Nuclear reactors are hugely complex machines. What they do and how can be difficult to explain in terms easily understood by the average person. The nuclear industry can use this to its advantage.

Take the incident (rated level 2 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) at the UK’s Dungeness B reactor that occurred on June 29 this year. Here’s the statement from the reactor’s owner, British Energy, describing what happened…

Whilst lowering a fuel plug unit in order to latch it to a new fuel stringer, it became apparent that the coupling had not latched correctly and that foreign material was trapped between the spring collet assembly and the neutron scatter plug. The debris appears to be a rubber sheet, the source of which is likely to be one of the three covers used to cover the maintenance tubes during earlier cell maintenance activities. The failure to correctly latch was identified during a procedural check as the assembly was being raised. Fuel handling activities were suspended, but the assembly remains suspended by approximately 3 metres.

"As part of the recovery process, polyurethane foam was injected below the suspended stringer to minimise the potential drop height in the event of it de-latching. The foam did not come in contact with the stringer. The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

Are you any the wiser as to what went on at Dungeness B? Stringers, collets, scatter plugs? This story has hardly had any exposure in the UK media and it’s not difficult to see why – a journalist would have to first be able to understand it and then explain it in a way so that his reader could also. The use of language works in the favour of Dungeness B’s operators – it’s a form of cover-up that takes advantage of people’s understandable ignorance of the complexities of nuclear power.

Take this passage:

The subsequent analysis of the foam indicated that it was a material that could act as a moderator, and thus challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates.

This means that the foam, had it been in the reactor during operation, would have become part of the nuclear reaction. You really don’t want foreign material inside a reactor acting as a moderator – moderation is the vital process whereby the nuclear reaction is controlled – it can make a dangerous nuclear accident more likely. So, ‘challenge the applicable criticality safety certificates’ means ‘break vital safety rules and put people in danger’.

The nuclear industry: they think they’ve made the atom their servant and now they’re trying to do the same with language.