Welcome to the second annual Nuclear Reaction Awards. As the year comes to its close we’d like to recognise those who have help make the nuclear industry the over-subsidised and under-scrutinised joke it is today.
Today’s Award: The Best Nuclear Spin of 2009
As the nuclear industry and its supporters have struggled to coax an increasingly reluctant nuclear ‘renaissance’ off the ground, spin has been everywhere this year. There were many highlights for us.
- Beautiful propaganda paintings of nuclear power in lush, green, unpolluted settings.
- French nuclear corporation AREVA promoting its business in America with full page magazine adverts but not once using the word ‘nuclear’ .
- The continuing desperate push to rebrand nuclear energy (with its uranium mine contamination and high-level waste) as ‘clean’.
In the end we can choose only one. For us the finest piece of spin this year was the nuclear industry’s continuing attempt to convince us that the nuclear ‘renaissance’ is actually happening. Just look.
The construction of the so-called state of the art EPR reactors at Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France continue to descend further and further into over-budget and behind-schedule farce. The Olkiluoto EPR single-handedly destroyed AREVA’s profits this year. AREVA is now conducting a very public fight with its Finnish customer TVO. The UK nuclear industry is already being subsidised by the public before new reactor designs are off the drawing table. Those new reactor designs safety features have been heavily criticised by nuclear safety regulators in the UK, Finland, France and the US.
Then there are worries about uranium shortages in India and China New nuclear reactor projects cancelled or in trouble in Canada, Turkey, Bulgaria, Texas, Alabama and elsewhere. Citigroup calling new nuclear reactors ‘corporate killers’.
So where is the nuclear ‘renaissance’? It’s everywhere and yet it’s nowhere. It’s all talk. We salute the nuclear industry’s spin doctors for fashioning such an exquisitely intangible creation.