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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe its a British thing, but I'm very amused by the phrase "nuclear reservation". Cant wait for the Chernobyl Country Park or the Fukushima Fun Zone. Love the way soft cuddly words are connected to "evil" words in a tragically predictable attempt to gloss over things.

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I dunno. Reservation seems very unemotional and bureaucratic, very disconnected from any soft and cuddly words. Nature reserves are land that has been set aside for nature purposes, Indian reservations are land set aside for the Native Americans, and nuclear reservation are land set aside for nuclear purposes. When you phone ahead to a restaurant/hotel/car rental agency and make a reservation, a table/room/car has been set aside for you.

Do you use a different word in the UK for these situations?

Environmentalist and nuclear proponent James Lovelock (of "Gaia hypothesis" fame) has proposed distributing nuclear waste throughout wilderness areas to avoid concentrating the effect, but also to scare away developers:

"Stick it in some precious wilderness. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/16/scienceandnature...

In US english, the meaning is more subtle. Reservations are also where we put things we don't want (like native americans).

It fits how we use the word reservation in the west. This was also hanford's name I think when they constructed the site during WII as part of the manhattan project.

US may be, but reservation in the UK means nature, pretty birds, and not treading on wild flowers. Weird people wearing bobble hats and walking boots armed with binoculars sneak through ticking off things they have seen in little reference books. (Note we in the UK don't shoot them, nature or the weird people). Certainly not some scary nuclear thing at all. In dear old Blighty we call such places: "scary nuclear places".

Well in America the word Reservation was used for land set aside for Native tribes long before the idea of a "nature' reserve ever sprang up. That's why we typically use refuge for what you would call a reservation.

The only reason the word reservation has a positive connotation to you is because of what it colloquially refers to in your country. It's base definition is really anything that's been reserved for a specific purpose, doesn't have to be for wildlife preservation.

I doubt whoever named this facility back during WWII-era was attempting to soften up the image of it. Given that it was part of the Manhattan Project they probably didn't even think the general public would be aware of it.

Plenty of nature and pretty birds--the need to secure Hanford kept the area undeveloped.

Thank you for the best contribution to the Campaign for Plain English on HN.

I hope to soon see 6 lane stuck-in-traffic-ways, online adultery sites, and one joyous day I will be called a passenger on a train again instead of a customer :-)

I meant western United States, I'm sorry for being American centric. Really, the definition of reservation is quite simple: an area reserved for something. It's not a national park (though hanford reach is a monument I believe). Given the lack of people on the reservation, the area is quite natural.

Cant wait for the Chernobyl Country Park

Actually, the Red Forest in Pripyat is a place where many people can't wait to go. The exclusion zone has created a very interesting nature reserve.

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