We’re grateful once again to Areva’s North America blog for pointing us towards yet another laughably woeful piece of pro-nuclear propaganda. This time it’s by Thomas Friedman writing in the New York Times. (Some of you might remember the Pulitzer Prize-winning Friedman’s erratic and downright wrong predictions about the war in Iraq a few years ago which gained him much attention and made him the butt of several jokes.)

Further evidence that Friedman maybe isn’t the most reliable pundit comes in the very first paragraph of his nuclear hagiography…

Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” Is it time to restore the French in “French fries” at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them “Freedom Fries?”

In fact, the Congressional dining room stopped calling French Fries ‘Freedom Fries’ in 2006 (I wrote a jokey article about it for the Guardian at the time). Friedman clearly didn’t have the time to do a little Googling.

So what about the rest of what he has to say?

France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and it has managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics. And us? We get about 20 percent and have not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors. We’re too afraid to store nuclear waste deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — totally safe — at a time when French mayors clamor to have reactors in their towns to create jobs. In short, the French stayed the course on clean nuclear power, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and we ran for cover.

France has ‘managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panics’ has it? We suppose it’s possible to say that if you regard shipping thousands of tons of nuclear waste from France to Russia - where it is stored in dangerous conditions - as dealing with ‘issues’ without any ‘problems’. Official French government policy does not have a proper solution to even mid-level nuclear waste let alone the high-level stuff.

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And take a look at page 15 of Greenpeace’s report ‘France’s Nuclear Failures’…

In total, close to 890,000 m3 of radioactive waste had been produced by the end of 2004. Almost 40% of this amount is linked to reprocessing. This total does not account for some 12,000 m3 of waste from the reprocessing plant in Marcoule that was dumped into the sea in 1967 and 1969. Neither does the inventory include any of the “reusable materials” currently in stock – thousands of tonnes of spent nuclear fuels stored at La Hague, separated plutonium and uranium, scrap MOX – nor the two cores of the closed fast-breeder reactor in Creys-Malville, still stored on the reactor site.

Ask the people living in the Champagne region about Tritium leaking into the groundwater. Ask the the French authorities why they are conducting tests of groundwater at the country’s 58 reactors. We could go on and on and on.

Friedman frames his argument with talk of ‘real men’ and ‘tough guys’ and ‘grit’ as if the fight against climate change was a cowboy movie. It’s an odd kind of debating tactic to be sure, this juvenile machismo. Was anyone ever won over in an argument by being called a ‘wimp’?

(Harvey Wasserman has much more at Counterpunch)