Nuclear and Society: an outsider’s perspective

On the 27th January, I attended a lecture

entitled ‘In The Public Eye: Nuclear Energy and Society’, given by Malcolm

Grimston as part of The University of Manchester’s Dalton Seminar Series. This

was set to be a particularly compelling lecture because, as we all know,

nuclear has something of a PR problem and there are no clearly defined ways of

rectifying it. Grimston based his lecture on a book he is currently writing on society’s

conceptions of nuclear and the nuclear industry, and the innumerate tensions

and uncertainties that these generate.

He began the lecture by saying that the nuclear industry

does not deal with the distrust and negativity surrounding it in a very

constructive way; often ending up in an indecisive state of ‘rubbing hands

together’ and not proactively addressing the claims made against it. He argued

that this is because of the way in which ‘people’ respond to the statements

released by governments and companies like EDF that aim to inform and calm

people. This can be seen in the case of the Fukushima evacuations where the

government wanted to quell national and international anxiety by providing

‘safe zones’ which, ironically, served to inflame ‘people’s’ fear of radiation.

According to Grimston, ‘people’ react perhaps quite rationally  to the information put forward specifically

regarding nuclear safety: if they are told that nuclear stations are to be made

‘even more safe’, then how safe were they before, if it is possible for safety

to be improved? Through this deconstruction of what it means to be rational or

irrational, he argued that the nuclear industry and nuclear experts have to

perpetually navigate a minefield of semantic eggshells in fear of inadvertently

worsening ‘people’s’ already apprehensive sentiments towards nuclear.

I use the word ‘people’ specifically with quotation marks

because it was a word that cropped up time and again in Grimston’s lecture. As

he progressed, his diagnosis of who or what comprised ‘people’ became

increasingly problematic: ‘people’ become an homogeneous mass of all of the

people who exist outside the realm of science and the understanding of nuclear

that this entails. More specifically, and more importantly, Grimston casually conflated

the media with the general public, suggesting that they think (be it rationally

or irrationally) in the same way.

This is problematic because the media and the general public

are not the same thing and they cannot be conceived of in the same way by the nuclear

industry, including highly respected academics like Grimston. There is a chain

of understanding that starts with industry, which passes through the media and

then is consumed by the public. As a result, the media can be considered to be

more powerful than the public because they are the ones who take the

information given by the industry and relay it in any way that suits their own,

oftentimes, reactionary, ideological or political agenda. This not only

encompasses nuclear power but also information and statistics regarding

immigration or benefits claimants.

One obvious example

of such an outlet is The

Daily Mail, which only a few days ago published an article on how fallout

and radiation from Chernobyl will affect our crops this harvest. As a result, the

public read and can be swayed by headlines that scaremonger, distort facts and

fuel ignorance of nuclear, producing the paranoid (ir)rational responses that

Grimston discussed. I would argue, therefore, that members of the public are

not to blame for their warped conceptions of radiation (amongst other nuclear

problems) because they consume news headlines or Hollywood films that tell them

otherwise.  If the public were not

subjected to such sensationalised stories that feature in the tabloids, some of

the most read newspapers in circulation and online, then it is much more likely

that there would be a positive embracement of nuclear energy. As a result, the

public and the media cannot be described under a vague umbrella label such as

‘people’.

This is important to not only give some credit back to an

interested and interesting public who, it is becoming increasingly apparent,

are misinformed and distrustful of nuclear because of the media (71% of 23,231

people from 23 countries in 2011 after Fukushima wanted to replace nuclear and

coal with renewable energy sources), but also to improve the image of the

nuclear industry itself.[1]

It is hard to feel sympathetic for an industry where high profile academics do

not critically separate the media from the public and show no active attempt to

engage with the media to shine a light on the inflammatory journalism produced.

Even though I, a humanities graduate, had a few of my own misconceptions

addressed by the lecture, none of what Grimston said seemed to be news to the

majority of the people there, evident from the knowing tutting and chortling

taking place. As a result, the lecture actually ended up casting a scornful

gaze on the public who through, perhaps, no fault of their own, do not know any

better. This was cemented for me, when Grimston provided each case study with

an example of ‘people’s’ (ir)rational reactions to safety measures; a sentence

or two in the voice of ‘people’ that supposedly summed up their interpretations

of various situations, mostly regarding Fukushima. As he read them out to a

chuckling room, they sounded like they could have been taken for tabloid

headlines. Instead of being critical of this, ‘people’, that indiscriminate

homogeneous mass of everything outside of the industry, were merely mocked.

I argue that the most effective way for people who work in

nuclear to ensure the future implementation and success of new nuclear is by

directly addressing media headlines, for example this one from The

Daily Express or this one, again, from The

Daily Mail. Accept that the public have been misinformed by what they have

seen and heard in the newspapers, on the television and at the cinema and

confront the sensationalised stories directly. Nuclear has often been accused

of secrecy and of lacking transparency, and this is becoming a self-fulfilled

prophecy. I would argue that the industry must actively and publically engage

in a much more open and critical dialogue and debate with the outlets and

ideological apparatuses that construct what the public have come to know, understand

and, ultimately, trust.