If you watch MS-NBC, you’ve probably seen these really irritating (but catchy) animated commercials featuring nuke-plants assembling themselves, people learning dancesteps, the world splitting in half, and various other things, without giving a very clear idea of what is being advertised, who it’s appealing to, and generally WTF is going on.
It looks like they’re trying to promote nuke energy as being efficient, safe, convenient, and tasty, but that’s just a guess. Who are they, and what are they up to?
Okay, the article says that “[t]he ads explained how the generation and distribution of nuclear power works.”
If you look at the ad, it’s not exactly educational, is it? Is it trying to appeal to the general public by letting them think they understand something about nuclear energy? That it looks cool, so maybe they’ll support building a nuke-plant in ten or twenty years, without understanding why they have his warm’n’fuzzy feeling about Nuke Powa? Is it more immediately focused? Are people trying to build support for nuclear power without actually, you know, discussing it? There’s a quick cut of wind-turbines in the background at one point–is that to confuse Neil Nosepicker into thinking “Aveda–they’re all about green energy and shit”?
Areva is green in the sense that they do recycling of nuclear waste. IIRC they’re the largest nuclear waste recycler now, though that business is suddenly falling off - just read an article about this - think it was because of fears about the wrong people getting hold of the fuel. I think I read that several large customers just dried up which leaves Areva uncertain they can keep processing for somebody (maybe the British government) or have to drop the whole thing, and they’re not renewing yearly contracts and only doing it on a monthly basis.
They might be trying to get people to mail-order nuke plants, but then they might also be trying to buoy up their stock price by getting people to want that.
IIRC John Lovelock, who invented the Gaia hypothesis of Earth as a living thing, has said that nuclear power is probably a necessity if we are to fix the biggest environmental problem, global warming. Although I was living near enough to Three Mile Island to worry about evacuating in the worst case scenarios, I think I like the idea of relying more on fission power. It seems to have worked out well for Europe. This would mean Areva would be a big success, I think.
It’s pretty funny that I couldn’t keep their name straight, even for one post. I couldn’t even remember the company’s name after seeing the commercial several hundred times. Aveda? Aredo? Aveeno?
There’s something insidious about ads like this, that contain quick flashes of complicated charts (there’s one about “Worldwide Energy Use by Sector,” for example, that must be up for about 1/2 second), and I still can’t figure out what they’re saying with the people learning dance steps. And the way the visuals keep changing–you’re in a uranium-mining pit, zoom in for a closeup of a dump truck, and when you pull back the truck is dumping its load into a facility that wasn’t there in the previous long-shot. Spatially unsettling, to say the least. Confusion, on some critical level, is the idea behind such ads, rather than information.
I just looked up for this ad on Youtube. Even though the ad I found was Canadian, I assume it’s the one you’ve seen,since there are an extraction facility, a truck, people dancing, etc… as you described.
It doesn’t look confusing at all to me. It just shows the whole nuclear production process from beginning to end : the earth containing radioactive materials, the mining of ore, its transport, a nuclear plant with brief glimpses at the control rods (or something like that) and the control room, recycling, and eventually power lines going to some club in Shanghai where people dance under the lights.
I wouldn’t know the goal of this public relation campaign : buy our stocks? Support nuclear energy, we need it?