JEREMY GORDON | OPINION


The phrase ‘accident tolerant fuel’ has severe negative impacts. It conveys the idea that accidents are a daily risk; that the


nuclear industry is ‘tolerant’ of accidents; and that normal fuels must be ‘accident intolerant’, which sounds even worse


ideas and drew a line between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ forms of nuclear fuel by its own free will. The name also makes the mistake of competing on


safety, which should never be a selling point but rather the expected default of any competent industry. To be vocal about increasing safety is to tacitly admit you were not safe enough before. And it further implies you might have been lying all those times you said nuclear power was ‘safe, clean and reliable’, so it undermines trust as well. This is not paranoid anti-nuclear hysteria. These are


rational, logical and natural reactions to messaging which have been studied and documented for decades. We cannot blame the European Commission for standing on the safe side of a line that industry itself has drawn. How has a poor choice of words ended up costing


millions? The term ‘accident tolerant fuel’ originated in 2012, a


year after the Fukushima accident, with a programme of research at the US Department of Energy. It is unfortunate but understandable that to gain access to this programme other people had to use the same term. However, the name inevitably spread from scientific papers and government documents to presentations, job titles, product names and eventually to full page colour adverts, press releases and social media posts. Now of course it is cemented in the EU Taxonomy as well. The name became notorious among industry


communicators, who facepalmed, rolled their eyes and shook their heads at the mention of it. Everyone has a story of pointing out the problem and being told, “Yeah, okay. I see what you mean, but that’s just what it is called. There’s nothing we can do.” Chatting about this over coffee was never the way to change it, however, and I regret not using my platform to encourage a change of name until now. For most of the last decade fuel experts and the industry’s leaders all knew accident tolerant fuel was not a good name but thought it didn’t matter. The importance placed on getting this communication issue right was not even the tiniest fraction of what would be placed on getting a technical issue right. Why not? There is a reason why an entire category of people within the nuclear industry — its communicators — can be unanimous in their professional opinion for a whole decade yet still be completely overruled. It is an uncomfortable truth about the nuclear industry that you will surely recognise: the only real ‘nuclear people’ are the qualified engineers and anyone else’s opinion can be discarded. The nuclear industry is too often an engineering


monoculture and we need to face up to the results. Of course, it is completely correct to prioritise nuclear engineering knowledge when we are concerned with the actual functioning of the plants. That knowledge is the foundation of the whole industry. But we often find nuclear experts in charge of non-nuclear aspects of work as well — business, strategy, public affairs and more — even


communication. This has come about over many years of hiring young engineers and then promoting them across the organisation as they mature. They are trusted and seen as ‘real nuclear people’ by the engineers already at the top. While an engineer’s cautious and calculating approach to


risk is exactly what you need to run a nuclear power plant, it is wrong to apply it across an industry. Non-engineering areas of work deal with information, theories and practices that cannot be measured, charted or proven to be correct. Few engineers are comfortable in these uncertain situations where their ways of understanding and decision-making do not work. As risk aversion becomes ingrained it prevents the


nuclear industry from adopting strategies that have been successful in other industries. It disempowers staff with non-engineering skills and stops them being trusted to achieve their best. Soon, people who could change things stop joining the company, and there is a toxic environment that makes people with other important skills disengage, give up hope or leave. Given that the engineering mindset dominates every part of the global nuclear industry, is it any wonder things have not gone well for it at the political and cultural levels? To give you an example of how extreme this can be, I was


recently told by an engineer that being a communicator is “useless” and sets off “red flags”. I am just “a regurgitator and repackager” of “word salad” that is the “equivalent of spam”. I was told that “actual learning” from “an actual engineer” is the only “real meat” and it is more important than being able to “sway politicians”. This person’s conviction that engineers reign supreme shows two serious detachments from reality. First, convincing politicians about nuclear is one of the industry’s foremost challenges, not some kind of distraction. (I wish I did know how to do it.) Second, if the way to influence politicians was simply to share the industry’s abundant knowledge of engineering then the global prospects for nuclear would be very different. I believe in the talent and determination of the nuclear


industry, as well as its technology, but I know it can do better. I want to see it learn to avoid costly unforced errors like the term ‘accident tolerant fuel’. It is not too late to change that name, or the culture that stuck with it against all advice. Nuclear is not going to stop being an engineering field, and it doesn’t need to. But the industry needs to recognise that nuclear cannot be separated from its cultural and political context and managed by the methods of engineering alone. One root cause of nuclear’s chronic underachievement has been that its engineering monoculture does not respect the different ways that people process, understand and act in the world. Rather than go on being distrustful and dismissive of non- engineering ways of knowing, the industry must learn to embrace them and put them to work. ■


www.neimagazine.com | March 2022 | 13


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