The effect of big media: A real conversation

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine that interestingly turned nuclear. She's married, mother of one beautiful nine month old girl, in her late 20's and intelligent enough to have a degree in business. She has no nuclear energy involvement in any way and never has had - and we usually never talk about it specifically at all.



Recently she and her husband took a brief three-day trip up to one of the islands in Lake Erie for a short getaway. For those unfamiliar, the islands are far enough out that you must either take the ferry, one of the "Jet Express" high-speed ferries, or fly. Anyway, we were having a discussion about the trip when... let's call her "J" .. says the following.



J: "You know, we saw that nuclear plant over in Toledo from the boat. I thought about you."



Will: "Really? Did you get me a picture?"



J: "No, it was too far away. It was too small in the viewfinder."



There was some more general discussion about cameras, but I had mentioned having to write something for my blog and she told me I should write something about the plant she'd seen (which is Davis-Besse.) I had an idea at that point.



Will: "You know, when you were seeing that nuclear plant, did that bug you at all?"



J: "Yeah, it kind of flipped me out a little bit."



Will: "Why? Why did it bother you?"



J: "Because, it was close enough to f@#k me up, you know?!"



Let's pause here for a moment. The plant was far enough away that it was not possible to get any kind of photo of it even with a new digital camera with zoom.



She then offered that she'd been to the islands a few times before but it never bothered her those times... well, maybe she didn't really know what it was back then, she says.



Will: "So what happened in Japan really made you take notice now, anytime you know you're near a nuclear plant, is that it?"



J: "Yeah, before Japan I wouldn't have cared at all but now, you know, it's something you think about."



Will: "What if I told you that there are over a hundred nuclear plants all over the United States, some of them as old as the ones in Japan (I didn't go into detail on purpose here) and you never hear about them? They haven't had any accidents since TMI and no one gives them any thought most of the time."



J: "The ones in Japan didn't have any accidents either until now."



She said that like she'd just proved a point, or made one. But what it turns out she was really doing was expressing the best opinion she could based on her knowledge of the situation, which stems ENTIRELY from mainstream media.



At this point I suggested that these questions and her answers were going to be a blog post on APR. She was fine with that. I told her that one of the things we're trying to figure out is the general public's opinion on nuclear energy, and that she was a great example of the kind of demographic that's probably most misinformed. J has the TV or radio on lots, but only for background. Watches some news in and around baby care, house work, her job, time with her husband and extended family and so on. Not a TV junkie by any stretch, and oddly enough almost totally internet illiterate. In other words, as I let her know, a good candidate.



I asked her if she knew what really happened in Japan. She told me a convoluted story about the earthquake making the plant lose its air conditioning and then overheating and blowing up. There were other details, and events and so forth in her timeline which really was just kind of a hodge podge of real and purported events. She asked if that was right; I told her that her story was about 25% realistic if not perfectly factual and the rest was garbage. But I also immediately told her that I and many others of similar persuasion were really trying to get a handle on what the mainstream media had done to perception, so that her description (as best she could give it) was just what the doctor ordered.



I told her about certain "experts" who go on TV all the time, and make reports to unimportant scientific groups which always get reported on TV as well. She had no idea that such people were doing any of these things, if not all of them, for large consulting fees. I found that interesting.



Turns out she thought that the whole accident was a result of the earthquake. I told her "No, the plants got through the quake as well as could be expected; the real event that triggered this accident was the tsunami" and after a moment of trying to express essentially "well, duh" to me she did get to see that these are two different events, even if the one caused the other. My point that the earthquake was survivable by the plants while the tsunami was not did actually get across.



I asked her what could make her less scared of nuclear plants. She said she didn't know, but then added that she's not "freaked out" about it. She didn't realize there were so many more of them. She said that knowing a lot more about them may or may not help a whole lot in reality. Now here's the best part.



She told me she's far more scared at the corner gas station than she was seeing the plant from the boat, or on the islands. That's right! The gas station. "Sometimes you get a whiff of gas, you know..." she says. I add in "and you're standing right on top of all those big gas tanks underground, too!" to which she says "Exactly! I wonder about that when I have my baby in the car and I have to pull in there and you can smell gas and that's a lot more scary than some nuclear plant somewhere else."



J is not anti-nuclear. She's really not pro or anti anything in terms of policy or politics. She's open to new ideas but is most open to the truth. I think there are a lot of people like her out there... people who trust that the mainstream media will report what they need to know in a level of detail they can understand. I think she was a tiny bit surprised that there is so much money to be made on the anti-nuclear side by "consultants" who will denigrate nuclear energy.



Regardless of the proximity of the Davis-Besse plant, J plans to take her family back to the islands next year for another trip, and she intends to renew her wedding vows at a little gazebo she showed me a picture of. It looks like a really nice place. She can't wait to go back, either.



Looks like by the end of our visit the fear was gone. "Out of sight, out of mind" is perhaps a good thing for nuclear energy in some ways after all.



3:30 PM Eastern Friday August 12, 2011

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