No Word for Meltdown: The Return of Nukespeak

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/rory-oconnor/34975/no-word-for-meltdown-the-return-of-nukespeak

George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable - such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. In Orwell's "1984," each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary had fewer words than the previous one, making it harder and harder even to think a thought that might challenge Big Brother.

So Orwell would not have been surprised to learn, as the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert helpfully pointed out this week, that there is literally no word for "meltdown" in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's glossary of atomic-related words and phrases.

A Google search for the past month showed more than 1.93 billion hits for "meltdown. Yet the regulators at the NRC remain wary of listing the word that everyone else in the world uses to summarize the full horror of what will ensue if uranium fuel at the core of a commercial nuclear power plant is left uncooled long enough for it to melt. It's no surprise, since the nuclear industry's proponents speak a different language than the rest of us, a special language where euphemism and obfuscation reign, as we first pointed out thirty years ago in our book Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Myths, and Mindset. Nukespeak is the language of the nuclear mindset — the worldview or system of beliefs of nuclear developers and enthusiasts, to whom there are never any accidents — only "events" or "incidents", "abnormal evolutions and normal aberrations", or "plant transients."

Some things never change: the Orwellian impulse to hide the truth about nuclear dangers remains the same as when we first wrote on the subject. And the nuclear priesthood (to borrow a phrase from the father of our "Nuclear Navy", Admiral Hyman Rickover) still uses many words and concepts that were already shopworn decades ago.

More at the link --

For example, they say that US reactors can't meltdown like Chernobyl, but it's like saying that an airplane can't crash like a helicopter because airplanes have wings and helicopters have rotors. The technology is different, but both of them can crash, and US reactors are fully capable of disasters worse than Chernobyl.