Uncovering the Nuclear Mindset

Jacqueline Hettel, Assistant Director, Institute Humanities Research Nexus Lab

The regulation of the nuclear power industry in the United States has been called into question several times over the past 40 yearsoften in reaction to events at domestic nuclear generating sites like that of the Browns Ferry fire in 1975, an accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, and most recently an international event resulting from a tsunami that affected the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Criticisms about the actions of the NRC, and even the language of the industry, have been made by individuals for political reasons. One book in particular has been published titled Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima, which claims that there is a linguistic filter of the nuclear mindset that the nuclear power industry and its proponents use for rhetorical means. However, the authors of this text do not provide any description for the language of the nuclear power industry in making their claims. In order for any assumption to be made regarding whether or not there is any attempt to hide the truth about nuclear dangers (Bell No Word for Meltdown: The Return of Nukespeak), we must first understand the actual language used by the nuclear power industry. Using a language-based model sampled from documents in the NRCs ADAMS database of publicly-available documents, very distinct differences in the construction of meaning and use of industry terms like safety, technical, and even nuclear were uncovered. Interestingly, investigations of these words in different contextswhether or not it came from a regulatory official, licensee, or from a member of the publicyielded fascinating insights into the differences in culture, perspective, and behavior of those different groups. These differences, it will be argued, are the missing pieces of data that when revealed allow us to truly understand the nuclear mindset.

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