By Eric Matthew Clelland
The civilian nuclear industry has the goals of deploying the necessary power needed for the hyper scaling world and producing man-made medical isotopes for curing even late-stage cancer among other miracles. It is not coupled with the development of nuclear weapons and in fact, many measures are being taken to maintain non-proliferation. There are exciting challenges being tackled in the modern nuclear engineering industry; however, there exists one challenge that is the most difficult to design around: public perception. An average person, when prompted to think about nuclear engineering, may recall images of mushroom clouds or recount past nuclear accidents because that’s all that comes up in popular media. However, nuclear technology does its best work in the contained, warm core of a nuclear power plant or at scales that human eyes can’t perceive curing the worst cancers with the power of nuclear medicine. Yet, people in the nuclear field are seen as radioactive people and discourse arises immediately after their occupation is mentioned. By collecting the experiences of engineers and psychologists, I have uncovered some of the reasons nuclear engineering generates social friction. I will also explore best known methods to defuse those social discourse situations.
I interviewed an engineer at a civilian nuclear power company: Mr. Remi Le Thai, Responsible Engineer at Kairos Power. Mr. Le Thai had no original intentions of pursuing a career in the nuclear industry post-graduation having graduated UC Berkeley with his master’s degree in mechanical engineering specializing in fluids. Yet, when Kairos, a nuclear reactor design firm based in Alameda, California hired Remi as an intern he rose all the way through the ranks to the title of Responsible Engineer, a role of responsibility specifically for the design of the primary coolant systems of Kairos’ reactors.
I had posed the question: “How do your friends and family feel about your work?” to Mr. Le Thai.
Remi stopped to recall a memory that I had triggered within him when an unspecified person voiced their concerns about Remi specifically, a man in his mid to late 30s, for the nuclear terror that was the nuclear arms race of The Cold War that ended in the 90s and disasters from the past. He responded to the discourse by explaining that Kairos is a civilian nuclear engineering firm that has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or proliferation. He said to me: “Yes — nuclear is a controversial field but there are fantastic practical applications and to compare Kairos’ efforts to a weapons program is a wholly false equivalence and engineers in the nuclear field must regularly and professionally explain things to disarm these judgments.”
Other fears of nuclear engineers exist; one is the fear of nuclear waste and radiation as well as the public fascination of nuclear accidents. “Disgust sensitivity” is a phrase coined for the immune response-like reaction people have towards topics like nuclear technology. Anne-Sophie Hacquin from the Paris Science and Letters University, Department of Cognitive Studies invoked this phrase and this phycological phenomena in her article “Disgust sensitivity and public opinion on nuclear energy” published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology [1]. Much like the regular immune system, the behavioral immune system serves to protect the body from pathogens or other unperceivable risks by putting people in a state of heightened alert when faced with intangible danger like germs and nuclear radiation by similarity. Hacquin emphasizes a disgust sensitivity people experience particularly towards nuclear technologies by studying people’s behaviors in experiments.
Hacquin found that people would overestimate the fatalities caused by the Fukushima nuclear plant emergencies and underestimate the casualties directly caused by the earthquake and tsunami that directly preceded it. Throughout her experiments, Hacquin developed a “disgust score” for her participants. In the final test, Hacquin presented either an economic pro-nuclear argument and/or an argument to address the fears of nuclear waste. She discovered that addressing participants’ fears about nuclear waste most optimally reduced her participant’s disgust score because it targeted the part of their anxiety that equated nuclear radiation to pathogens or germs that the behavioral immune system protects us from. Addressing fear is the most optimal solution to people’s concerns.
Another tool to use to begin matching social discourse is to find a point of “Reluctant acceptance”, perhaps this doesn’t sound like a winning word but it’s a signpost on the path to common ground. Professor Nicholas Pidgeon’s from Cardiff University’s School of Psychology specializes in Environmental Psychology and Risk, and he gave a lecture about framing discourse within the discussion of nuclear power and climate change [2]. He reframes the fears people have about nuclear power (or any controversial technology) by comparing it to their greater fears of things like climate change to find a conversational foothold he calls “Reluctant acceptance”. The process of discourses is an important step to building trust. A person may start out with cold opinions but engaging in conversation with them with purposeful reframing of their concerns then often people will accept the ideas of the Nuclear Industry when it’s framed as combatting their existential fears of climate change or cancer.
A Nuclear Newsletter article reinforces the general population’s rising favorability towards nuclear power. As of 2021, 76% of people surveyed are in favor of nuclear power up from 74% in 2010 and a minority 49% in 1983 [3]. Be warned, this support is fragile and must be nurtured. The rising support is driven by reluctant acceptance because of other problems society faces such as energy prices and
climate change. But as stated, reluctant acceptance is a great place to start the conversation, starting there and addressing people’s disgust sensitivity can bring someone closer to the persuaded side.
If something isn’t selling you can change the product, but when you’re convinced it’s perfect, change the customer. I’ve explored a firsthand account of the social stigma engineers in the nuclear industry face because of their occupation. Psychology is a technology that we can use to help people understand and accept our perspective of the world.
[1]
A.-S. Hacquin, S. Altay, L. Aarøe, and H. Mercier, “Disgust sensitivity and public opinion on nuclear energy,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 80, p. 101749, Apr. 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101749.
[2]
The National Diet of Japan, “The National Diet of Japan The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission,” 2012. Available: https://www.nirs.org/wp
content/uploads/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf
[3]
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Nick Pidgeon presentation – Public Risk Perceptions and Nuclear Energy in Britain,” YouTube, Aug. 01, 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btNNql7R-1E (accessed Nov. 19, 2025).
[4]
“Support for nuclear energy grows with climate change concerns,” www.ans.org. https://www.ans.org/news/article-3114/support-for-nuclear-energy-grows-with-climate-change concerns/