Nuclear Industry Propaganda

Whilst the cluster-fuk(ushima) continues, the nuclear industry demonstrates once more that the thing that melts down worst when it comes to nuclear accidents is the truth. The governing body of the nuclear industry – the IAEA is subject to regulatory capture i.e. the body designed to provide oversight is more or less run by the industry that it is designed to be objective about. This leads to problems when it comes to truth so the table below offers a translation between what they say and what they actually mean.

What they say	What they mean
Not Serious	Serious
Serious	Catastrophic
Catastrophic	End of the world
4000 deaths	1 million deaths
No long term consequences	Multiple long term consequences
Not proven to have long term effects	We don't know
Never been proven to have long term effects	We still don't know
Excess Moisture	Radioactive water leaking at the rate of 1 gallon per minute
Stay Indoors	Air not safe to breathe
Evacuation Zone	You won't be able to live here again
Voluntary Evacuation	We strongly recommend you run away
Leak	Plenty of toxic shit in the environment
Explosion	This isn't really supposed to happen
Fire	Neither is this
Partial Meltdown	Meltdown
Fuel Rods overheating	Meltdown
Containment Vessel Intact	Cracked and Leaking
Reactor Core Damaged	We may have to bury it
We're going to flood it with seawater	What the hell else are we going to do?
We're going to drop water on it from helicopters	We really don't have a clue what to do
Elevated levels of radiation	These guys will get cancer
Radiation Exposure	Acute Radiation Sickness
This will never happen again	Until the next time it does
Cheapest source of energy	Minimum $250 billion dollar clean-up bill if we have a bad accident
Most environmentally friendly source of energy	After every other source of energy
No long term effects on Belarus	Pretty much destroyed their entire country
Cancer rates amongst liquidators only went up a few percent	They're aren't many of them left alive
Chernobyl wasn't as bad as people imagine	Less than 20% of children born healthy in Ukraine and Belarus
Some places have high background radiation	Having iodine-131 accumulate in your thyroid must therefore be a good thing
International Nuclear Event Scale	We needed a scale to determine how expensive accidents were going to be
New reactors are safe	We don't know yet how these could go wrong
No statistical increase in cancer rates	We can probably cover this up
The radiation they’re being exposed to is only the equivalent of one X-Ray or CT scan	We don't need to mention that you have a choice about being exposed to an X-Ray or CT Scan and that they do cause cancer
The bombs at Hiroshima / Nagasaki didn't cause any harmful genetic effects	They did but we're going to lie about it anyway
Nuclear power doesn't kill as many people as coal / oil etc.	It kills a lot more people, it just does it more slowly and they can't definitely say it was us
You can trust us	Definitely don't do that for fuck's sake