This morning I was reading this serious article about how in the 1970s plans were afoot to have offshore nuclear power stations as having them in the sea would give ready access to lots of water to act as coolant “without raising the ire of potential protesters on land”.

Then I got to a bit that read

The possibile ecological impact of running half our river water through nuclear power pants has led many to conclude that such plants would be better built in the coastal zone.

and I giggled. In case you missed it, here it is again.

through nuclear power pants

indeed. Seriously, does nobody proof read this stuff?

And I then got distracted. And could no longer read the rest of the article. It’s still in my instapaper queue so I’ll see if I can get through it some other time.

But it really made me wish I could draw and illustrate. And then I gave myself a stern talking to and remembered that thanks to the Ed Emberley Make a World book I got last year I can at least put pen to paper and make something that is more recognisable than I ever used to be able to.

So, I grabbed some pens, paper, my camera and a bit of stubborness and drew these.

Nuclear power pants

(I opted for the UK meaning of pants rather than the US meaning. Who ever heard of nuclear power trousers?)

The serious point of this is that because of a lack of proof-reading I abandoned the article (in hysterics, but abandoned is abandoned right?). Simple spell-checking didn’t pick this up. I know it’s only a blog post. But it’s a blog post for the Smithsonian magazine. And I expect more from something with magazine in it’s title text. Proof-reading still matters.

Update: I’ve since spotted that the article has also mis-spelt a name - Godron instead of Gordon, and has misspelled possibile in the quote I included too. So I take back the bit where I assumed they’d spell-checked it. Oh, and in case you wondered, I have attempted to leave a comment to the orginal article to inform them of these errors.