All Blog Posts from Public Eye

On April 30, "60 Minutes" ran a story on the radioactive liquid waste sitting in underground tanks in Hanford, Washington, and the government's efforts to process the waste. The piece, "Lethal and Leaking," was critical of efforts by the Energy Department to deal with the problem. Correspondent Lesley Stahl also criticized Bechtel, the contractor charged with building the plant to treat the waste. According to the producer of the piece, Rich Bonin, the Energy Department and Bechtel are "joined at the hip."

On its Web site, Bechtel has posted a response to the "60 Minutes" piece (PDF). "60 Minutes misrepresented well-known facts, confused basic issues, and drew unwarranted conclusions that could mislead the public and decision makers if left unchallenged. It is remarkable that with all the investigative resources at their disposal, 60 Minutes failed to shed light on the real issues that have made the [Waste Treatment Plant] such a challenging project," according to the four-page document.

Michael R. Fox, writing an editorial in the Hawaii Reporter, also criticized the piece. (The Hawaii Reporter prints all editorials submitted.) "Not mentioned by [Lesley] Stahl are the 30 years of exaggerations about Hanford which exist to this day," he writes. "Likewise, local and state media have failed to address the exaggerations, as have state and national political leaders, and of course the environmental movement so quick and breezy with wild assertions. It was too much to hope that the prestigious Stahl and her staff would begin undoing the nonsense even after all these years. Regrettably, she didn’t since scare stories still sell."

I asked Bonin to respond to the criticism. Because it's a complex issue – one of the section headers of the Bechtel response is "The submerged bed scrubber vessel" – I asked him to first to focus on how confident he was in the story his team put out, and on the challenges of putting the story together. He then addressed one specific issue in the Bechtel response.

"Any story on '60 Minutes' is hard to do and complicated and in the beginning there's always a mountain of information I have to get my arms around," he said. "I get to spend weeks, sometimes months, researching a story. We don't begin taping or scripting until we've got it figured out." This story was particularly challenging, he said, because it was so technical. "You can't present a broadcast that will make sense to engineers and not the rest of the public," he said. If he wasn't completely confident in the story, he added, "we wouldn't have run it."

Read full post…