What do you think of when you think solar energy? Or wave energy? Or wind power? Put them together and I get sailing on a sunny day. Pleasant pursuits. But how about nuclear energy? Most people’s first associations would be mushroom clouds, cancer and danger.

That’s the trouble with nuclear energy; the associations are so unpleasant that it’s hard to imagine a world fueled by the same substance that can cause so much harm.

Yet in France, living with nuclear power is such an everyday thing that nine-year-old Elsa, the daughter of a nuclear plant worker in Flamanville, on the coast of Normandy, had never had a school emergency drill that dealt with the dangers of radiation. Fire drills, plenty of them. Even bomb scares. But drill for a security threat from the two nuclear plants in town, or the nuclear waste storage plant across the bay? Never.

When I asked her mother to show me the pills each family is given in case of radiation emergency, the pills that could protect Elsa’s thyroid glands from deadly radiation, which can cause the breakdown of the internal organs and death, she couldn’t find them. In fact, Valerie Cihelca laughed gaily and so did her husband. “I have no idea where they are,” she said, “we never think about it.” Ten minutes determined search later, she returned with the pills. Each family within a ten kilometer radius of a nuclear energy plant has the emergency ration, but they’ve never been used.

Fifty eight nuclear plants provide eighty per cent of all of France’s electricity, by far the highest proportion in the world. In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, France decided to become energy independent, and is almost there. But my question to everyone was, if the rest of the world is so concerned about the dangers of nuclear energy, even though it is clearly cheap, clean and allegedly safe, how come the French are so blasé and accepting?

(I can hear the cries of protest from anti-nuclear activists when I say nuclear power is allegedly safe. Yet consider this: three thousand people died in the radiation disaster in Chernobyl, while DOUBLE that number die EVERY YEAR in Chinese coal mines. Yet nobody says China shouldn’t mine coal).

I got three answers from French people why they are so accepting of nuclear energy. First, they admire big engineering projects eg the TGV, the fast speed train, Eurostar, the channel tunnel, Concorde, and nuclear reactors are huge projects, each one costing two billion dollars or more. Second, they admire scientists and engineers, while many other nationalities tend to be suspicious of grandiose engineering claims. And third, their rational thought leads them to accept that, given the evidence, nuclear energy is safe.

After a few days research and a few more visiting French nuclear installations, I’m hardly in a position to judge. But I was struck by the knee-jerk objections so many people have to what other people accept so naturally. Is nuclear energy the clean, safe solution to the world’s electricity needs, which are set to double within twenty-five years? Not by itself – everyone agrees that future power needs will be met by a combination of alternative energies as well as fossil fuels.

But I did come away from this assignment impressed by the words of Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace in 1972, who said that he had fought against nuclear weapons and all things nuclear, but now he had changed his mind. Why shouldn’t we benefit from the positive aspects of nuclear power, he asked?

His words reminded me of the phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater;” another unfortunate association, but one worth considering.