A caller this week asked why we didn’t report that Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is now ranked “one of the worst plants in the nation.” She had read that on a Dow Jones news service.

The News Courier did report in a Thursday story that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had assigned a “yellow” performance indicator to the newly restarted Unit 1 reactor, which officially means it “requires more NRC oversight.” We had reported that fact two times before Thursday.

We also reported that only eight of the nation’s 104 reactors fall into the yellow category, which the NRC has determined is in a “degraded cornerstone.”

The NRC delivered its performance ratings on all three Browns Ferry reactors in a Wednesday meeting. Units 2 and 3 fell within the “green” performance indicators—the best grades possible—with the NRC determining they required no additional oversight.

Unit 1 received bad performance grades because of five unplanned shutdowns—or scrams—in its first 7,000 hours of operation and from a “cross-cutting” issue—not identifying and correcting problems in a timely manner. But there hasn’t been a scram since October, six months ago.

The story picked up by the wire services didn’t report that the NRC itself said it needs at least 36 months of operation to assign an accurate performance rating to a reactor.

We did not run this story “above the fold” or with a splashy, sensational headline because we did not feel it warranted one and we do not feel there is a need for panic.

The potential for widespread disaster in the event of a massive release of radiation into the atmosphere has been well known since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Before that, there was the near meltdown –“China syndrome”—of the Three Mile Island reactor in 1979, and before that, the 1975 Browns Ferry fire that burned through control cable trays.

Given this history, it is entirely appropriate that the press holds the nuclear industry’s collective feet to the fire to help ensure safety of the public. But there is also danger in what we could call the “Chicken Little syndrome.”

Clarions of public information lose credibility if they run in circles crying “The sky is falling; the sky is falling” too many times. And when the press loses its credibility, and it reports that the sky actually is falling, the reading public tends to ignore it.

And therein lies the seeds of disaster.

Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is not rated as “one of the worst in the nation.” If it were, we would have reported it as such.