Decline and fall: the ailing nuclear power industry.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Decline and Fail: The Ailing Nuclear Power Industry.

Decline and Fail: The Ailing Nuclear Power Industry. Peter Stoler. Dodd, Mead, $16.95. Occasionally, I entertain a suspicion that one little surprise the 21st century has in store is that nuclear power will turn out to be important after all. Despite its title, Decline and Fail argues that such a development is not only likely but desirable. A quick check of the dust jacket finds the book endorsed by Carl Walske, president of the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear industry's lobbying organization (Walske, by the way, is quoted several times inside the book, in approving contexts, which gives you some idea of how the blurb business works.)

The author, Peter Stoler, is with Time magazine. Time and Newsweek use a system under which "reporters' and "writers' are separate breeds. Reporters do interviews in the field and file something like diplomatic cables to writers in New York, who produce words. This curious arrangement engenders the classic newsweekly story, in which the author seems to have an astonishing depth of information at his disposal yet does not understand what he is talking about.

Apparently Decline and Fail was written in the same fashion. As far as can be determined from the text, Stoler did little or no reporting. Nearly everything in the book is attributed to articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, magazines, or books. In the few cases where it appears the author did more than simply whiz through the clip files, the results are not reassuring:

""I resent it when someone in a corporate boardroom decides what risks I should accept,' says Pennsylvania, woman who cannot look out her window without seeing the cooling towers of Three Mile Island.' Time is famed for punctuating stories with perfect quotes from conveniently anonymous sources even when there is no reason for the speaker's name to be withheld. Elsewhere: ""Nuclear power has been walking around like Dracula for the last few years,' said a young man who answered the phone at the San Francisco headquarters of the Sierra Club. "These cancellations are the stake through its heart.'' Let's hope the usual factual standard at Time is a little higher than "a young man who answered the telephone.'

Disciples of the Time ethos may defend file-based journalism, but the substance of several chapters of Decline and Fail--nearly half the book--appears to have been all but lifted from two earlier and far better...