OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 18 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Don’t double down on sitting down
The nuclear industry likes to chart its development
by its problems and by its successful responses to them. What about recent successes that were due to other people?
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev
Even though Chornobyl is again under Ukrainian control, the situation at the Zaporizhia plant remains fraught under Russian occupation and close to the front line. Thankfully however, the public and political appetite for news about it has waned over the course of a year. There are only so many times newspapers can run headlines about a station being disconnected from the grid when nothing tangible ever results. Usually after a safety incident the industry prides itself
Of course, we should not exaggerate the risk of a nuclear accident.
YEAR AGO NUCLEAR ENTERED a new era with a number of firsts: The first time a country with nuclear power attacked another. The first time disinformation was used by a government to spread fear about its own nuclear power plants. The
first time an operating nuclear power plant was attacked. The first time a nuclear facility was occupied by the army of another country.
14 | March 2023 |
www.neimagazine.com
on a prompt, unified response that divides time into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ with an updated operational mindset. That doesn’t seem to have happened this time. The most marked reaction has been for a majority of nuclear organisations to extricate themselves from involvement with Russia and its state nuclear company Rosatom, but that’s not universal by any means. In October last year Rosatom declared that because the
Zaporizhia plant lies in an area of Ukraine claimed by Russia it therefore owned the plant and started forcing employees to sign new employment contracts. This was shocking, and also intriguing because by that logic all six reactors as well all their used fuel storage must be operating without valid licences, which is a clear violation of the Convention on Nuclear Safety. Obviously Rosatom had no choice but to comply with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda, but the collective nuclear industry did have a choice how it responded. Yet strangely, Rosatom remains a member of some quite prominent organisations as if nothing ever happened. As for this column’s call (NEI, March 2022) for industry to show some solidarity with Energoatom and with its workers,
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