nuclear-news

Rebranding nuclear waste fools nobody

Greenpeace 4 August 09

Nuclear waste has undergone an image makeover recently. Indeed, the industry is working hard to ensure that the most dangerous kind of nuclear waste isn’t even called nuclear waste any more. It’s now called ‘spent fuel’.

Sounds much friendlier, doesn’t it? Doesn’t make all the nasty problems associated with the nuclear waste that comes out of reactors disappear but giving something horrible a nice name helps to stop people thinking about those nasty problems. It why we call civilians killed in wars ‘collateral damage’ and why genocide gets called ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The issue of we do with this nuclear waste – sorry, spent fuel – has also had a splash of greenwash. There’s been a big push to rebrand nuclear waste reprocessing as recycling. We don’t reprocess nuclear waste any more – we ‘recycle spent fuel’. Isn’t that nice? Sounds green and environmentally friendly, doesn’t it? Nothing in the actual process has changed and we’re still left with the dangerous by-products but it sounds so much better.

So, now nuclear power has successfully rebadged* itself as not-nasty and environmentally friendly, surely it’s been warmly accepted as a renewable energy source?

The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) will not back programmes to develop nuclear energy due to the waste it produces and the risks it presents […] ‘Irena will not support nuclear energy programmes because it’s a long complicated process, it produces waste and is relatively risky,’ Helene Pelosse, director general of Irena, told Reuters in a telephone interview from the French Alps.

That’s a big fat ‘no’.

Rebranding nuclear waste fools nobody

August 5, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, spinbuster | antinuclear, nuclear, radioactive, reprocessing, uranium, wastes