Work for the nuclear industry? It seems your private life is no longer private…

Thousands of staff at UK nuclear power stations have been told to spy on the private lives of workmates and inform on colleagues who might be “vulnerable” to blackmail or bribery by terrorists intent on getting access to Britain’s nuclear secrets and stocks of weapon-grade plutonium. As part of the “security measures” nuclear power station staff are being asked to keep a watch on their colleagues’ love lives. They are also being told to keep tabs on colleagues they think may be using illegal drugs and even those travelling abroad.

How’s that for fostering team spirit and camaraderie? Would you like to go for a night out with a work colleague if you thought he was counting the number of drinks you were having with a view to reporting back to your boss? How about confiding in him or her that you were having money trouble or relationship problems? Your work mates must now be regarded with suspicion and distrust. You are all potentially guilty in the eyes of your employer.

And why stop with staff at nuclear reactors? There are people right across the industry with access to nuclear materials, information and influence. The Prime Minister of the UK Gordon Brown’s brother Andrew is head of media relations at EDF who are looking to build nuclear reactors in the UK. Just what discussions has he had with his brother on the subject of nuclear power? Isn’t anyone spying on him?

The other French nuclear giant AREVA are currently causing chaos across the nuclear industry with their botched reactor construction projects and incomplete reactor designs. Is anyone keeping tabs on AREVA CEO Anne Lauvergeon? AREVA are doing such an unbelievably poor job of the nuclear ‘renaissance’ you could almost imagine they’re double agents working for various environmental campaigns.

The logic of this takes us to all kinds of unpleasant places. Are the partners and children of these reactor workers being followed? Their phones bugged? If not, why not? We assume that the armed police forces who escort nuclear waste shipments are spying on each other? The people who arrange the shipments? The guys who load, unload and drive the transport trucks? If not, why not? Aren’t all these people open to kidnap and coercion, blackmail and duress?

We don’t want to see this kind of awful paranoia and divisiveness but it is, unfortunately, the price you pay when you embrace a dirty, dangerous and discredited energy source like nuclear power which has the potential for such terrible consequences as nuclear proliferation and sabotage. We doubt very much that they’re spying on each other at the wind and solar energy farms across the world.