Why Nuclear Scares Us, and Why It Shouldn’t
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Written by DDL Smith, Author
DDL Smith is a British novelist known for ‘Detective Dion’ and the eco-horror novel ‘Decay’. His independently published novels have attained global reach with his ‘think like a publisher’ mentality.
With the release of Decay, an eco-horror about the legacy of nuclear orphan sources, it is worth reflecting on why fear still surrounds nuclear energy. Fear has shaped public opinion for decades, yet fear itself can be a dangerous force. It can stall progress, distort our views, and obscure the facts.
Nuclear power holds a singular place in the imagination. It is seen as one of the most feared, most scrutinized, and least understood technologies of our time. To scientists and engineers, the process is simple, split uranium atoms, release heat, turn water into steam, and spin a turbine.
Outside technical circles, the picture is different. The public view is shaped by accidents, headlines, and long shadows of disaster, fueled by disasters and fallout maps.
Nuclear today: Building for the future
Across the United Kingdom, a new generation of nuclear projects is taking shape. Sites like Hinkley Point C in Somerset and the Sizewell development on the Suffolk coast mark the country’s largest investment in nuclear power for decades. Together, these stations are designed to provide stable, low-carbon electricity for millions of homes and form a backbone for Britain’s transition away from fossil fuels.
For policymakers, nuclear offers what renewables like wind and solar alone cannot. A constant supply of low-emission energy that supports the peaks and troughs of wind and solar. Each project promises jobs, infrastructure investment, and long-term security.
Yet progress relies on more than engineering excellence. It also depends on public confidence. Engineering builds the station. Trust builds consent. Yet, the public won’t always understand the science and the safety mechanisms taught. As humans, we rely on stories. The stories people remember, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Changing the narrative behind nuclear is key to building a future that relies on nuclear energy. It’s why outreach and providing a better narrative are vital. Yet, recent outreach to several major UK nuclear projects, including Hinkley Point and Sizewell, revealed another challenge, silence. Both declined to provide comment, citing workload and the volume of media requests. Their reluctance is understandable, but it highlights an industry still uneasy about public dialogue. If communication remains gated behind press lines and corporate statements, confidence can only grow so far.
Why fear persists
Let’s take a look at how fear persists in many of us regarding nuclear. A few years ago, I was flying into Leipzig, Germany. Through the window, I spotted a colossal cooling tower. In that moment, I wondered, "How much radiation did I just absorb?"
Later, I remembered that Germany was already in the process of shutting down its reactors after the 2011 Fukushima incident. The tower I saw might not have been active at all, or even part of a conventional plant. But the shape, the classic hyperboloid of cooling towers, was all I needed.
That flight over Germany showed me how powerful symbols are. My mind locked on the tower as though it were radioactive, ignoring the radiation exposure I had just received from the sun on that same flight. It’s a small, fragile example of how perception works, we seize on fears, even when they’re disconnected from reality.
Despite decades of safe reactor operation worldwide, nuclear power carries a persistent shadow. Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island remain embedded in public memory. For many, they function as shorthand for catastrophe. These events, though rare, loom larger than the billions of reactor-hours where nothing dramatic occurred.
The media reinforces this imbalance. Headlines almost never read “nuclear plant operates safely for another year.” In contrast, stories about “nuclear accidents” draw attention, drama, and repeat viewings. That asymmetry shapes what people believe. Risk perception is rarely decided by numbers, it’s shaped by what people see, hear, and imagine.
Psychologists call this the availability heuristic, we estimate how dangerous something is by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid images of reactors in crisis outweigh simpler narratives of steady operation. Scientists have noted that nuclear risks are prime candidates for this bias because so much of the public discourse involves dramatic coverage and vivid associations.
Facts vs stories
Fukushima offers a striking example of how fear and narrative distort reality. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 19,000 people. The media images of waves crashing into nuclear reactors fused disaster and nuclear danger in the public mind. Yet official figures show no deaths from acute radiation sickness, and only one death recognized by a government review as possibly linked to radiation (a worker’s lung cancer) under compensation rules.
Still, more than 2,300 “disaster-related” deaths have been attributed to the evacuation itself.
Because the public remembers images more than numbers, many link “nuclear disaster” with “death tolls,” even when the primary causes were natural hazards or evacuation harm.
That link has proven dangerous for nuclear rollout, fears compound faster than facts.
By contrast, more than one million people globally die each year from air pollution tied to fossil fuel use. But because the story of air pollution isn’t as dramatic as a reactor explosion, people see it as less of a threat.
Nuclear design is built on redundancy upon redundancy, multiple safety systems, thick containment structures, layers of regulatory oversight, international treaties, and inspections. On paper, nuclear is one of the most tightly regulated and secure industries on Earth.
Yet stories often have more power than spreadsheets. Popular culture imagines worlds permanently scarred by radiation. In the Fallout games, civilization crumbles for centuries after nuclear war. In reality, radiation fades more quickly, visitors walk across the Trinity test site in New Mexico today without the fatal exposure those games would suggest. Fiction plays with worst-case scenarios, fact shows how science contains and controls risk. The danger comes when the two are blurred.
Fear in this context is not irrational. It is how humans process threats. We notice danger more readily than reassurance. But fear can become mismatched to evidence.
Towards a balanced narrative
The challenge is not to dismiss fear but to meet it. Anxiety cannot be erased by statistics. It requires conversation. A discussion that is open and honest. Industry voices must learn to speak in more than technical terms. They must speak in human ones.
Projects like Sizewell C face a cultural as well as an engineering test. Building confidence may demand as much work as pouring concrete or wiring turbines. Because trust is not engineered, it is earned, slowly, through presence and participation.
When I was writing Decay, I wanted its portrayal of radiation and acute radiation sickness to be as accurately horrific as facts would allow. But finding detailed, scientific information about ARS was surprisingly difficult. Not because it’s hidden, but because it’s so rare. The rarity itself is a testament to the progress made in nuclear safety. Not everyone has the time or patience to deep-dive into nuclear science, that’s why the narrative around fear needs to change.
The nuclear industry cannot stay locked behind acronyms and press offices. It needs to open its doors, invite curiosity, and work with the public rather than around them. Engineers need to think like storytellers to show nuclear energy not as a horror of the past, but as a tool for the future.
A balanced narrative begins when expertise meets empathy. We should understand people’s fear and change the narrative because we remember stories of a bright or dull future, not press releases on double containment units and core-catchers.
Reflection
Nuclear energy is not free of risk. No technology is. But its risks are known, measured, and outweighed by what it can deliver, stable, low-carbon power in a time that desperately needs it. What endures most stubbornly is not danger, but story.
And stories matter. They shape how we see, how we fear, and how we trust. Fiction has long cast nuclear energy in shadow, from wastelands and glowing ruins to apocalyptic decay. Yet those imagined worlds have value. They remind us of responsibility, of humility before our own creations.
In Decay, an orphan source haunts the forest floor, a reflection of how carelessness, not the science, breeds danger. It’s fiction, but it mirrors a truth. Fear grows in silence.
We already trust radiation in medicine, electricity in every device we touch. Nuclear energy belongs in the same company, a technology once feared, now proven, and ready to serve. The difference will not be written in spreadsheets alone. It will be written in stories, outreach, and transparency.
Explore the fiction novel Decay, available online at all large book retailers.
Read more from DDL Smith
DDL Smith, Author
DDL Smith is a London-based novelist whose cross-genre, contemporary fiction reflects issues and fears in modern society. His creative roots started from a young age with theatre and scriptwriting for online content. When transitioning to novels, his goal was to use marketing techniques to ‘think like a publisher’ while staying independent. A tactic that has his books available in book chains across the globe.
