On Tuesday, the Statesman published a letter from Landsberger apologizing for his misrepresentation.

Landsberger says he doesn't know who actually wrote his column. He received it, via e-mail, from an employee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. (Landsberger emphasized that he believed the employee, whom he wouldn't name, sent him the column as a private citizen, rather than on behalf of the national lab.) Nor was this the first time; when it comes to deceiving newspaper readers on behalf of a stealth nuclear lobbying campaign, Landsberger is an acknowledged recidivist. "I've been doing this four or five years," he says. "They [op-ed columns] come from Oak Ridge maybe two or three times a year, particularly when there's a hot-button issue."

Landsberger's accomplice is Theodore M. Besmann, an Oak Ridge employee since 1985. Besmann is a prolific correspondent. Beginning at least as far back as 1978, he has had published under his own or others' names dozens of nuclear love songs in newspapers across the country, from The New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to The Washington Post to the Houston Chronicle to The Christian Science Monitor ("Nuclear: The Environment's Friend," appeared in the Monitor in 1994).

None but a blockhead, Samuel Johnson said, writes for free. Ted Besmann is no blockhead. He moonlights as a paid consultant to Potomac Communications Group, the Washington PR firm that works for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry's stentorian voice and lobby. The NEI's current primary concern – besides beating the congressional bushes for tax breaks and subsidies for nuclear power – is opening the atomic garbage dump at Yucca Mountain. Many of the nation's 103 reactors are running out of on-site storage space for their spent fuel rods, the NEI says, and may have to close if the Energy Department doesn't soon open the Yucca Mountain facility.

To spread its message, the electric utility-funded NEI relies on generous campaign contributions to key members of Congress, virtually unbridled access to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and academic "experts" who prostitute their reputations and those of their universities.

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'Prostitute' is the applicable word here.