We haven’t mentioned it for a little while but we’re still working on our comedy show set in the nuclear industry. The only worry we have about it is that some of the storylines we have planned, despite being true stories, will be rejected as too fantastical, outlandish, or just downright puerile.

Take the 40 contract workers fired or temporarily suspended at Canada’s Bruce Power nuclear reactor for ‘violating the company's code of conduct regarding Internet use’. Were the contractors, who were supposed to be refurbishing the reactor, merely updating their Facebook statuses or was there – if you’ll forgive us – something more single-handed going on? The company isn’t telling. Chief executive officer Duncan Hawthorne said, ‘you can fill in the blanks yourself’. We will, Duncan, we will.

Meanwhile, the big-hitters of the nuclear industry are getting together to establish a ‘European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy’ providing ‘theoretical and practical-based nuclear management education’ in order to train future ‘leaders in European nuclear corporations and institutions’. The thing is, when you consider that some of these big hitters include AREVA (whose flagship reactor project is running three years late and 2.3 billion euros over budget) and Vattenfall (threatened with ‘special supervision’ in Sweden and on its last chance with the Krummel reactor in Germany), you have to be slightly concerned about what kind of leaders this academy is going to produce. What’s the first lesson? Financial Mismanagement 101? Advanced Incompetence?

Speaking of last chances, it seems Scotland’s Hunterston B nuclear reactor may also be on borrowed time after the latest leak at the plant. Nobody was too surprised, Hunterston being one of the worst reactors in the UK for safety violations with a decade-long record of leaks and fires. Apparently there is a culture of ‘failures of management and supervision’ and ‘failure to use “best practicable means” to abide by the rules’. These people sound the ideal recruits to teach at the ‘European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy’.

Finally, on the subject of the nuclear industry and education, in a gesture we’re sure was in no way an attempt at buying popularity or scoring a cheap propaganda victory, the UK’s Oldbury Power Station has bought a whole three laptops for one of the town’s primary schools. No doubt the pupils will be crowding around their new computers and Googling their generous benefactor…