COP26 – Bananas waiting in line – Day 2

It was an early and busy morning, but perhaps there was a lesson there. While we are participating, we have to self-administer a quick Covid test every day, send the result to the Government, get back their confirmation through SMS and then we show that at the gate. This morning, we also had to self-administer the more thorough PCR-test (by the second day of arrival) and then mail that to the Government. It takes time to scrub and sample, so I had barely time to get breakfast, as we were leaving the house at 8 am.

At 8:45, we, and our two full boxes of bananas, arrived to this. Oh well. Nothing like staying in a mass-queue for an hour I guess. At least the weather was nice, and we did get to chat with a journalist from The Economist. I guess carrying a box of bananas gets people curious and asking question…

Might as well stayed in bed for another hour or so, but there we were. And it didn’t get much better when we got into pre-security, as then we just got to stand in a queue inside. Not a social distance in sight in this one, I can tell you. Good thing everybody did their test that morning (although they are self-reported…)

The point of the bananas was that we put some info-stickers on them and then started wandering around the hallways, handing people free bananas and getting to chat people about the fact that bananas are slightly radioactive (due to Potassium-40 in them, as well as a lot of other foods), and how that compares to the dreaded ”nuclear waste radiation.”

And it was not just bananas. Remember the giant gummy bear from earlier? We also has smaller gummy bears, a full jar of them. Did you know that a gummy bear -sized uranium pellet contains as much energy as a ton of coal? Well, now you do, and so does many a visitor to the COP I guess.

The morning was full of excitement, so I guess it was worth standing in queue. At 11 a.m. Eric Meyer (whom we remember from Paris and pretty much every COP since) gave an interview for IAEA. He even got to singing a bit.

To see the video and hear Eric sing, here is a link to it.

In the afternoon, the Nuclear for Climate booth was visited by non other that Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Director General of IAEA. In recent years and under his leadership, IAEA has finally fully embraced its mission and started to promote civilian nuclear energy as a good solution to climate change (link goes to a short videoon Twitter). This change has been a long awaited and a very welcome one!