An Emotional Approach to Future Sustainable Nuclear Energy Development

An Emotional Approach to Future Sustainable Nuclear Energy Development<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Alain Michel from Uranium Institute Symposium 2000

One of the obstacles, possibly the most important one, to rapid future re-development of nuclear energy is people’s anxiety, mistrust and total lack of enthusiasm for the uses of this form of energy. This is essentially an emotional problem.

Nuclear energy seems to be related in people’s mind to a number of scary images:

• The atomic bomb.
• The scientist or engineer, technology obsessed (if not mad), and thus dangerous.
• Proliferation of dangerous materials, collected by super-skilled terrorists.
• Radioactive wastes, that will put future generations at risk.
• Exploding power plants (see <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Chernobyl) and the ensuing radioactive contamination.

When nuclear energy’s peaceful applications became public after the end of World War II, the hope that it would be the panacea to all our energy problems was vivid. Alain Le Guernec(Ref 13) remembers: "I loved this year 2000 seen from the 1950s, with its atomic rockets we could find in multicoloured toys made in painted tinplate, cheap and kitsch at the same time, with its utopia at ‘trois francs six sous’ from Science et Vie magazine."

The popular science books of the 1950s — especially those coming from Eastern Europe — were full of hopes for the potential uses of new technologies. In L’Energie de l’Atome (Ref 14),we find descriptions of future nuclear energy applications: power plants for electricity production, metallurgy, propulsion of large boats, and also railway engines and aeroplanes, as well as space rockets and small power reactors used as space power sources.

Some predictions became real applications, some never came true for technical or economic reasons, but some also because they scared people. The dream of the US Air Force and its political supporters to have a machine that could fly with the sole time limitation of the "quantity of sandwiches and coffee required by the crew" had to be stopped by President Kennedy after a billion dollars had already been spent (Ref 15). Other uses of nuclear energy were halted by fierce opposition, such as in the space programme, although they had been demonstrated to a large extent.

On the other hand, huge nuclear-powered aircraft carriers that can navigate for months without refuelling, provoked no objections in the public. Anxiety about the activities of nuclear submarines came mostly about abandoned Russian submarines in the Kara Sea. Probably few people even know that the big ice-breakers are nuclear powered. But crowds have been motivated to stand in front of the doors of nuclear power plants, shouting to have them stopped and dismantled.

The nuclear industry should also re-evaluate its technical solutions/proposals, looking at them through the eyes of the public, with its dreams for ideal solutions using a minimum level of technology, with its ethical requirements: "We need electricity but the end does not justify the means." (Ref 16)This is not the industry’s usual attitude: we consider that if we have a good and reasonable technical solution, we should be able to inform and convince the public that it is the best we can do now. But can we be sure of that? "It is vital that people in the nuclear industry are able to engage competently in the ethical discourse. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can counter moral stances simply with practical arguments, perhaps it is even counterproductive…" (Ref 16)

Public acceptance is presently essential. During the Scientific Forum "Sustainable Development: a Role for Nuclear Power?" held in Vienna during the IAEA General Assembly in September 1999, it was said that, "Investors will not tolerate long delays and the ensuing high costs. So a key issue is to have social acceptance."

Basically, the new concepts want to fulfil the conditions that would make them "politically correct reactors", as described during a special session of the American Nuclear Society 1999 Annual Meeting in Boston. These conditions are:

• Proliferation-proof.
• Demonstrated deterministic inherent safety.
• No reprocessing and a feasible scheme for disposal of spent fuel.
• Competitive with natural gas electricity production.

Personally, I do not think the last condition is essential, although it seems so important in the eyes of economists and investors. What does competitiveness mean against a product, natural gas, whose price is so unstable, whose security of supply is so dependent on political conditions, and (because it cannot be stored) whose supply is so dependent on special contractual conditions with major low price large users?

There is now concerted action within the European Union on smaller gas-cooled reactor types. It gives a lot of hope that a solution which is much more "public friendly" will come out of this research. ECN in the Netherlands is working on the ACACIA project (Ref 17),an industrial heat and power cogeneration system that will generate 14 MWe of electricity and 17 tonnes/hour of steam, using a reactor developed by a US/Russian programme, or a Japanese programme, or a South African programme. When this project was presented to the public, there was no association in people’s mind with Chernobyl.

I have a special appreciation for the Eskom project in South Africa. It is an international collaboration involving South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Russia, etc. on a rather small modular plant (100 to 115 MWe output). It must meet the conditions mentioned above. I hope it will be mostly built in a factory instead of on-site, thus leading to shorter construction time, and that it will be manufactured in a series instead of one at a time.

These reactor projects will at some time in the future be submitted to public scrutiny; their size, safety, modularity, the possibility of factory production that makes them somewhat similar in production to the familiar large aircraft, are positive factors. But again, this is what we would have called in the past a top-down decision process. Should we not start an inquiry or, better described, a vast study and concentrate on the conditions that would make a reactor acceptable to a large proportion of the public? A sort of bottom-up decision process. Are we certain that the "politically correct" criteria mentioned above are those that would make a nuclear plant easily accepted, or even favoured?

Can the nuclear industry also do something of this nature with nuclear wastes and the associated radioactivity? This is certainly the core of the problem, the most difficult question. It will most probably take at least a generation of efforts to familiarise the public with this natural phenomenon. Some in the industry believe that medical and food applications, which are gaining more and more acceptance, will help in this direction. Radioactive sources have been accepted on satellites to produce electricity, in the past they were also in pacemakers and smoke detectors. How small does a source have to be to become accepted as a common tool?

It is strange to think that all of us have accepted carrying potentially dangerous explosives in our cars (a full petrol or liquid gas tank), and the introduction of the same in our homes (gas bottles of all sizes), although they have a demonstrated capacity to explode. We see cars exploding in most thrillers. And we do not care. We could heat our homes for free, if we accepted carefully conditioned nuclear wastes in our cellars, but this looks at the present time like a mad proposal. For ever?

Final Remarks

If the nuclear industry really wants to have a re-deployment of nuclear plants — and I think society will need it — it must gain more popularity among the public, because in the end this matters more than anything else.

I suggest that we in the industry should be more emotional in our approach, and possibly more dramatic. Shall we dramatise the contradiction of halting nuclear plants while we have to reduce our CO2 generation? Shall we advertise

how scandalous it is to burn clean natural gas, a source of so many future manufactured products? "Is this ethical behaviour?", questioned recently Fred Decamps, the head of ONDRAF, responsible for nuclear waste management in Belgium.

In our scientific communication, we must take into account the emotional sensitivity of the layman. Why do we use unfriendly units such as Becquerels, leading to impressive high numbers? We must change our morbid vocabulary which speaks of skeletons and coffins, sarcophagus and burial. We must remember that even on such scientific questions, there is a place for emotions in our communication. Guedeney observed even in 1973 that even among the power plant professionals, "Emotional factors always took over the intellectual ones in the evaluation of the radiation risk, whatever the function or the hierarchic rank."(Ref 5)

I suggested above that we should adopt a more bottom-up approach. Fred Decamps summarised the required evolution as going from a DAD (decide, act and defend) approach to a DDD approach:

• Dialogue, for a sufficiently long time to get out all the opposition and uncertainties.
• Decide, but give sufficient explanation of the reasons for the decision.
• Deliver, what has been promised in due time.

Governments and their advisors have widely integrated in their decision processes the need for dialogue and consensus research. Be it the House of Lords Committee in the UK, the Ampere Commission in Belgium, or the nuclear consensus talks in Germany, discussion and transparency seems to be the leitmotiv. But the resultant publicity will almost certainly increase the need to integrate in the preparation of responses the emotional reactions of the public.

G Friedman observed that, "These subjective reactions of the population must be taken, in their determination and their implications, as objectives, possibly leading to important effects and thus needing to be closely studied. The people in charge of the development of atomic energy in various countries have until now, neglected them too much."(Ref 5) And this was written in 1962!

Let us remember that to convey on TV his positive message on nuclear activities, the charm of Georges Charpak, his abundant white hair and seducing blue eyes, did more than his reasoning. People had the feeling that such a nice personality must tell the truth. We have to be a little less factual and technical, and a little more enthusiastic and emotional, and maybe nuclear activities will be slightly more acceptable.