*Question: How many of you are even moderately interested—let alone passionate—about something you know nothing about? I suspect the answer is obvious and dubious—well dubious as it relates to learning about the unknown.
Perhaps I am applying my own confirmation bias to this topic but I would venture to guess that this inconvenient truth stands as a large obstacle in our mission to educate.
But hold on, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. How can we proceed with the education process before we have established a need for said education? We know that we want to teach people, but are people even aware of what they need to learn? Let’s think for a moment, what are the driving forces inspiring regular folk to learn about energy, and more specifically nuclear energy? Is it safety? The environment? Our flagging economy? It isn’t so clear, is it?
Once again my bias suspects that while some people draw motivation from those concerns, the great majority has no real cause to care. As long as electricity keeps pumping through their sockets they can hardly imagine a world where electricity might someday experience a shortfall.
So, how can we ignite the spark that will passionately appeal to the emotions of an audience that has previously had very little cause to care? The Nuclear Story needs its hook; a hook that will reign in widespread appeal.
Pathos: Let’s build some together
Our Nuclear Story must find its pathos; an inviting place where we can forge the connection with our audience. It needs to be a place with a comfortable common ground that bridges the gap between the science and everybody else. It is a reasonably natural part of the human condition for people to fear what they don’t understand and in the context of nuclear energy it can make communication very difficult.
For this again I use myself as a barometer. I am no scientist. I am no engineer. I am no mathematician. I am trying my hardest to learn and understand yet I still find it difficult. It’s not so much the technical nature of what’s going on; it’s more the lack of context. It’s hard for me to establish a logical starting point. I have no foundation.
Nevertheless, I press on. But keep in mind it is because I have an incentive to do so. I am, after all, here supporting a pro-nuclear website. Yet if I weren’t in this position, I too would be milling about on my computer perfectly content in my ignorance as the electricity keeps pumping through my sockets.
But what if it weren’t? What if I woke up one morning, powered up my iMac, and wasn’t greeted by that oh-so-familiar digital apple? What if then I went to turn on my LED TV to relive the past with the History Channel, and see nothing but a hollow, black screen? What if then I were to find out I’d be experiencing rolling black-outs with intermittent power for the next, oh let’s say, unforeseeable future? Well, all the sudden I would care. I would have my context, my starting point, and my foundation. More importantly, I’d have one serious problem on my hands.
As a design professional, technology geek, and average member a first world society, I need my electricity. Of course, there are many millions like me. Life without stable power is not an option and people need to be shown that without the enormous energy potential that is locked away in the atom, our comforts and well-being are very much in jeopardy.
What the Community is saying
It was Jason Ribiero’s article, Stories not Data. Can Nuclear Learn Something from the Invisible Gorilla? that served as the impetus for this post. In Jason’s article he highlights the now well-practiced anti-nuclear tactic of creating horror stories in a context where a series of unrelated circumstances becomes a false truth in people’s minds on the basic premise that they occurred in sequence. It is a narrative fallacy and it is a very effective literary device.
As a matter of principle I patently dismiss using scare tactics to illicit an emotional response that manipulates followers. On the same token I do not think it wrong to highlight facts that are truthfully scary: a world with no power. Our infrastructure is teetering, that affects everyone and people deserve to know.
William Tucker, of the freshly minted Nuclear Townhall, invokes Ayn Rand to suggest that perhaps people need to realize life with expensive and intermittent power to serve as a real life smack in the face to otherwise oblivious consumers like me. Clearly I echo William’s thinking in that the Community must find some way to create the impetus for concern among people, I just do not think closing perfectly viable— not to mention important—plants in the nuclear fleet is the way to go. Where I fear that William is correct is that it may take something very extreme—life without stable power—to finally make this everyone’s problem.
Image Credit
fondling flickrspace courtesy of Flickr user jurvetson published under the CC license.
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As is common in policy debates, advocates on both sides claim that the public backs their preferred policy options. Framing is the central device by which both advocates and opponents of nuclear energy attempt to manage broad public opinion. However, if and when the decision is made to build a new nuclear power plant in a specific area, mobilized minorities of local citizens can prove decisive. Who shows up to protest, vote, or speak out at the local level will have a stronger impact on the future of nuclear energy than the current struggle to shape national opinion.
One could suppose that people living in countries with nuclear power plants are more supportive of this form of energy because they are more familiar with it, better informed about it and more aware of its benefits. The hypothesis that better and increased communication leads to an increase in support is backed up by a poll (the Eurobarometer survey carried out for the European Commission’s directorate-general for energy and transport), in which Europeans were questioned about the degree to which they felt themselves to be informed about nuclear safety, and then looked at the impact of this on their views. What was found is that those who feel informed about nuclear safety tend to perceive the risks as lower than those who feel uninformed.
A similar link can be demonstrated between lower perceptions of risk and those having personal experience of nuclear power, even when the personal experience amounts to no more than living less than 50 km from a nuclear plant or knowing someone who works in the industry. Again, people in countries without nuclear power plants feel less informed and more likely to say that the risks outweigh the advantages. More evidence of the effect of knowledge and information on public acceptability of nuclear power comes from polls in which an opinion is sought before and after explaining some key fact. For instance, when it was explained that nuclear power could help to protect the world’s climate from global warming, the number of people supporting an expansion of nuclear power increased by an additional 10%, and more than a third of those who originally said that no more nuclear plants should be built subsequently changed their minds. Another, similar poll showed that knowledge about improvements in energy security also increased the proportion of people who were willing to accept nuclear power.
The inescapable conclusion is that more and better public information campaigns are needed in those countries where supporters want to advance the cause of nuclear power. This is the heart of the challenge for advocates for nuclear energy. It is not enough just to say we never met a reactor we didn’t like. We need to get the public up to speed, because when they know the truth it does look like they can make an informed decision and back nuclear. Antinuclear forces have held the public in high contempt for decades so much so that they lie almost reflexively now, and that makes them very vulnerable. The time to take this out into the streets is now, and it may not be as hard as it looks. The numbers of active committed supporters doesn’t need to be that high for this type of movement to make an impact. A new spirit of pragmatism has made the public more receptive than for decades to the irrefutable social, economic and environmental arguments in favour of nuclear energy.
I think everybody care about is world as people did in the eighties: They made protest against TMI and stuff.
Now, the thing is, the concern about our world is the same but the people are not the same. I feel as the time goes on the world changes and with news ideas we’ll find a good solution out of this.