Public engagement
Nuclear power: why educating the public won’t work
The Hitchhiker’s have be grappling with one of the hardest, and most important questions this month, ‘Education : how do we engage the public?’. Caroline McCalman, provides some perspective. Three years ago, a few months into my PhD, my colleagues and I in the Nuclear Societies research network at the University of Sheffield were invited to attend the annual […]
Nuclear disaster news: a case study.
Marika Hietala, Ph.D. researcher from The University of Sheffield, discusses and compares how the news of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was distributed in West Cumbria (UK) and Satakunta (Finland). Fukushima: Initial reception When the nuclear disaster occurred in Fukushima in March 2011 I was busy with my undergrad dissertation and as a result, oblivious to […]
Fukushima – pointing the finger
The sheer amount of media coverage of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been nothing short of staggering. Huge initial television and newspaper coverage of the incident as it unfolded bloated into a swathe of online articles and blogs by both professional journalists and members of the public. The advent of social media meant […]
Fukushima – the reacton from nuclear engineering communities
The Fukushima-Daiichi meltdowns certainly turned the opinions of many people and governments against nuclear power – including Germany and Italy, the UK being a notable exception. However, the reaction within the nuclear research and engineering community itself has not been one of ‘radical re-thinking’ or ‘course changes’. Amongst technologists, what transpired in Japan isn’t really […]
Morality in the media?
The 11th of March marks the 5 year anniversary since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Osman uses the opportunity to discuss the responsibility of the media and a moral obligation to represent truth. It’s fairly clear that the popular opinion of nuclear power after the Fukushima incident of 2011 was quite negatively affected. A poll commissioned by the BBC in the immediate […]
Better communication between authorities and the public essential
In March we will be discussing the impact of media coverage of major nuclear disasters, asking how this affects the image, or public perception, of the nuclear industry. New Hitchhiker, PhD student Connaugh Fallon, gets things started with a perspective on Fukushima, before and after a nuclear education. Public perception of the nuclear industry is inevitably shaped by […]
A Comment on Nuclear Ethics
By Mark Williams After a day of discussion around the ethics of nuclear, one thing seems to be clear: people want to know more about the risks, and they want dialogue with experts in the form of an open forum.Earlier this month in Manchester University’s School of Chemistry, 3 invited speakers, who have a range […]
Nuclear and Society: an outsider’s perspective
By Elizabeth Harper On the 27th January, I attended a lecture entitled ‘In The Public Eye: Nuclear Energy and Society’, given by Malcolm Grimston as part of The University of Manchester’s Dalton Seminar Series. This was set to be a particularly compelling lecture because, as we all know, nuclear has something of a PR problem […]
Nuclear don’t need no education?
By Helena S Davies Science, like countless other specialist subjects and pursuits, is continually guilty of segregating itself into two groups: those that know and everyone else. Now this former group is persistently encouraged and chastised for ensuring that the group consisting of everyone else (otherwise known as the public) are kept informed and are […]