Steve Kidd concludes that the fear that surrounds the word nuclear has to be removed. And the source of the fear is undoubtedly deep concerns about the impact of heightened levels of radiation. The big positive of nuclear is producing a huge amount of energy with a small quantity of material. The big negative is fear of radiation. The huge quantities of water at Fukushima containing very low levels of radiation have become a big issue because of this, while 100,000 people are still evacuated from their homes for the same reason.
The obvious conclusion is that until there is a proper understanding by the general public of radiation, the nuclear industry has no chance of reaching anywhere near the potential that its advocates hope for. There are lots of other worthy things that can be done in nuclear communications, as mentioned above. But even the greatest marketing genius could not successfully promote nuclear while there is such a deep climate of fear lying behind it. The industry has made many efforts in communications that can maybe be criticized as essentially avoiding this key very difficult issue. Kidd will produce another article that will look specifically at radiation and how we can take away something that is supposed to be very special about nuclear. This is clearly a fix that will take a long time, but continuing to avoid it now just delays a realistic solution. Also see: https://i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/ConfrontingBias.pdf
http://www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionpublic-acceptance-is-there-any-progress-4425230/
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
