Speaking recently with a friend who opposes nuclear power, I asked whether he might think differently if it went by another name. My suggestion was “sustainable steam power,” which is essentially what nuclear energy is. He said he wouldn’t; his mind would still conjure up images of nuclear bombs and nuclear winters. Incidentally, he explained this while sucking on an e-cigarette – or “vape,” as it’s now called. When the nicotine-ingesting technology first appeared in the late 2000s, the devices looked exactly like cigarettes (with a glowing tip and white stem), were branded “e-cigarettes,” and people “smoked” them. Someone then had the ingenious idea of calling them “vapes,” creating a new verb (“I’m vaping, not smoking”), and making the devices look like they’re made by Apple. Suddenly, it became an entirely different category from tobacco smoking, allowing users to conveniently ignore all the warnings they’d heard about cancer and heart disease.
There’s much to be said about semantic hacks that change people’s psychological frame. “Natural gas” is a classic example. Who doesn’t like natural things? More people probably would be unnerved about it being piped into their homes if it were called “methane energy” or “greenhouse gas energy.” I wouldn’t be the first person to argue that nuclear energy is the worst example of marketing in the past century, for it should never have been named after a weapon that had just killed hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Call it “sustainable steam power,” and it becomes nonthreatening. Call it “anti-coal power,” and it becomes ecologically aspirational.
I mention this because, first, I am somewhat an evangelist about nuclear, believing it to be one of the few genuine silver bullets for avoiding a climate catastrophe, and view anyone who opposes it as on par with vaccine dodgers and MAGA supporters – those who would gladly sacrifice the rest of society because of their own juvenile paranoia.
I mention it also because the Singaporean government this month became the latest in Southeast Asia to announce that it’s considering nuclear power. Natural-gas-fired plants currently provide 94 percent of Singapore’s electricity, but the city-state wants net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and lacks the space to develop enough solar or wind power. Apparently, the British consultancy Mott MacDonald has been hired to do a two-year feasibility study on nuclear power, which one presumes will include some analysis of the public’s views on nuclear.
Several opinion studies have been done in the region, and thankfully, the Nuclear Business Platform summarized them in an article in March. Overall, it’s the same story in most countries. There are surprisingly high levels of public support for nuclear energy, but there are equally high levels of public fear about its safety, and, particularly, much opposition to reactors being built anywhere near anyone. The section on Indonesia gives you a flavor of this:
As many as 94.27 percent of respondents agree with the benefits of nuclear power plants, while 92.53 percent believe that developers have good intentions, and 93.53 percent consider nuclear power plant operators to have sufficient competence. On the other hand, there are concerns about the risks of nuclear power plants, where 70.93 percent of respondents consider nuclear power plants as risky installations due to potential nuclear accidents and radiation leakage to the environment. As a result, the public prefers the location of nuclear power plants to be at least 30 kilometers from residential areas.
As I mentioned at the top, a cheap hack would be if everyone agreed to simply rebrand nuclear energy as something less unsettling. I doubt, however, that enough people would buy into this, nor would most governments think it’s a worthwhile endeavor, since most tend to be overly conventional in their thinking.
We just have to live with the fact that most people will hear the word “nuclear” and still think the worst. You could spend hours telling people that only 40-50 people have been directly killed by nuclear power accidents in half a century, whereas driving kills around 30,000 Indonesians each year. Or tell them that the chance of another Fukushima-like disaster is so small – I believe the odds are one in one billion per year, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency – while the chance of several Southeast Asian metropolises receding into the sea by the end of the century is a near certainty. All of this is undeniable, but my guess is that hearing these facts would produce the opposite effect, with people unable to not conjure up post-apocalyptic scenes by the mere mention of nuclear.
Our brains are hardwired to be more alert to black-swan catastrophes (those that are hard to predict and rare) than to more common threats. We’ve become so habituated to road accidents, flooding and pollution that they largely go unnoticed and, to some extent, are accepted as an unavoidable trade-off. A 2022 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that participants overestimated the risks of nuclear accidents compared to other types of disasters and were more willing to read and share a news article about a nuclear accident than other types of accidents. It reasoned that this could be because “a behavioral immune system evolved to supplement our physiological immune system by motivating people to avoid coming into contact with pathogens in the first place.” That sounds entirely plausible, and it may explain why we do not have an evolutionary fear of traveling at 130 kilometers per hour in a tin box.
That nuclear disasters are so rare also probably makes them terrifying. If there had been a nuclear power disaster every year since 1954 (when the Soviet Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant started operations), perhaps we’d have become less doom-mongering and more blasé about the risks. Likewise, if hundreds of nuclear reactors are built around your city, and if within five years your hair hasn’t fallen out or your children haven’t become Marvel anti-heroes, your safety worries would probably be dimmed somewhat.
So it could be a case that fear will only dissipate once adoption of the technology has reached a certain mass, which, incidentally, was also the case after the invention of the automobile and after the invention of the smallpox vaccine. An interesting paper published in 2016 found that land prices of homes in China within 40 kilometers of nuclear power plants dropped by about 18 percent one month after the 2011 Fukushima radiation leakage. Within a few years, however, prices were back to normal.
As for the NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”), this isn’t exclusive to nuclear reactors; even the most wool-shirted environmentalist would oppose the construction of an ugly wind farm or sprawling solar power project on their doorstep. In the end, they must be built near someone. However, the NIMBYism is probably another result of our doom-mongering, which could be gotten around by some well-designed publicity. My guess is that most people still think of nuclear reactors as being the size of the Death Star and colonizing entire towns. (Springfield in The Simpsons, for instance.) But search online for photos of small modular reactors (or SMRs), the type that most Southeast Asian governments are considering, and you’ll see that they are more like data centers than doomsday machines, and most are designed to be placed next to already-ugly factories and warehouses. The smallest can even be put in the back of a lorry. In other words, you wouldn’t know an SMR was in your neighborhood unless someone told you.
One obvious solution would be to avoid having to build the reactors on land. Last year, the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering announced that it is researching floating SMR power generation platforms, effectively a nuclear power plant on the sea. (They’re known as OFNPs in the business.) This sounds like a marvelous idea, especially for archipelagic Indonesia and coastal Vietnam and Singapore. (Only Laos should be excused for not taking an interest.) They would be resistant to earthquakes and tsunamis (so not another Fukushima), and could be easily moved between locations depending on their energy needs. Surrounded by water, I believe it reduces the chances of a meltdown to close to zero. From a behavioralist perspective, they would massively decrease public opposition, since out-of-sight-out-of-mind would remove the fear factor for nine out of ten people.
In my view, governments should clear out their central bank vaults for research and development on anything that could be moved offshore. Offshore wind power is now old hat in Southeast Asia, but offshore solar could soon be a game-changer. Last year, China launched the first-ever floating solar facility off the coast of Shandong Province. Likewise, offshore nuclear power (sorry, “offshore sustainable steam power”) needs to be added near the top of every government’s environmental plans.