Anyone who laments the death of long form journalism these days should take a look at “Wasteland” by Matt Stroud. The long form piece on the largely forgotten and abandoned nuclear waste site in Nevada for The Verge adds up to almost 10,000 words (and that’s not counting all the videos and photos that accompany the article). The story opens with Stroud’s visit to an eerily abandoned town in Nevada at the base of Yucca Mountain. Stroud is there to investigate what became of the nation’s first planned nuclear waste depository. The story then traces over 60 years of history starting from when he first commercial nuclear reactor opened in the United States and the issue of highly toxic nuclear waste first became part of the public discussion. The article reveals a disconcerting truth – tens and thousands of tons of radioactive waste is held in limbo while politicians and scientists debate about what to do with it.
Despite its length the comments on his article are quite laudatory. One commenter wrote: “…You would never find such a beautiful, incredibly fascinating article on any other site. This is the stuff I have been looking for. I would totally subscribe to a Verge Magazine if it contained this kind of detailed content.”
We asked him about the reporting process, organizing, and his favorite environmental journalism.
Note: I’ve underlined what I found to be the most interesting parts of this interview if you’re in a hurry but I strongly recommend that you read it all the way through when you get the chance.
[Estimated reading time: 9 minutes]
image used with permission from lawatha
What sparked the piece?
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of Yucca Mountain since I was a kid. The Verge was really just getting started at the beginning of 2012, and I knew its editors were looking to expand their reporting further into both science and “longform.” So I took the release of the Blue Ribbon Commission report in January 2012 as a way into a story I’d been wanting to tell for a long time. The BRC report had been cursorily covered in various news outlets, but I knew that it was worth a deeper exploration. It was, more or less, a history of the country’s debate over nuclear power with questions about how to move forward. Those questions were complicated by an addendum that the move forward could not, for dodgy political reasons, include Yucca as a waste repository. So I pitched it as all these things — a history of a science, a chance to look forward, a glance at the questionable politics surrounding nuclear power. And the editors went for it.
How many reporting trips did you take?
I took two: One to Las Vegas to tour the test site and talk with a bunch of people advocating on both sides of the Yucca Mountain debate. The second one was to Carlsbad with a videographer, the great Jordan Oplinger, to tour the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant underground repository there.
What details/info did you make sure to get on those reporting trips?
My goal was to get way too much information on everything related to nuclear waste that I could possibly ever want to know. And, in Vegas — beyond what I wanted to get on the test site tour — I wanted to get an idea of how far the city was from the proposed repository — and what sat in between the two. It’s easy to look at Google Maps and say, “oh, a lot of sand and rocks and desert separate the two.” But you really can’t get an appreciation for what that means until you make that 100 mile drive from the Strip out into the desert. You go out past prisons and trailer parks and random military airports. And then — after driving seemingly forever in the hot sun — you find this weird brothel out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but rocks and barren mountains in every direction. And outside the brothel — which had a minimart and saloon and restaurant attached to it — there was this billboard with an alien on it advertising that it was the last stop before Yucca Mountain, as if Yucca Mountain was a tourist destination rather than this idea of a eternal repository of deadly waste. That alone was worth the trip to Vegas.
(And I’m saddened to learn now that this brothel is closed. RIP Nevada Joe’s.)
How long did the piece take you to research? How long did it take you to write?
Well, I pitched it in January 2012, when the BRC report was released. It was accepted sometime in February. So, in all, it took about six months to put together. But I was a freelancer at the time, working on other projects, so it’s not like this was my only focus. I really didn’t sit down and start writing it until late April. I remember I turned in a draft around mid May. Editors Jesse Hicks and Joseph L. Flatley were going back and forth with me while my first daughter was being born, on May 18, 2012. (Literally, I was sitting in the lawn of Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, talking over edits on the phone.) We finished the edits a week or so later, as I recall. The rest was working with Jordan to get the video right, which actually required a couple more interviews that we set up over Skype.
Where did you go for research material?
Libraries and the web. Visited a few court houses. Went to Vegas and Carlsbad.
How did you organize your research and how did you decide what to keep and what not to?
I eventually — way after I started reading books on the topic and, if I remember correctly, after I traveled to Vegas — decided on a pretty basic structure for the story. From there, I only kept material that served the structure.
What’s an example of something that got left out?
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has its own very complicated political history — most of which is outlined in Nuclear Reactions, a very good book by former Congressional Quarterly journalist Chuck McCutcheon. I wanted to include a lot of that stuff, but it didn’t really fit the story so it got axed.
What surprised you in the course of reporting/writing this piece?
You really can’t legally get anywhere near the actual hole in the ground that was supposed to be the Yucca Mountain waste repository, even though it’s just an empty cavern holding no waste whatsoever. And I was too chickenshit to scale the fence that blocks the road leading to it — mostly because a bunch of people had told me there would be helicopters swarming me if I did. But I later learned that the closest government employee technically guarding that fence is like 25 miles away and probably wouldn’t even have noticed if I had scaled the fence. Anyway, since I didn’t scale it, I ended up spending quite a bit of time out in the neighboring, sparse residential areas.
Peripherally, I suppose what surprised me was the existence of those communities out there. There were people living very comfortable-seeming lives out in this distant, hot, moon-like terrain. And though they were weirdly detached from all the chintzy gaudiness of Las Vegas, there they were, in their own spaced-out desert community, together. I pointed it out in the story, but these were the people — along with those in the city closest to Yucca, Pahrump — who lobbied hardest to get Yucca completed. This seemed meaningful to me — and surprising: the people who would be most affected by the catastrophic results of a Yucca failure were the people lobbying hardest to have it built.
What was the most difficult thing about reporting/writing this piece?
I felt I had a lot of responsibility to the story itself and all the people who have devoted their entire professional (and in some cases personal) lives to it. And it’s such a complicated issue — both in terms of the science behind nuclear power and the storage of nuclear waste, and the politics surrounding both of those things — that trying to give it justice as an outsider… well, it was difficult. I felt that if the story was wrong, or if it cast anyone incorrectly or unfairly, that I would have paid a tremendous disservice to all the things and people I had gone out there to explore. I mean, even looking at the story now, with some of the info boxes removed and the code a little messed up, makes me very uncomfortable.
If you were to do the story differently the second time around – how would you do it differently?
I’d have honed the thing, probably focused a lot more on the Blue Ribbon Commission itself. And I would’ve gotten Harry Reid to talk with me.
What do you think is missing in environmental journalism today?
I think a lot of really good journalism is done on energy topics by journalists with newspapers and outlets such as the Associated Press and various NPR affiliates. But there aren’t a ton of people like Elizabeth Kolbert — or outlets like the New Yorker — that take in all of that journalism and make broader sense out of it. I don’t know how Media as a whole goes about finding and supporting more Elizabeth Kolberts, but we should.
What’s something you’re experimenting with in your pieces currently?
If I experiment with anything, it’s subjects that I’m not altogether comfortable with. This cover piece in this month’s Harper’s is something I could never do — I don’t have the level of knowledge about math and numbers that this journalist has — but I’m trying to delve into topics that require me to learn things I don’t already feel comfortable with. Wasteland was an example of that type of experimentation, actually; I mostly write about crime and courts.
Best piece of environmental journalism you’ve read and why.
Since I mentioned Elizabeth Kolbert: this piece on Amory Lovins was not some feat of investigative journalism or even a particular “get” by Kolbert. But I remember reading it on the Caltrain, commuting from San Jose to San Francisco, and being floored by how simple Lovins made an environmentally conscious lifestyle seem. I read it again every once in a while, and I reference this paragraph occasionally in conversation to this day:
A lot of Lovins’s ideas sound radical and futuristic — ultra-light cars made of carbon fibres, vehicles that generate electricity when they’re not on the road, an economy powered by hydrogen. At the same time, he is a passionate advocate of what he calls ‘good, old-fashioned Victorian engineering,’ and believes that a great many problems can be solved using high-school physics. (Lovins can spend hours describing the energy savings that follow from steps as simple as increasing the diameter of pipes.) This combination of high- and low-tech enthusiasms makes his outlook difficult to categorize. Once, when I casually used the phrase ‘thinking outside the box,’ Lovins interrupted me. ‘There is no box,’ he said.
That last line — “there is no box” — is empowering in a way that no bullshit “Go Green!” campaign could ever be. And Kolbert elicits that sense of empowerment so subtly and meaningfully throughout the profile, I can’t remember being more affected by any other piece of environmental journalism.
The best recent piece of environmental journalism I can remember reading is this one — Ring of Fire by Katie Drummond at The Verge. I’m a bit biased on this — I was with The Verge when this story came out, it’s another piece that Joe Flatley edited, and Katie will be my boss when I transition into a new role at Bloomberg next month. But that story, Ring of Fire, takes a specific environmental problem, puts it into a tangible perspective with visible victims, and shows the reader how the problem arose and how it might be fixed. Great piece of writing and investigation. And the video is incredible, too.
Stroud is now a writer for the Bloomberg – read his latest here.
Note: Matt was the very first writer I contacted for this blog and I will forever be indebted to him for his patience as we went back and forth and I tried to hone the exact questions I wanted to ask. Thanks Matt!
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