As a means of shoe-horning your way onto the news agenda, the tactic this week of the Royal Society of Chemistry worked a treat.

It claimed, quite straight-faced, that the 1962 James Bond film Dr No had ruined the previously unblemished public image of the nuclear power industry.

The society’s president David Phillips said that the film – in which the eponymous villain plans world domination from his nuclear reactor – presented a view that atomic energy was a “barely controllable force of nature” and as such had resulted in a “remorselessly grim” public perception ever since.

Having seen the film several times, I can honestly say that this train of thought has never occurred to me, but maybe I was too distracted by Sean Connery’s action antics and Ursula Andress rising from the Caribbean surf.

Naturally the society’s claim was swiftly rubbished, not least by the government’s climate change advisor Professor Tom Burke, who said that “the idea that Hollywood has made people sceptical about nuclear power is a bit like thinking that it’s gangster movies that are responsible for crime waves”.

And of course he’s right, as the society itself would privately acknowledge. What the society is trying to do via its Bond-bashing is drive home a message that nuclear power needs a “renaissance” and that, despite events in Japan last year, is still a safe means of power generation.

But the nuclear industry seems to have weathered the post-Fukushima storm pretty well and the sought-after ‘renaissance’ is underway in many countries – the UK and the Czech Republic to name but two.

And public opinion is not all one-way traffic. A recent poll found that the strongest anti-nuclear sentiment was in Japan, understandably, Germany, and, surprisingly, France. But the pro-nuclear figure had risen in the UK since the last poll in 2005, and was the same in the US. 

Maybe the Royal Society should distract attention from nuclear by lobbying the Bond scriptwriters to feature a criminal mastermind who sabotages the solar panels on the White House (yes, there are some: put up by Carter, removed by Reagan and soon to be reinstalled by Obama), or targets other energy sources. Coalfinger? Dr NOx? A View to a Kilowatt?