The author, Shellenberger, is cherry-picking small quotes from a "letter" supposedly written by Robert Gale, who was a leading radiation poisoning treatment res

The author, Shellenberger, is cherry-picking small quotes from a "letter" supposedly written by Robert Gale, who was a leading radiation poisoning treatment responder during the crisis. This is typical Shellenberger. We are not given any context for the quotes, nor indeed do we even have a reference to the letter itself, to whom it was written, to what it was responding, nor any offsetting quotes that Gale may have made. Why, for instance, are we reading Shellenberger's excerpts of the letter rather than the letter itself? Shellenberger is a frequently repeating offender at cherry-picking and slanted presentation. Just because an isolated fact may be true, in isolation, does not make the re-contextualization and presentation as an ensemble of facts a "truth". It is entirely possible to assemble a bunch of true quotes together in a manner intended to mislead, or even outright lie. In this case, the ensemble is presented as a context in which Shellenberger, taken together with his past writing, is trying to convey that Chernobyl wasn't a serious accident, no one should use it as a reason for concern, and anyone talking about it is either uninformed or biased about nuclear power. None of that is true in the larger sense.