nuclear-news

The second category of the nuclear cheerleaders includes the numerous PR gurus who lobby and schmooze on the industries behalf. Few of this last category have any relevant qualifications (not that this stops them claiming to be “experts”) and often work for largePR agencies, who count the Tobacco industry and the fossil fuel lobby among they’re other clients. This last point is relevant for as I shall demonstrate these PR types often use the same tactics the tobacco and global warming denial lobby utilise to promote nuclear energy while distorting the facts.

Finally you have by far and away the majority of the nuclear cheerleaders – the sheep. These are people who generally don’t really know very much about nuclear energy, other than what they’ve lapped up from industry produced propaganda. They tend to be either unaware of many of the negative aspects of nuclear energy or assume that all such stories are the product of a bias media….yet they happily lap up stories from the very same media whenever they say something positive about nuclear energy (usually the result of lobbying by the PR types mentioned above). This last category of nuclear cheerleader are probably the most dangerous, as they are quite happy to pass himself off as “experts” to anyone who’ll listen and fill other people’s heads with pure industry generated drivel and half truths.

These “sheep” are essentially worshippers of a “scientific cargo cult” , something that has the illusion of science but is actually more a creation of science fiction. There are several other examples of such “scientific cargo cults” such as those trying to develop SSTO space vehicles that violate the basic principles of the rocket equation, or nano-technology “assemblers” (that ignore the very basics of thermodynamics and atomic theory) or Intelligent design (that ignores science altogether!). All of these examples as well as some aspects of the nuclear dream all share one think in common – they are founded on myth’s that are at odds with reality.

Don’t get me wrong, we can do a great deal more than we are currently doing in space (for a lot less money too!), and nano-technology has many potentially exciting applications (notably in the field of renewable energy), and there is some potential scope to use nuclear power in the future (but only so long as we’re prepared to pay the price both in financial and environmental terms), but the idealistic visions promoted by some in these fields are just non-starters, usually for fairly simple technical reasons. Wasting time and money pursuing such impossible goals will only make achieved more reasoned and plausible objectives less likely.

To prevent anyone reading this from getting sucked into this nuclear energy cargo cult, as recently happened to the (former) environmentalists George Monbiot, I will explain a couple of the common myths that these cheerleaders spout out and demonstrate how they are wrong, illogical and totally divorced from reality……. http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/the-top-ten-common-myths-of-the-nuclear-cheerleaders/