I know that the worst case “media-generated scenario” for Fukushima goes on getting worse every day, nevertheless, we ought to be bold. Indeed, dammit, I’ll risk being cocky. Nuclear PR professionals – but also disinterested intelligent bystanders – need to communicate in a relaxed, mature and non-defensive tone:

• Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.
• Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.
• People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.
• Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.
• We can have it all – nukes, coal, oil, hydro, wind, wave, solar and every other alternative energy source you can envisage.

See talk tracks, proof points and soundbites below…

“Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.”

There’s no reason why nuclear spokespeople should say otherwise. They can even add that whilst science, engineering and risk analysis suggests it is extremely unlikely, the extremely unlikely will as likely as not turn into some kind of reality. But so what? Particle physics meets sod’s law, like everything else.

The point that nuclear PRs need to repeat is this: we will go on getting better at developing nuclear technology. We shall go on getting better at creating nuclear plant suited for the environment in which they are located. Fukushima is the same age of technology as Chernobyl and TMI and they provide us with lessons for the future.

“Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.”

For a few days or weeks some population (like today’s Tokyo) will face some uncertainty. The media will make it as bad as possible. Maybe that’s the point. Almost all the media have talked nonsense about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl since they happened. As the media’s eclipse of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami victims in preference for speculation over Fukushima reveals, it’s like a disease with these people.

“People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.”

Maybe things will go wrong and they’ll face an actual higher cancer risk from nulcear power as well as today’s “merely” feared one. But the most concerned type of citizen already works hard to create increased cancer risk: they diet and jog and meditate so as to live longer. After all, longevity is their biggest cancer risk (and almost everyone else’s too), and, in the nuclear age, we are living longer lives than ever, thanks to nuclear medicine and obsessive lifestyle anxiety.

“Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.”

Regardless of Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now (with luck) Fukushima, nuclear energy has an unsurpassed safety record among the major electricity-generating sources. For instance, there have been 0.006 fatalities per GWe year of nuclear electricity produced compared to 15 times as many fatalities per GWe year for natural gas; and 1000 times as many fatalities per GWe year for coal, oil and hydropower.

Here’s a few examples for hydropower. In China around 170,000 people died when Banqiao and Shimantan burst in 1974; almost 30,000 immediately and the rest because of latent effects. A decade earlier Europe also had its fair share of similar accidents. In 1959, 400 people died in France when the Fréjus reservoir ruptured; and in 1963, 2000 died in Italy because of crumbling ground at the Vajont reservoir.

We shouldn’t forget the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform killed 167 people in 1988. BPs recent problems must be fresh in all our minds, too.

If the scale of a potential accident rules out an industry’s right to exist, then what are we to make of Bhopal, India, in 1984? A Union Carbide chemical plant there killed three thousand people when 40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked and contaminated the surrounding environment. But we all know that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries benefits many more people than they harm.

I’m not trying to spread fear here about other energy and industrial sources. All energy is bottled force. The entire energy industry has mostly handled its controlled release responsibly. But the evidence suggests that nuclear technology is low risk. Windscale killed nobody. Three Mile Island killed nobody and left no measurable long-term carcinogenic risks in its wake.

Meanwhile, we should remind the world that the Chernobyl accident killed around 50 people in 1986. Most of its exclusion zone is now being dismantled and being re-settled and farmed again safely. Though as many as 9, 000 people (4, 000 of those among the 6 million most affected population) might die a slightly premature death from Chernobyl-related cancers. However not only is that worst-case outcome unlikely, we shall never know because that statistic cannot be measured among the many millions of people it encompasses.

The biggest risk from nuclear energy is people’s fear of it. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, unfounded fear and anxiety was the most damaging consequence of the accident investigators could discover (see here for a full interrogation of Chernobyl’s death toll). But that fear is something the media helps generate.

Hence, the media also must learn from its past mistakes. It, too, must face up to its responsibility to protect the public. A little less hype and scaremongering over Fukushima would make a most welcome start. The next step would be to have an honest debate about risk and energy policy. That’s something nuclear PR can help facilitate.

“We can have it all.”

However, we can have nearly everything: nuclear (with the odd calamity); oil and gas (with more frequent calamities; bought from dictators and religious fundamentalists); solar (might become seriously lovable and economic quite soon); wind (not always, and not where you’d like it); hydro (big hazards; plenty of enemies); conservation (if we can be bothered to live like cavemen). It’s all possible, and all has real risk or drawback, including (variously) fear, guilt, patience, or tedium. Which do we prefer? Which most solves the global warming problem?

Well, clearly nuclear energy has fewer greenhouses gases than coal, oil and gas. Green alternative energy sources provide far from proven technological solutions, at greater cost than nuclear energy. Moreover they have to yet to show that they are adequate to the task of replacing coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy. The least risky route of all would be if our governments hedged their bets and adopted a mixed bag of solutions (read all of the above).

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Clearly, the pictures of the reactor building’s side walls and ceiling exploding that we all saw live on TV were startling. But it was obviously not a nuclear explosion. As Malcolm Grimston, associate fellow at Chatham House in London, remarked:

“Thankfully, although the explosion was spectacular, it wasn’t devastating and it seems the force was not sufficient to breach the reactor’s metal shell.”

Of course, the authorities in Japan rightly evacuated around 170 000 people from a twenty kilometer radius from the plant. But that was a precautionary move, not one born out of panic. There was some mildly radioactive steam and or hydrogen that needed venting from the plant. It was wise to remove people from its vicinity while the gas dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

To put all this in perspective, the authorities have rated the incident so far at 4 on the 0-7 international scale of severity. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated 7, with the official death toll being just under 50, though as many as 4,000 could die eventually as a consequence of that accident. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident was rated 5. Notably in that case nobody was killed or seriously injured, and no long term health consequences are expected.

Sure, the recent earthquake and Tsunami have pushed the safety defences at Fukushima to the limit. We don’t know yet whether the two troubled reactor cores at Fukushima “merely” suffered fuel damage, a partial meltdown or the near full meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island. But we can say with some certainty that that lack of knowledge is not that important. It took years before we knew the full extent of the meltdown at Three Mile Island. That’s because it is not possible to poke one’s head, or even a camera, into the reactor core until it cools down and the radiation levels allow it.

There is something very credible and laudable about Japan’s safety-first nuclear culture at work in Fukushima. They have flooded their reactors with seawater – which effectively destroys them – to make 100% sure that they cool down harmlessly; the main threat being hydrogen and steam explosions caused by the reactor’s heat.

The picture emerging from Fukushima is “reassuring”. The onsite and offsite consequences – no deaths and just a few injuries and some dispersal of mildly radioactive gas – have been limited. That’s what a safety case and the regulatory authorities demand from a nuclear plant’s in-depth multi-layered defences.

It is my view, that the Japanese handling of this nuclear incident at Fukushima - whether they made mistakes or not – will validate the safety case for old nukes.

So there’s something very skewed, overblown even, about the media’s reporting on Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami disasters: we know there are tens of thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless or stranded, yet everybody is talking excessively about a troubled nuclear plant that has not and most likely will not kill anybody.

However the media were playing up to stereotypes over Japan’s nuclear troubles. There’s a rich history associated with nuclear scaremongering, not least because the public has an appetite for horror stories. At Three Mile Island in 1979 the meltdown occurred at the outset of the shutdown. The media and politicians then spent weeks terrorizing the world as they speculated about the terrible impact of a meltdown that had been so undramatic that nobody noticed it had happened already with little consequence.

As I have reported extensively on this online review, while Chernobyl was an horrific disaster, it was no where near as bad as the doom-mongers claimed – see here here and here.

So the western nuclear industry now has a major PR challenge on its hands. The challenge will be to convince the world that core meltdowns do happen and that the evidence shows that they don’t matter much (Chernobyl being a unique case). That calls for some straight and upfront risk management communication, one that can show that new nukes are even more reassuringly safe than old ones.

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Just leaving Kiev on the long road to Slavutych was an eye opener to a world I had only ever read about in spy novels. Every twenty or so miles there were police roadblocks to negotiate: documents, please, and can you answer some questions? My interpreter called it a giant job creation scheme. There were hardly any cars on the road. I soon understood that freedom to travel did not yet exist in Ukraine.

As night fell, few lights shone from roadside cottages we passed. Old ladies, carrying massive piles of sticks or buckets of water from the well, seemed surprised by the sight of our fast-moving car. They sometimes froze in the middle of the road forcing us to make sudden manoeuvres to avoid killing them. The few cars going the other way appeared to be heading directly at our Volga, which was an old communist party boss’s car well past its peak.

We arrived in Slavutych and went immediately to a restaurant. It was a public facility with high ceiling and loads of ostentatious marble, or marble-substitute, in reddish-brown and gaudy pink, and seats for two hundred people. I named it the Taj Mahal because the tacky-style reminded me of an over-the-top second-rate Indian restaurant I once visited in Birmingham, England.

The six of us were the only diners that night. I would eat there every night for many months to come virtually alone or with a few power station bosses or with very welcome parties of visiting foreign journalists. The menu took twenty minutes to read, but a waitress soon told us that they had nothing available from the menu that night. She brought what they had in the kitchen – it turned out to be caviar and bread.  Most nights we had a choice of only one or two dishes or starving.

When I got up next morning and toured Slavutych, I discovered a large, half-built town with deserted streets, next to no shops, except for roadside kiosks selling Polish biscuits and Ukrainian vodka. There was only one private bar in town; the police used to throw out the gangsters (none of whom worked at the plant) when I visited, then huddle in the kitchen until I left to ensure I was protected. One night a fight erupted at the next table, blood spilled and the police rushed out and made matters worse – but I was kept safe.

Just getting to the office was a nightmare. The creation of Belarus placed an international border between the power plant and Slavutych. So everyday we had to cross into Belarus and back again into Ukraine, and navigate two tightly controlled exclusion zones, there and back. Some days, I was seriously delayed at the Belarus border on the way to work and at the Ukrainian border on the way home. Sometimes all the border guards in both countries appeared to be asleep as we motored past.

At that time, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) was not able to sell electricity for money. It bartered it instead for goods from other enterprises that were equally devoid of cash. The power plant also paid its own workers with plastic tokens which had a notional dollar value that no bank would honour and which were not valid outside of the shops it owned and ran. The shops lacked food, anyway. People were growing their own vegetables, or doing odd jobs for farmers in return for meat.

It took all my powers of persuasion to get the Chernobyl management to open up the “Sarcophagus” to the prying eyes of western journalists. Why, asked the then station manager Parashin [now an even more senior figure], should we show the world our shame, our embarrassment when they can tour two working reactors onsite? I told him that the construction of the protective shelter over reactor 4 was a triumph – and I knew he thought so too. His fear was really that opening the doors would just produce negative coverage. It was also a big decision because it takes a long time to prepare people to safely penetrate the Sarcophagus. Tours inside disrupt the daily work that goes on there. To his credit he signed the order to allow entry.

On days off, I toured hospitals and schools neighbouring the exclusion zone, finding malnourished and sick people everywhere. The hospitals lacked medicine, the schools lacked new books and other essential material – nobody had been paid their wages for months.  There was no interest in politics; the atmosphere was fatalistic and quietly depressing.

In the villages I found evacuees decanted to places they didn’t really like (there is no place like home) among people who could barely support their own struggling communities. Chernobyl victims appeared to receive additional support denied to “real” locals.  That was resented, until villagers realised they too could claim victim status certificates from their doctors because they considered it unjust to say no.

At that time, life spans were getting shorter and health levels were declining all over the former Soviet Union. Evacuees, and people living on contaminated land, were convinced radiation was the root of all their troubles. Others only pretended that was the case to gain access to scarce health services and other benefits, including weekly invalidity cash and free holidays for their kids. I even met power station workers whose kids, born elsewhere, cynically took advantage of holidays to Ireland – and who could blame them?

It was sad. There was nothing I could do to help – except in working to get decent information out. I found Chernobyl to be an amazing place. Five thousand people turned up every day to run two working reactors and to keep the rest of the site maintained and safe. The worst of the accident was not visible. The staff had smart, well pressed, uniforms. The corridors and offices were full of pot plants. There was a busy and professional buzz about the place.

I soon discovered that communism and centralism were not dead; certainly not at Chernobyl where a gigantic bust of Lenin overlooked the main entrance. The station manager ran the plant and the town of Slavutych with its 30,000 or so residents, including shops, hospitals and schools. All major decisions crossed his desk and awaited his signature. Sometimes it seemed to take forever to get an answer.

I was one of the first westerners to enjoy life in the exclusion zone.  I saw how its wildlife flourished in a verdant setting without parallel elsewhere in Europe. In the zone, wild animals roamed unmolested through ancient forests and luscious marshes, along untouched riverbanks and across riotous unfenced meadows. It rather defied expectations and gob-smacked me; what nine years of human absence had produced in a so-called dead zone.

Today, I have selfishly mixed feelings about the world’s discovery of Europe’s best-protected nature reserve.  My joyrides in a speedboat on the broad empty river observing the fish, birds, grazing animals and natural shoreline brushed by rushes, trees and beaches, may not be so special an experience in future. Others will also now be joining me by the roadside overlooking waterlogged fields at sunset in the forsaken land.

Ends.

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In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion, here is a review of Voices From Chernobyl, The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen) Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.

Alexievich’s book provides insight into the personal experience of victims of the world’s worst nuclear accident, arguably man’s greatest industrial accident. One cannot but be moved by the stories the voices tell. They make for morbid, yet compulsive reading.

In unrelenting monologues, “Voices from Chernobyl” relates the reminiscences of those caught up in events way beyond the bounds of normal experience. One city and 485 villages abandoned, more than 116,000 people forced to leave their homes. Millions more were told that they now lived on contaminated land – their own and their children’s lives at risk for generations to come. Only war or revolution can compare, but then most of the victims who survive those normally return home when it is all over.

There is something uplifting about the stoic acceptance and will to recover shown by many of these victims: “Our husbands died the same year, they were in Chernobyl together, but she’s already planning to get married. I’m not condemning her – that’s life. You need to survive. She has kids.” On the other hand, the book also exposes the pessimism that can afflict human nature, which produces a fatalism that paralyses people, when they lose faith in their ability to shape their own destiny: “We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By year 2000, there won’t be any Belarussians left.” This is a Jekyll and Hyde story.

Many of the locals heard and circulated myths. The authorities were said to have buried the dead from nearby villages in mass graves. Whole populations were supposed to be destined for transfer to Siberia. There were rumours of holding camps being prepared behind Chernobyl to contain and monitor victims before they died. New-born were said to have yellow fluid instead of blood. An apocryphal escaped prisoner hiding in the thirty-kilometre zone became so radioactive the prison would not take him back. Stolichnaya Vodka was believed to provide the best protection against strontium and cesium; two bottles being more effective than one.

Then there were the more credible myths. Hundreds of thousands of people were believed to have met an early death by 1995, millions more were said to be seriously ill. Official-looking reports claimed that children in large numbers were being born with deformities, immune deficiencies and leukaemia, all because of Chernobyl.

There are true tales too, of heroism and love. The voice of Lyudmilla Ignatenko is remarkable; her devotion to her husband unmistakable. He and his colleagues Titenok, Pravik and Tischura, “kicked the graphite with their feet” in a desperate attempt to douse the flames their fire brigade unit discovered on the scene soon after the reactor exploded. They all died seven or so days later in Moscow, and were buried in special leak-proof coffins. What happened to the millions of affected inhabitants living in the neighbourhood afterwards is also well tackled in this book.

“Voices of Chernobyl” tells of drunks asking big questions: “Gorbachev and Licachev [then Gorbachev’s rival], Stalin. Are we a great empire, or not; will we defeat the Americans, or not?” It was 1986: “whose airplanes are better, whose spaceships are more reliable? Well, okay, Chernobyl blew up, but we put the first man in space.”

They got their answer in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. There were now three republics handling their affairs, as opposed to one empire, and two of them were so new they barely existed. Chaos ensued. Most of the liquidators went home immediately.

Suddenly, taxi drivers in Kiev could earn a more reliable income than a nuclear power plant director.

It might have been one of the last “Soviet” experiences to befall the USSR, but it was also a typical one. It had its villains, including “comrade” Gorbachev whose first instinct was to cover it all up, only to abandon this approach when it became impossible to sustain. He went on to hasten the demise of his crumbling empire; today he is a born-again environmentalist. Chernobyl had its heroes in the fire fighters, liquidators and scientists who did a magnificent and unselfish job cleaning up the mess. Its victims also played their various parts, but never knew whether anything they were told was anything like the truth.

In “Voices”, “liquidator” Arkady Filin tells the story of his father’s memory of defending Moscow in World War II: “I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive. That’s it. And back then, my wife left me.” It was years before he learned from films and books that he had been part of a great historical event.

Filin’s point is pertinent. “Voices of Chernobyl” does not grapple objectively with its subject – or pretend that victims understand the wider picture.  The interviews merely record well the confused views of those who suffered. But to do those people justice we need to do more than rely on their impressions. We need to rely on science and study. Otherwise the debilitating angst that most observers confirm to be real and to afflict millions of people in the region will continue.

As with many other issues, scientific opinion regarding Chernobyl is counter-intuitive. There is a massive gap between the scale of the disaster and the official death toll. Anybody aged over 35 will remember the radioactive cloud over Europe and they will know something of the evacuees, abandoned cities and exclusion zones. When scientists say that they observed very few serious physical health problems directly attributable to Chernobyl – including no deformities, few, if any, leukaemia or solid cancers – accusations of a cover-up will be listened to.

Even a cursory look at the margins of the exclusion zone reveals thousands of real people who are sick and disabled, many of them children, most of them elderly, who live in the shadow of a major catastrophe. The region’s mental health has certainly been undermined by such visions, particularly in relation to children – but that does not mean radiation was responsible for their health problems. Neither does it make the case for abandoning science for superstition and intuition.

The so-called good news, because it is still awful, from scientists is promoted by the Chernobyl Forum and endorsed by eight UN agencies and the governments of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. They confirm that less than 50 people were killed and the worst that could happen in the future is that 4000 lives could be, but may not be, ended prematurely. In their view, much of the land that was evacuated can now be reused for farming and repopulated safely.

There are, however, respectable voices to suggest that the figure of 4000 may be a tenfold underestimate – depending on the parameters and methodology used to measure the accident’s impact on human health. There are wilder – much less credible – claims that 500,000 have already died in Ukraine alone. But whether the “real” number of fatalities over decades is 4000 or 40,000, scientists face the same problem communicating their facts to world fed on a diet of more macabre accounts by the media and anti-nuclear campaigners.

In the final analysis, Svetlana Alexievich uses her “Voices of Chernobyl” to suggest that the wilder claims have credibility. The dustcover and blurb promoting the book tell us to believe that there has been a conspiracy.  Svetlana’s own illness is attributed to Chernobyl as the price she paid for researching the book – yet immune deficiency is not a disease caused by radiation. Hers is a call for faith in ignorance. Her own voice does a disservice to the victims and reinforces the misinformation that has caused so much damage. But in years to come the voices she records will provide a haunting reminder of Chernobyl, and a valuable one at that.

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I found that nearly a year ago the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) handed administrative control of the site to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Despite the UNDP claiming that the site’s material is “under review” it has yet to make any real changes.

The site’s claim to be impartial remains useless. Its own UN sponsors say the Chernobyl myth is the biggest hazard resulting from the disaster – yet Chernobyl.info does much to reinforce it. Indeed, the entire site produces the opposite effect to the myth-busting its own UN sponsors say is now crucial.

It matters because Chernobyl.info ranks high in Google searches and because it appears to be an authoritative source backed by credible institutions.

The myths and the facts
In the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster there was understandable uncertainty and controversy regarding the accident’s impact on the health of people living in the neighbourhood. But within months, let alone years, of the Chernobyl accident it was possible to produce sensible accounts of the real hazard it posed. (Here’s one area where the fairly optimistic experts admit they got it wrong at first: predictions of thyroid cancer, which implies they take the evidence where it leads.) Twenty five years on, there is no excuse for not helping people to understand the carefully-researched facts as we now have them.

It is a scandal that the whole world, let alone the five million people living in contaminated areas in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia are still receiving alarmist messages about the threat that haunts them.

Take Ukraine. Chernobyl.info cites official sources as saying that 84 per cent of the three million Ukrainians exposed to radiation from Chernobyl are registered as sick. It is often said that these include one million children. This is bound to generate huge anxiety amongst children and their parents.

Indeed, in the Gomel region of Belarus people were told that there was an increase in leukaemia cases of about 50 per cent in both children and adults compared to the period before the disaster. Additionally, they were repeatedly informed that, as Chernobyl.info says, clusters of breast cancer had been increasing for ten years in the region, and that there was “a recognised and internationally collaborated” causal link to the accident.

Residents in affected territories were told that “internationally recognised epidemiological studies” showed major negative health consequences of the accident. They cited, for instance, the findings of bodies such as the Clinical Institute of Radiation Medicine and Endocrinology Research, in Minsk, Belarus, that discovered a 40% increase in cancer between 1990 and 2000 attributable to Chernobyl. Reports often hinted of much worse to come in later years.

The sources for such claims were seemingly respectable, and secured a mention in a European Union executive summary to an international conference in Kiev in 2001 (that’s not to be confused with an official endorsement, but understood as a report on another report’s findings).

Campaigners, aid groups, even bodies associated with UN agencies, all seemed to support, and perhaps initially believed, the claims.

It is true that Ukraine and Belarus registered many hundreds of thousands of unharmed people as victims of Chernobyl after 1986. This certainly seemed to reinforce the fears. However, in the early days, there was disaster relief money to be had. People classified as sick as a consequence of Chernobyl secured additional funding, winter fuel allowances, access to scarce health care, housing and other resources. Such benefits were invaluable after the Soviet Union collapsed. It was understandable opportunism. It wasn’t then in any local person’s interest to ask too many questions. Moreover, doctors felt obliged to help their impoverished patients by ticking the “right” boxes.

Since 2001 onwards, most of the local benefits have been withdrawn. That is partly because the apparent health issues were not real. It is also partly because the overheads became an unsustainable burdenon the national budgets of Ukraine and Belarus. The people were stuck with a flawed understanding of what was happening to them, but without the compensation.

No wonder that scientists found that the single worst consequence of the accident was a “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas caused by persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation.

As Louisa Vinton, Chernobyl focal point at the UNDP, said in 2005:

“Two decades after the Chernobyl accident, residents in the affected areas still lack the information they need to lead the healthy and productive lives that are possible. We are advising our partner governments that they must reach people with accurate information, not only about how to live safely in regions of low-level contamination, but also about leading healthy lifestyles and creating new livelihoods.”

The nonsense endures. Anyone visiting Chernobyl.info today will be told what Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in 2004:

“At least three million children in Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation require physical treatment (due to the Chernobyl accident). Not until 2016, at the earliest, will we know the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions.”

This quoted opinion remains in play on the website – without any explanation – despite official members of Kofi Annan’s specialist agencies having reached diametrically opposed conclusions.

The role of charities
It is perfectly understandable that charities sprang up and attracted international aid and assistance to help alleviate the consequences of the accident. Their original sympathy for the children, women and communities whose land was blighted by contamination cannot be doubted.

But, sometimes, good intentions can do more harm than good. This can particularly be the case when their sell-by date has passed.

Once in motion, however, it is difficult to halt an industry. This is particularly the case when the defining reason for its existence is good works and, perhaps, a narcissistic statement about the values of the people who conduct such work.

Caring about Chernobyl’s victims has become, for some, the personification of who they are and what they stand for. In these circumstances, it seems, people will cling to their world-view regardless of the evidence. More on that later; first let’s review the latest facts.

A better class of work
For more than two years (2003 – 2005), eight specialized agencies of the UN family studied all the evidence relating to the health affects of the disaster in the designated affected areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. This was an unprecedented study by hundreds of scientific experts in the fields of oncology, radiation and environmental protection.

The bodies doing the research were among the most respected in the world. They included the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and the World Bank. The governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine also participated and endorsed the report.

The Chernobyl Forum
The scientists, after reviewing all the existing evidence from all credible sources, came to what was for some a startling set of conclusions in their landmark Chernobyl Forum Report 2005. Though most of the report’s conclusions were already apparent to experts – working together as part of the IAEA’s International Chernobyl Project –  as early as 1991 and more so by 2001. The 2005 report found:

* Fewer than 50 deaths directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
* No profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas.
* No widespread radiation contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, with the exception of a few restricted areas.
* About 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, of which at least nine children died; however the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost 99%.
* No evidence or likelihood of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found, nor has there been any evidence of increases in congenital malformations that can be attributed to radiation exposure.
* Other than thyroid cancer there were no other increases in cancer rates attributable to the accident in the directly affected regions.

In conclusion, the three-volume, 600-page Chernobyl Forum report said that up to 4,000 people may eventually die (note: Chernobyl.info reports this as “will die”) as a long-term consequence of the 1986 accident from radiation induced diseases. However, the authors were at pains to state this is an upper limit. They said we will never know for sure if the death toll gets any where near that mark because statistically it is insignificant when set against the normal background levels of cancer. The report stated:

“Apart from the dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence among those exposed at a young age, there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers  or leukaemia due to radiation in the most affected populations. There was, however,  an increase in psychological problems among the affected population, compounded economic depression that followed the break up of the Soviet Union.“

The report’s Chairman, Dr. Burton Bennett, added:

“… we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas [Ukraine, Belarus and Russia], nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within a few exceptional, restricted areas.”

It is also worth noting that the restricted zones are increasingly being de-restricted by the Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities. Farming has officially resumed in areas it was once thought would be abandoned for centuries. Chernobyl itself is becoming a bit of a theme park and tourist destination. Moreover, the Chernobyl Forum reported:

“… because the doses were so low, there was no evidence of any effect on the number of stillbirths, adverse pregnancy outcomes, delivery complications or overall health of children. A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to better reporting, not radiation.”

There are huge disagreements
The discrepancy between the myths and what the Chernobyl Forum described could hardly be greater.

The Chernobyl Forum says, for instance, that most of the land in the affected regions is returnable to normal use and the biggest single health impact is psychological. Much of the material on Chernobyl.info implies or says that these areas remain hazardous and people are suffering severe medical effects.

So this can’t be brushed aside – the “refuseniks” need challenging. There is a case (the Chernobyl Forum’s) that the biggest problem is anxiety brought on misinformation. There is another case (equally aired on Chernobyl.info) that there is a cover-up of the human health effects of Chernobyl and that to deny these real effects is misinformation.

Though, admittedly, for all sort of contradictory reasons, it initially suited many stakeholders – governments, journalists, and campaigners – to inflate the consequences of Chernobyl, as Richard D North’s useful briefing highlights.

The problem is one of evidence-handling
It hasn’t required creative thinking to keep the Chernobyl horror story alive. All it has required is that people throw away ordinary rules of editing and publishing.

Chernobyl.info treats all claims about the affects of the Chernobyl accident as having equal weight. Moreover it uses old and discredited claims about the accident to dispute the findings of new scientific investigation. It does so even when, as in the case of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and UN bodies, the makers of the original claims have moved on.

Hence Chernobyl.info says:

“Some facts about Chernobyl are uncertain or disputed. In such cases we follow our principles by presenting the different interpretations, and citing the sources. Chernobyl.info thus lives up to its stated goal of providing independent and impartial information.

“It is vital that aid and cooperation projects for Chernobyl should not depend on whether everyone is in agreement on a particular fact.”

But impartiality isn’t quite enough….
The difficulty here is that a normally-busy, normally-informed person taking an interest in Chernobyl and going to this site has no way of establishing where the truth – or where the merits of argument and evidence –  lies between the opposing claims.

An information project needs to offer some way for its users to navigate between alternative viewpoints. It is not good enough to lay out the competing claims, and their sources, and think people can devote the kind of time involved to checking it all out from first principles.

But Chernobyl.info studiously avoids being useful. Note the site’s citations of two main kinds of scepticism about the Chernobyl Forum’s conclusions:

“The report, which acknowledges only hard-and-fast scientific findings, has been severely criticised by independent Chernobyl experts, environmental organisations and Chernobyl relief organisations, who claim that it plays down the impact of the disaster and goes in the face of earlier studies. Some of its statements, moreover, are provably false.”

Its examples of these supposed falsities were examined in the Chernobyl Forum’s report and found wanting.

In passing, one wonders what other than “hard and fast scientific findings” are of real interest, and who Chernobyl.info – or its editors at SDC and now UNDP – consider to be “independent Chernobyl experts”. I assume they mean: partisan anti-nuclear, environmental and Chernobyl relief organisations.

Does Chernobyl.info mean that such people were independent of international bodies such as the eight UN organisations, the World Bank and leading scientific experts from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia? Does “severely criticised” mean the same as “seriously criticised”, or merely mean “strongly”, or “ardently” criticised?

The scandal of Swiss government and UN involvement
It was at least very odd that the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an arm of the Swiss Foreign Ministry, appeared to still dispute the evidence compiled by the international community as late as 2010. This sort of material might not matter if Chernobyl.info was an independent site run by activists; but it isn’t.

The difficulty seems likely to be that Chernobyl.info’s editors believe that their duty is to the passion, commitment and anxiety of people who are affected or worried by Chernobyl.

The problem seems to be a sort of multiculturalism. Chernobyl.info’s view seems to be that the UN and all its experts, including UNDP’s own scientific advisers, have an opinion based on rigorous investigation, but it is no more valuable than those of people who dispute it. Indeed, it seems fair to give special weight to “local” or “regional” “communities” and non-governmental organisations who may be under-resourced.

It is worth noting that the UN bodies themselves seem schizophrenic. On the one hand they seem to want to be honest to the facts in the Chernobyl Forum report. On the other, they want to appear friendly toward the anti-nuclear campaigners and local groups who dispute it – even when their own governments don’t.

This anomaly is probably explained by the fact that UN bodies, such as UNDP, have traditionally welcomed any well-funded projects which can be thought to help people living in what are undisputedly deprived regions.

All that would be acceptable were it not for the fact that it is the myth itself which is doing so much more harm than the radiation.

In short, Chernobyl.info seems to have been hijacked by people who have a particular emotional response to the Chernobyl accident. They appear determined not to let go of their existing work no matter what evidence is produced to undermine their pre-judged conclusions.

If UNDP does in future follow the site’s mission statement, it is unlikely that Chernobyl.info will stay as it is. The site’s stated aims are perfectly legitimate:

“…[to] provide a sound basis for the evaluation of measures aimed at dealing with the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.

“The most important target audience worldwide comprises decision-makers, at all levels, who are concerned with the consequences of Chernobyl. The provision of information for decision-makers should help to promote the funding of targeted and useful measures.”

But Chernobyl.info does the opposite. Instead it impartially provides material whether it deserves the word “information” or not.

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To satisfy that interest, over the next few months (the 25th anniversary of the disaster is on April 26) I shall share what I’ve learned from my time at Chernobyl and the rest of my 20 years as a PR putting the record straight. There’s much to say. Not only will Chernobyl NPP and its exclusion zones become major tourist attractions this year, the industry is set for a modest global recovery. But I’ll come back to all that. Meanwhile, here’s some pictures highlighting Chernobyl’s iconic status taken (by Richard D North) on a trip I organised in 2006:

A birth defect attributed to Chernobyl (perhaps wrongly): Chernobyl Museum, Kiev

Farm horse in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl village abandoned house

Slavutych Hospital: in the new town built after the disaster

A birth defect attributed to Chernobyl (perhaps wrongly): Chernobyl Museum, Kiev

Pripyat: the abandoned City that once housed 30 000

Refuseniks Farming illegally in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone river...

Chernobyl Reactor 4 after it blew its top (this is not by RDN)

The half-completed Unit 5: frozen as was in 1986

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station Canteen, 2006

Model of Inside of Exploded Reactor 4

Abandoned Exclusion Zone house

Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Manager, Mr. Gramotkin, 2006

The Sarcophagus, 2006

Chernobyl NPP Undamaged Reactor, 2006

Shop at Chernobyl Village serving liquidators and refuseniks

Inside Chernobyl NPP, 2006

Chernobyl Office Interior, 2006

Fire fighting exhibit Chernobyl Museum Kiev

Slavutych: where Chernobyl's staff live today

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Here’s what Vidal says:

“A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.”

Of course, he slips in that Shell paid for the research (though it was environmentalists who campaigned to make “polluters” pay for such reports). He quotes Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends the Earth International and director of Environmental Rights Action, saying:

“It is incredible that the UN says that 90% is caused by communities. The UNEP assessment is being paid for by Shell. Their conclusions may be tailored to satisfy their client. We monitor spills regularly and our observation is the direct opposite of what UNEP is planning to report.”

But it beggars belief that a 100-strong multi-national team of UN investigators could be bribed or influenced by a research budget of $10 million from Shell. The report, it seems, will find that the majority of the spillage and environmental degradation was caused by locals, as Vidal reports, “illegally stealing oil and sabotaging company pipelines,” a practice known as bunkering.

I have plenty of reservations. The main one is the casual assumption by so many journalists that there is a handy split (let alone a 90/10 split) between “the communities” or “communities” and Shell. The official report is not yet out, but it is clear to me that the distribution of blame cannot credibly be split 90/10. That’s because Shell, however influential, is just one of many players in the region in the oil business. For a start it is partnered with the state oil company. On the “other” side, too, there are myriad complex relationships between every sort of “official” power, the “communities”, and criminal gangs.

There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that criminality both at a local level (from gangs to corrupt officials) and at a national governmental level (within the oil ministry and its state-run companies) must take most of the blame for the region’s plight.

Here’s what Mike Cowing, the head of a UN team, told Vidal by email:

“UNEP is not responsible for allocating responsibility for the number of spills being found in Ogoniland. Rather, we are focusing on the science. The figures referred to are those of the ministry of the environment and the department of petroleum resources.

“This is a Nigerian issue, not a UNEP issue. However, I would add that from our extensive field work throughout Ogoniland we have witnessed, on a daily basis, very large scale bunkering operations.

“It’s very controversial. We cannot say whether a particular spill is from one cause or another. Our observation is that there is a serious [bunkering ] problem. I am being seen to be siding with the oil companies, but I am not.

“We were provided with the official spill site list. This is given by the oil companies themselves but is endorsed by the [government] agencies. We are not on the side of the oil companies.”

According to Vidal, the UN team took 1,000 soil and water tests, and other investigations were carried out, and hundreds of communities consulted.  This scoping of the extent of the problem will most likely form the basis for focusing the clean up effort that Shell looks set to fund also.

Will this work? I think it might, up to a point. But on the ground it is most likely doomed to fail. That’s because the scale and complexity of the problem in a region of 30 million people is beyond Shell, and currently beyond the Nigerian government’s ability to solve.

It was always simplistic (and mostly entirely without foundation) of the likes of Amnesty International to accuse Shell of human rights abuses and causing mass poverty on top of the pollution in the region.

However, the UN report looks set to give Shell what it badly needs: a shield to defend itself in the West against the nonsense it has suffered from campaigners over many years. That’s got to be good for its reputation and PR. The rest of the solution rests with the Nigerian people.

Having said that, the question remains about just how honest Shell is going to be about the realities it faces on the ground. Those are realities which should urge Shell to set realistic expectations, or risk the issue blowing up in its face at a later date on a greater scale, the way it did for BP with its Beyond Petroleum charade.

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She was out and about in Florida. She was there sending out reassuring PR messages to tourists. She told them not to abandon the Gulf Coast, in other words not to believe all the environmental catastrophe talk they’d been hearing on the news. She reminded the world that:

“There are still thousands of miles of beaches not touched by the spill. There are still opportunities to experience these beautiful beaches,”

She added:

“… folks here in Florida and across the Gulf Coast are still depending on visitors and tourist dollars to put food on their tables and to pay their mortgages and to send their kids to college.

Talking of paying bills. A local restaurant owner by the name of Patronis told the First Lady that oysters were off the seafood menu, not because they weren’t available but because “all the oystermen are working for BP,” leaving few men to scrape the oysters from nearby Apalachicola Bay.

Thank God for Mrs Obama and for the local tourist lobby who briefed her well. Her words couldn’t have been better timed, coming as they did as BP finally – we hope – plugged its deep-sea leaking oil pipe. If all goes well, by August the relief oil wells will have sealed the leak permanently. I predict that we will all be shocked by just how quickly the environment and BP’s reputation recovers.

Of course, my message, and I’m sure Mrs Obama’s message likewise, is not that environmental harm has not been done. The message is simply to keep it all in perspective.

This little incident highlights the power of competing PR agendas. There’s been a lot invested by environmentalists and politicians – not least Mrs Obama’s husband – in traducing BP over this spill. But the criticism was hyped and bordered on scaremongering. That had consequences far beyond BP.

Actually, early on in this crisis, President Obama also found himself stressing how lovely and open most of the Gulf beaches were. His remarks then, even more than Mrs Obama’s now, remind us that catastrophism is a very dangerous weapon. Being doomy is great when you’re trying to deflect blame and raise the stakes, but it’s less good when real hoteliers, for instance, get side-swiped as collateral damage.

The trouble is that it is hundreds of times easier to spread ideas, impressions and images of damage – and make them seem widespread, severe and permanent – than it is to remind people of a nuanced picture. This is an important effect of the media, which is much more the politician’s tool than reality is. The media can make one oiled pelican stand for all nature and for every pelican. Reporters can easily go to the most damaged spot and make it stand for the generality of damage, and make damage seem general.

Anyway, after a few months of uncertainty, noise and safe exaggeration, perhaps Mrs Obama’s remarks will see the beginning of a subtler picture. Of course, we have yet to see what the real damage of the spill is. We’ll know much better about a year from now.  Let’s hope Louisiana has thriving seaside and wildlife tourism between now and then and long after.

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Vision 2050 advocates that big business solves mankind’s major social and environmental problems in partnerships with government and society. The aim is to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans.

Here’s some of what they think needs doing over the next forty years to make a sustainable planetary society possible:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

The WBCSD explains that:

“As part of this transformation, Vision 2050 calls for a new agenda for business: to work with government and society worldwide to transform markets and competition. New rules for markets will reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition in the direction of sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. Rationalizing prices to include such externalities as climate and biodiversity impacts will make corporate environmental efficiency a true competitive advantage across all industries and regions.”

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities. I certainly warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (output) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of accepting political realities and in proactively helping governments turn costly externalities into profit-centres.

It’s worth noting, though, that this means that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the future of the world dependent on the short-term political thinking politicians are prone toward, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 aims to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or may not happen.

Yet, when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, won’t it be natural (as the WBCSD knows well) that big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms? Won’t government find itself talking with the big firms which can deliver big stuff?

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, says I, but it is a short term and limited one. Here’s why.

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to cutback on carbon dioxide usage to combat global warming. However, what if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go at little cost? With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter solution we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is (evidence suggests there are still huge reserves of gas, oil and coal waiting to be exploited).

Moreover, if the nuclear fusion technology comes on tap in the next 40 years then our energy usage could increase in intensity almost without limit forever. Energy production might remain centralized with the emergence of fusion. It would also make desalination possible on a grand scale; ending all worries about water shortages in a world that is two thirds covered by oceans. We already know how to build gas pipelines over distances of thousands of miles to deliver energy to our homes, so building a global water-pipe network should not be beyond us (something states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

By making best use of nuclear fission, solar and wind technology, this might facilitate the trend toward greater decentralized energy provision that environmentalists demand and Vision 2010 supposes: that is until fusion  - or something else – replaces them all (again subsidies might help, and they might not, and special pleading might not be attractive to taxpayers either).

My point is not to favour this or that solution over some other possible solution. My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Another issue is that the WBCSD Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning. In that regard, I accept that the BCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead, and it may be right that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business. My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green agenda, but only because it’s neat and now it suits them.

Regardless, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which make their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations for honesty, integrity and insight.

The future is almost certainly unpredictable. And perhaps my most important point of all is that we should instead be encouraging new risk-takers to emerge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Such risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors to today’s major solution providers. They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order. Such innovation and innovators rarely emerge from partnership relationships (cosy clubs) but unfold as the work of disruptive entrepreneurs, as the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

Vision 2050 does have PR potential, certainly for spin. It also has potential for making progressive progress through the promotion of partnerships, even if its difficult to know in which field. What grates on me is the self-interested certainty that is embedded in the content and tone of Vision 2050. At the very least I counsel that however well intentioned Vision 2050 is, I don’t think it is a sustainable plan over the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

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BP is on a knife-edge. They can’t seem attractive (and suitably penitent) whilst blaming others, and yet they are not alone in causing the accident in the Gulf. (Leave aside that they’ve got a gaffe-prone CEO who says that he wants things to go well because “I’d like my life back”. A severe shortage of pre-accident media training there, I fear.)

But in time – and that time isn’t yet, not by a long chalk – BP may well find itself able and required to discuss (first in private with sympathetic mature journalists and opinion-formers) where other parcels of blame lie.

It may well be that Transocean or Halliburton or others are culpable in some degree, perhaps even greatly. But how about those nice regulators who are the thin line between corporate greed and the fragile public and planet?

I am pretty sure that if there’s blame to be spread, the regulator is as much at fault (or as innocent) as BP or other firms. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the regulator is more to blame based on what I’ve learned from the circumstances behind all of the disasters I’ve ever studied. I’ll return to this another time, but from Titanic to Three Mile Island, I’m struck by how technological failure has flowed from regulatory failure rather than greed. I mean that very often – most often – the private sector fails when the public sector thinks it’s doing fine and has signed-off on its behaviour. (The modern financial failures are examples of this, by the way.)

So I reason that it was more the regulator’s job to drive, own, the “what-if” process than BP’s. It isn’t exactly BP’s job to be gungho and alpha-male. But, certainly, in the modern highly-regulated and accountable world the corporation is in a proper and allowed tension with its regulators. Indeed, I hold the view that regulators are rather feeble in hardly ever accepting a proper share of responsibility.

Unless BP has purposely pulled the wool over our eyes, something I doubt, or didn’t carry out its agreed obligations, which remains possible, I think BP ought to be cut a good deal more slack than it actually will be.

It looks likely that BP was operating in the Gulf of Mexico at the edge of technology’s capabilities in a high risk environment. (Krauthammer in the Washington Post argues that’s because of green prejudice, a nice argument I won’t pursue.) If it turns out that BP’s bad luck was to have an accident that no regulator or operator on earth had made allowances for then BP has the makings of a sound defence.  Though, paradoxically, even if that’s proven true, that’s an argument which can’t be pressed too loudly in polite society without risking a backlash.

There’s little doubt, then, that the blame will stick with the corporations (it may widen from BP as Shell fears here). That’s not least because regulators and the politicians will wriggle out of it and the media will prefer to hound BP and the other corporations to hounding the regulators and governments. That’s unless, and I’m dreaming here, the balance of third party opinion comes down on BP’s side.

I am almost sure – and far from happy about it because I believe BP should say what it knows or believes to be true – that there is very little BP can say today credibly in public. It cannot exonerate itself to any degree without appearing to avoid responsibility. It is up against quite deep human prejudices and tastes.

People love disaster and villainy. That’s why certain accidents have had mythic narrative power which no amount of good evidence can shift.  The Titanic, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, are powerful cases where the very names have stuck emblematically in our minds. Their very mention comes with the clutter of preconceived ideas about class, capitalism, corporations, technological over-reach. BP will, presumably, now join that list. Like the others, it will probably be a good example of an operation which went on to do good work whilst exploiting plenty more technology. But it will serve as an example of bad-intentions and hubris.

It is just possible that this event will sink BP. But that would make it truly unique (even the owners of the Titanic didn’t go under).

Away from the hype, the financial market will look at this issue in a wholly cash manner. What will the accident cost? Will BP face difficulty getting US or other licences? Yes, this might well be a transformative event for the entire petroleum industry. But the market may think that BP is becoming case-hardened in a big-time way.

Therefore the outcome of the whole affair provides BP with an opportunity to take pole-position in the battle to reshape the industry’s worldwide image. After all, the world remains as dependent as ever on petroleum, so there’s a lot of mutual self-interest out there. There’s also a lot of cognitive dissonance. Plenty of firms feel forced to align their reputations with tragedies, real and very often imagined, as if they were responsible for them, but still do good business regardless. Some of my colleagues – cynically, perhaps – call that hit on the company’s reputation the price of securing a licence to operate.

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