Are we witnessing the beginning of a real-life satire, at once amusing and terrifying? Its theme is the smothering of the nuclear power risk by catastrophic climate change and the oil crisis. At the G8 meeting in Hokkaido last week US President George W.Bush reiterated his plea for the construction of new nuclear energy plants. At the start of this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the fast-tracking of eight new reactors and called for ''a renaissance of nuclear power'' in a ''post-oil economy''

It is as if a world that wishes to save the climate must learn to appreciate the beauty of nuclear energy or ''green energy'', as the general secretary of Germany's Christian Democratic Union, Ronald Pofalla, has rechristened it.

Given this new turn in the politics of language, we should remind ourselves of the following.

A couple of years ago the US Congress established an expert commission to develop a language or symbolism capable of warning against the threats posed by American nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now. The problem to be solved was: how must concepts and symbols be designed in order to convey a message to future generations, millenniums from now? The commission included physicists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, molecular biologists, classical scholars, artists and so on.

The experts looked for models among the oldest symbols of humanity. They studied the construction of Stonehenge and the Pyramids and examined the historical reception of Homer and the Bible. But these reached back at most a couple of thousand years, not 10,000.

The anthropologists recommended the symbol of the skull and crossbones. But a historian reminded the commission that the skull and crossbones symbolised resurrection for the alchemists, and a psychologist conducted an experiment with three-year-olds: if the symbol was affixed to a bottle they anxiously shouted, ''Poison!'' But if it was placed on a wall they enthusiastically yelled, ''Pirates!''

Even our language fails, then, when faced with the challenge of alerting future generations to the dangers we have introduced into the world through the use of nuclear power. The guarantors of security and rationality the state, science and industry are engaged in a highly ambivalent game. They are no longer trustees but suspects. For they are urging the population to climb into an aircraft for which a landing strip has not yet been built.

The incalculable dangers to which climate change is giving rise are supposed to be ''combated'' with the incalculable dangers linked with nuclear power plants.

Many decisions about large-scale risks are not a matter of choosing between safe and risky alternatives, but between different risky alternatives.

In the case of nuclear power, we are witnessing a clash of risk cultures. Thus the Chernobyl experience is perceived differently in Germany and France, Britain and Spain, Ukraine and Russia. For many Europeans the threats posed by climate change now loom much more largely than nuclear power or terrorism.

Now that climate change is regarded as man-made, and its catastrophic impacts are viewed as inevitable, the cards are being reshuffled in society and politics. But it is completely mistaken to represent climate change as an unavoidable path to human destruction. For climate change opens up unexpected opportunities to rewrite the priorities and rules of politics. Although the rise in the price of oil benefits the climate, it comes with the threat of mass decline. The explosion in energy costs is gnawing away at the standard of living and giving rise to a risk of poverty at the heart of society. As a consequence, the priority that was still accorded energy security 20 years after Chernobyl is being undermined by the question of how long consumers can maintain their standards of living in the face of steadily rising energy prices.

The most tenacious, convincing and effective critics of nuclear energy are not the greens: the most influential opponent of the nuclear industry is the nuclear industry itself.

Nuclear power is constant, permanent and remains present even when exhausted demonstrators have long since given up. The probability of improbable accidents increases with the number of ''green'' nuclear plants; each ''occurrence'' awakens memories of all the others, across the world.

For risk is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk is the anticipation of catastrophe, not just in a specific place but everywhere. Guardian

Ulrich Beck is author of World Risk Society and professor of sociology at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians University and the London School of Economics.