For the sake of self-promotion (not really), here is a tiny piece on nuclear energy in Belarus that the folks at the Bulletin kindly edited and put up. I attempted to write about how Belarus’ president Aleksandr Lukashenko is trying to promote a nuclear power plant project to an audience quite “allergic” to nuclear energy after the Chernobyl accident.

I won’t deny that David Marples in his great Jamestown columns has covered this issue in depth already (so has Alexei Breus of NuclearFuel, for that matter). In his writings, Marples uses polling data from the beleaguered independent pollster NISEPI to show low public support for the NPP project in Belarus (only 32.5% in 2006).

Yet, I am fascinated by some polling data that seems to be coming from the Belarusian government, which admits even lower public support for the nuclear power plant project — 28.3% in 2005. The source for the data is an obscure paper by Alexander Mikhalevich of the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences (NAS) titled Technical and Scientific Support of Nuclear Power Development in Belarus presented at this 2007 IAEA Conference.

Further, perhaps I am reading too much into how official Minsk has used this (and similar) data when I note in the Bulletin piece that in its public relations campaign

“the [Lukashenko] government has repeatedly stressed (like here and here) IAEA support for the [NPP] project [because its] polling indicates that the Belarusian public trusts the information provided by the agency.”

You can get a sense of what I mean from one of the charts in the NAS paper, which I posted below. There you have it. Individuals close to the Lukashenko government admit that the public trusts the IAEA (44%) much more than the Belarusian government (3%).

Once again, here is the NAS paper. And while we are on the topic, you should check out the videos at the IAEA In Focus:Chernobyl section.