On Wednesday evening last week, Vincent De Rivaz, Chief Executive of EDF Energy, was interviewed on the UK’s Sky News channel. It was the same day as the UK government announcing its latest nuclear power strategy.

The interview is worth watching because of the evasions and contradictions in what Mr De Rivaz said that are common in nuclear power propaganda. Unfortunately they weren’t challenged by the interviewer so, in a short series, we're going to challenge them instead ( - part one is here, part two is here, part three is here).

In the interview, Mr De Rivaz said ‘nuclear is a CO2-free energy’. Yet more spin. Mr De Rivaz seems to be conveniently forgetting the C02 emissions from uranium mining, enrichment and nuclear fuel production along with the emissions from manufacturing the concrete and steel needed to build nuclear reactors.

When asked about support from the major UK parties for nuclear power and ‘are you confident you’ve got it in the current government and from any possible future government’, Mr De Rivaz said emphatically: ‘Yes, I am… I am confident that the main opposition party is exactly on the same policy.’ Strange then that the energy policy document from the opposition Conservative Party makes no reference to future plans for nuclear power at all. Not a single one.

Mr De Rivaz also said that EDF’s nuclear power plants will take ‘less than 60 months’ to build which is a pretty wild boast in the current climate. Can we really expect EDF to buck a very large trend and actually get their reactors built on time and on budget? Stranger things have happened but the precedents are poor to say the least.