An open letter to the intellectual elite of the pro-nuclear movement.
Here is why for decades we have failed to awaken the populace to the truth of nuclear power. Here is why for decades we have failed to counter the effects of essentially one lunatic, one actress, and one movie despite all the facts being on our side.
Pro nuclear intellectuals are rather keen to complain about the ignorance of the populace when discussing nuclear energy in the context of why “won’t people listen” type conversations. They often drone on about lousy “education” for example. (Ironic, since much of the pro-nuclear community is right wing, and accordingly view quality education as a free-market privilege, by definition to only ever be given to a small elite minority who can pay for it. But anyway.)
We’re often as a result patting ourselves on the back for being so brilliant as to see the truth. But if we’re so brilliant and educated, why do the seemingly stupidest of the uneducated anti-nuclear people have all of us combined completely over a barrel in terms of policy and social influence? What good is being a collection of hyper-educated geniuses if we can’t even effectively counter one lunatic and her library of lies?
For decades apparently (my time and long before) nuclear’s entire approach to convincing lay people of things has essentially been to simply clone the way we convince each other of things. With facts, logic, charts, and exhaustive arguments. When those efforts failed with the general public we lament the dimness of the people and then try again later in the exact same way. More charts, more massive technical essays, more echo-chamber conventions, and it never ever works. This is again ironic when the golden age of nuclear power was full of organized public relations backing.
Why do we keep doing the same failed thing over and over?
What we need are memes, demonstrations, films, social media presence, and activism.
Our old way has consistently failed because it fundamentally misunderstands our target audience, the general public. At the same time we are seemingly unable to admit we’re capable of misunderstanding anything, expressly because we are more or less a collection of hyper-educated, often genius, individuals, rarely familiar with stepping outside the areas where we truly do know more than virtually everyone else on the planet.
The real problem is that we are the ones that lack an education in the science of public relations. And rest assured, it is and has been a science for a very long time. We say they need to go back to school for physics, and that’s true, but we need to go back to school for sociology, psychology, and public relations.
Here’s just a small taste of the toolset at our disposal to defend nuclear energy via the right and from the left.
We need to shift a major portion of our efforts to the public relations and activism fields.
Examples:
- Ready memes to counter every fragment of the anti nuclear argument. And not tons of them, so that anyone can carry the debate solo with images alone.
- Public demonstrations meant to educate and provide context by their very existence. Such as anti-radiation demonstrations at coal plants.
- Widespread social media engagement particularly aimed at the science type figures that are either silent or blatantly anti-science in their anti-nuclear fervor. (Tyson and Nye spring to mind.)
- We also need to draw constant parallels between anti-nuclear crusaders and climate change deniers because here we have a ready-made work flow for dealing with powerful anti-science types, which the general public already accepts, particularly the left, which is the main source of anti nuclear activity.
Because that’s what anti-nuclear is also by definition, anti-science and anti-climate.
Those of you with the magic PHD need to very publicly step up to popular science figures to question their anti-nuclear comments and silences because you are the only ones that can. The rest of us will get dismissed out of hand.
I highly recommend we all learn twitter. Twitter’s very format forces the creation of pithy media, and bite sized arguments and unlike the other platforms it is much more like one giant lobby and crowd, as opposed to a hotel with many rooms. And before anyone complains about complexity of argument not fitting in a tweet, save that crap, because if science can fit a smartphone in my pocket, it can fit a good argument into a tweet. After all, you can link video and images to tweets, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
Also I might add, virtually all the political figures you’d ever want to influence have and use twitter accounts, including the president and all three people with a real shot at becoming the next one.
Thanks for your time 🙂
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