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 🙂
Resources section:
Videos:
Intellectual arguments have their place in the intellectual community and policy-making halls of DC. But if you’re talking about getting the voters to change their minds and understand the high-level issue, there is nothing like story-telling to make a difference.
An expert in Rare Earth Metals helped me with the technical aspects of my upcoming novel, Rare Mettle, about the US reliance on China for rare earths, and the implications of their growing monopoly control over our 21st century lifestyle and security.
He not only recognized a new way to “get the message out”, but was willing to spend the time with a non-geologist getting the facts correct, and describing the broad scope of the current-day stakes.
If any of you are so inclined, I would suggest you reach outside of your normal circles and try bringing the concepts down to layman’s terms, to explain the issues in ways that will resonate with the individual’s daily life and obstacles, not as a policy decision or theoretical equation. Only by reaching their hearts will you change their minds.
Thanks for listening, and I will now bow out of the nuclear discussion, as that is beyond the scope of my Rare Earth research (though I do know a little about Thorium and molten salt reactors).
Ann Bridges
Author of Private Offerings* and Rare Mettle
*Named in 10 Best Business Books of 2015 by Wealth Management Magazine
website: http://www.AuthorAnnBridges.wordpress.com
publisher: http://balcony7.com/authors/ann-bridges/
Thank you for the awesome comment 🙂 I agree fully 🙂
You are so on point here! We will never win this argument without a concise compelling message; and that message needs to speak to today’s audience. Twitter, snapchat, youtube, reddit, memes.
Very disappointed to learn of Nye’s ignorance.
Cheers
Thank you for your comment 🙂 And a supportive one at that 🙂
It just frustrates me, the irony, decades of people complaining about a public that needs to be educated, they themselves failing to learn from their own repeated failure. XD
It’s like the works flow is thus: Throws facts > no effect > complain about target not learning > fail to learn fact throwing has no effect > repeat. X) /smh
And yeah, I don’t know what Nye’s deal is at all. I can only speculate he’s too close to the left on every other issue he feels compelled to adopt this one as well? Particularly ironic in his case as a walking truncheon against climate change (and therefore science) denial.
We need a movie like Oliver Stone’s JFK, but instead of targeting the fascist shadow government’s conspiracy to murder a good President and prevent any honest investigation, target the same fascist shadow government’s conspiracy to suppress the intellectual development of the population, of which nuclear power is an important part. Include documentary of JFK’s promotion of breeder reactors and nuclear-powered rockets, vs. the Rapaport Report!
Good movies are extremely helpful. Pandora’s promise was ok in that regard but yes fiction is king. I gotta say though between china and india, it looks like humanity is gonna be just fine. I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to empower America any further. We’ve not been good with that power at all and as much as we blame our leaders, they only live to do evil because we allow it so it’s on us too, collectively at least.
In the USA, it appears to be true that there is a large cohort on the left that is stupid enough to be anti-nuclear. The only Republicans that I would trust to be pro-civilian-nuclear are those with absolutely no liking for coal, gas, petroleum, or the fake solar-powered “renewables” industries, which are either (or both) a romantic nostalgic delusion of the neo-Rousseau variety, or a deliberate Trojan Horse of the Fossil Carbon Industry
I can actually name one such person. She is Christine Whitman, who was once EPA Administrator.
But nuclear power in Britain, France, and probably elsewhere was originally, and conceivably needs everywhere to be, a socialist idea.
Russia, China, India, and Norway may not be socialist, but except to the extent that Russia and China are themselves single capitalist monopolies, they are not corporation-dominated as the USA is.
How’s this: “Nuclear energy is not Renewable” is a Government Lie.
The MSRE, in the 1960s, showed that neutrons from the fission of fissile uranium 235 or 233 can generate fissile uranium 233 to replace it.
The reactor is so unpromising for bombs that when Nixon cut AEC funding, the AEC cut the MSR program.