The nuclear industry cannot assume that the words and phrases it commonly understands as scientific or engineering terms have positive connotations for the public, writes Neil Alexander, principal consultant at Bucephalus Consulting."We have all heard that a picture paints a thousand words. This should not be surprising because our mind was always designed to handle images, the face of our mother, the outline of a lion in the savannah, the route from our cave to the berry bush. Images have always been essential to our survival and are bound to be powerful.Less appreciated is the power of words to create mental pictures and how that affects perceptions of nuclear power. The power of words should not be a surprise either as language was developed so that we could describe things to each other in the absence of an image and then further developed to describe things, such as emotions or complex principles, by creating virtual images." //

Used fuel is described by many outside the industry, and too many within it, as waste. Look waste up in the dictionary and you will find one meaning is 'an unusable or unwanted substance'. Presently, used fuel is unwanted and so it can denotatively be called waste. But the image created by the word waste is not one of carefully engineered racks of shiny fuel assemblies; it is of the waste we see in our everyday lives: trash. That isn't a good image.

Meanwhile, allowing it to be described as waste implicitly allows a place where it is stored to be described as a dump because a dump is 'a place where people are allowed to leave their waste'. However, the use of the word, regardless of its legitimacy, creates a very unfortunate image. //

I wouldn’t want a nuclear waste dump near me. I wouldn’t want one anywhere on earth.

I wouldn't mind a used fuel repository though. //

Clever anti-nuclear authors will insert the words 'long-lived' whenever they legitimately can. This simple phrase, differentiates nuclear materials from anything else mankind handles and makes it seem uniquely dangerous. Those same authors don’t feel obliged to use the word 'everlasting' when referring to other toxic materials.