Nuclear Fear and Public Perception
Fear in the Headlines
When Russian troops seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in 2022, panic rippled across Europe.1 News alerts warned of catastrophe, maps of potential fallout spread across social media, and people stocked iodine tablets2 as if another Chernobyl was inevitable. Radiation monitors, however, told a different story: levels around the plant remained normal3, the reactors had been shut down4, and there was no danger to the public. But by the time experts said so, fear had already won.
This is the paradox of nuclear power. Its greatest danger is not always technical failure, but public perception. For most people, the word “nuclear” is less about watts of electricity than it is about disasters remembered: Chernobyl’s graphite fire5, Fukushima’s seawater flooding6, mushroom clouds over Hiroshima7. These images are vivid and terrifying. They overshadow the quieter reality that nuclear energy today is tightly regulated, incrementally safer, and statistically among the least deadly power sources we have8.
The shadow of nuclear weapons deepens the fear. I know that if the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever built, were dropped on the city where I sit writing this, it would vaporise me before I even knew it had happened9. That is the mental picture many carry when they hear “nuclear”. It hints at annihilation, not green electricity. The fact that civil nuclear power has nothing to do with hydrogen bombs matters little when the same word binds them together in public imagination.
The problem, then, is not that the science has failed. It is that the story has. Nuclear energy remains trapped in the narratives of fear and secrecy, unable to shed the ghosts of its past. If we are to confront climate change honestly, this gap between physics and perception must close. And that requires a different kind of work: not only engineering, but storytelling.
The Physics vs. the Fear
Radiation is not unique among environmental risks, but it is uniquely feared. Part of this is because most people have no intuitive sense of what it means. A doctor can explain cholesterol in terms of food, or air pollution in terms of smog. Radiation, by contrast, is invisible, tasteless and odourless. Unless it burns you quickly, as at Chernobyl, it is all but impossible to grasp.
That is why Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) has become the popular mental shorthand for nuclear risk. Images of Chernobyl firefighters in hospital beds, skin blistering and hair falling out, are seared into memory.10 ARS is cinematic: vomiting, burns, death within weeks. For the public, that is what radiation means. But in reality, ARS requires an enormous dose. Levels far beyond what most accidents or exposures could deliver.11
When I began researching ARS for a novel about a family poisoned by an orphan source, I expected to find a wealth of modern case studies. What I found instead was how thin the record is. Even recent medical reviews lean heavily on data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, and from Chernobyl in 1986. The fact that literature from seventy years ago is still the benchmark speaks volumes: ARS is so rare that medicine has almost no new material to work with.12
That rarity was what startled me most. Radiation sickness is one of the most feared conditions in the world, yet we know so little about it in practice because it hardly ever occurs. This fear even has a name: radiophobia. Surveys after Fukushima found that public anxiety about nuclear risk jumped to 83%, even when actual doses were within safe limits.13 Fear, more than fallout, remains the true legacy of radiation.
For the public, there are only two images: deadly radiation that melts skin, or official reassurances that the radiation they cannot see is “probably fine.” Both seem impossible to trust. Until nuclear experts can explain exposure in terms that make sense outside a lab, the conversation will remain dominated by fear rather than fact.
The Lessons of History
Public fear of nuclear power does not reset with each generation of reactors. It accumulates. Every mishap or disaster leaves a story that endures long after the technical lessons have been absorbed.
In Britain, that story begins with Windscale in 1957. The reactor fire was contained, but the government’s instinct was secrecy for political gain.14 Even today, many remember not the technical details, but the cover‑up. The sense that authorities could not be trusted.
Then came Chernobyl in 1986. The explosion and fire scattered fallout across Europe, creating an exclusion zone still visible on maps today.15 The RBMK design was unique to the Soviet Union, but those distinctions are lost in public imagination. What lingers is the image of an abandoned city and a poisoned landscape. The world only knew the accident had happened because Swedish scientists detected radiation spikes and forced Moscow to admit the truth.16 Another cover‑up had eroded trust.
Fukushima in 2011 should have told a different story. No one died from radiation exposure,17 and the disaster was contained more quickly than Chernobyl. But confusion and a chaotic evacuation killed thousands.18 The tragedy was driven largely by the tsunami but what the public saw was simple: death and nuclear power. Panic, not proportion, became the legacy.
Most recently, Zaporizhzhia in 2022 showed how little public trust has changed. The reactors were shut down, radiation levels normal.19 Yet across Europe people braced for another catastrophe.20 The ghost of Chernobyl was enough.
And now, with Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C under construction in the UK, engineers stress that these are the safest reactors ever built. They are equipped with multiple redundant systems and even “core catchers” to contain worst‑case accidents.21 But for much of the public, these new builds are not measured against their designs. They are measured against Windscale, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
This is the lesson of history: each failure has been less catastrophic, more manageable, more instructive. But the fear has not lessened. If anything, it has become cumulative. Safety improves; trust does not. That imbalance sets the stage for the central challenge nuclear faces today.
Why Facts Don’t Land
If nuclear safety has steadily improved, why has public fear remained constant? The answer is that facts do not erase fear. People do not think in sieverts or dose thresholds; they think in images and symbols. When some people don’t believe the Earth is round,22 and others don’t even bother to read footnotes in news articles,23 it’s difficult to build trust on figures alone. People need a story. Trust needs to be built.
Fossil fuels kill more than eight million people worldwide every year from air pollution.24 But those deaths are dispersed, hidden in hospital wards and lung statistics. By contrast, nuclear disasters are concentrated, cinematic.25 The abandoned streets of Pripyat, the white hazmat suits at Fukushima, the exclusion zone maps shared online during Zaporizhzhia. These are not figures, they are stories. And stories stick.
Here is why trust plays a role. Every major incident has reinforced the suspicion that institutions will not tell the truth. Windscale was hushed up. Chernobyl was denied until fallout was detected. Fukushima was marked by confused, contradictory statements from the plant’s operator.26 Even when nothing happens, as at Zaporizhzhia, panic is fuelled by the assumption that “they must be hiding something.”
For outsiders, the contrast can feel absurd. Fossil fuels kill invisibly, endlessly, with no improvement over time. Nuclear learns, tightens, adapts, and kills far fewer. Yet the public response is reversed: resignation toward coal, dread toward reactors.27
The reason is that data competes poorly with memory. Eight million deaths a year is an abstraction. A ghost town behind barbed wire is unforgettable. Scientists try to fight fear with numbers, but numbers alone cannot undo imagery. Until nuclear experts find ways to engage with the public on the level of trust and story, the facts will remain correct but ineffective.
Radiation in Medicine
Radiation is not only associated with fear. In medicine, it is trusted every day. Millions of people undergo X‑rays, CT scans, or radiotherapy each year.28 They sign consent forms, glance at the trefoil on the wall, and submit themselves to radiation without panic.29
The irony is striking, and almost feels infuriating for nuclear power. In one setting, radiation is seen as catastrophic; in another, it is routine. Yet the underlying science is the same. Both nuclear medicine and nuclear energy rely on careful control of dose, shielding, and redundancy. Both involve regulators, safety protocols, and decades of accumulated learning.
Even when mishaps occur, the story is different. The Therac‑25 accidents in the 1980s, where software errors delivered fatal overdoses, were covered as medical tragedies, not existential threats.30 Earlier cobalt‑60 teletherapy accidents, and even high‑profile orphan source cases like Goiânia in 1987, led to grief and lawsuits; not to a wholesale rejection of radiotherapy.31 The lesson was framed as: improve machines, fix procedures, strengthen oversight. Radiation as a tool of healing remained accepted.
Why? Because medicine is framed as personal and compassionate. Radiation in hospitals is understood as something that helps, heals, and saves lives. Its risks are accepted because they are balanced against an immediate, visible benefit: diagnosis, treatment, survival.
By contrast, nuclear energy is framed as industrial and catastrophic. Its benefits: cleaner air, climate stability, reliable power feel abstract, long‑term, and rarely linked directly to individual well‑being. When it goes wrong, the imagery is not a healed patient but a ghost city.
And the imagery itself matters. An X‑ray machine fits in a single room, neat and compact, and feels almost harmless. A nuclear power station stretches across nearly a kilometre,32 with cooling towers visible for miles, and feels imposing, even threatening. The physics may be no more dangerous, but the story it tells is different.
Social Science, Not Physics
If nuclear power’s problem were still physics, the solution would be straightforward. Engineers have already built reactors with redundant cooling systems, passive safety features, and even “core catchers” designed to contain a meltdown before it spreads.33 Modern plants are not designed to repeat the mistakes of Windscale, Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
But the real challenge is no longer in the reactor hall. It is in the public imagination. Fear accumulates faster than trust. Each mishap, even when well contained, adds another layer of anxiety. Each government misstep, from Soviet secrecy to TEPCO’s confused statements, deepens suspicion.34 Safety improves, but faith in the institutions around it does not.
Nuclear is not unique in this. Aviation is another industry where safety has improved to extraordinary levels. Flying is far safer than driving and yet people still fear it. When a Boeing jet falls from the sky, or a software system like MCAS fails, the headlines confirm the public’s worst anxieties.35 The truth is that aviation, like nuclear, is remarkably safe. But when it fails, it fails spectacularly, and that drama drowns out statistics.
That parallel matters. Even nuclear physicists know the numbers on their own field, but when they step into an airplane, they may feel the same irrational unease toward planes that the public feels toward reactors. Fear magnifies rare disasters into permanent narratives, while safety becomes invisible. Nuclear power, then, is fighting the same battle aviation has long faced: proving, again and again, that what is safe in practice can also be trusted in imagination.
There are signs of change. A new generation of communicators: scientists, journalists, even YouTubers are beginning to make nuclear transparent.36 They film reactor control rooms, tour waste facilities, explain dose rates with clarity, and confront the history of disasters without euphemism. That transparency shifts the public image from glowing green radioactive goo to what it really is: steam generation from some spicy rocks.
This kind of openness does what data alone cannot: it builds familiarity and tells a story. A story based on safety and disregards ambiguity. Nuclear stops being a mysterious black box and becomes something you can see, understand, and even question.
Yet the gap remains. Policymakers are often reluctant to engage in that kind of direct communication, preferring to reassure rather than explain. Industry still defaults to jargon. And the imagery of exclusion zones and hazmat suits continues to outweigh charts showing comparative safety. Even TEPCO offers tours at Fukushima Daiichi with guides and geiger counters.37 That showing, not telling, reflects a clear recognition: trust is built not through tables, but through transparency.
This is where storytelling matters most. Nuclear power needs to shift from being remembered as the technology of past disasters to being imagined as part of a liveable future. Nuclear mishaps should live in the public mind as history, or from the minds like novelists such as myself; not as a present threat.
That is why I came to this subject as a novelist. While writing about radiation for a story, I expected to find horror. What I found instead was tragedy born of misunderstanding, and a technology that has learned from every failure. My research convinced me that nuclear’s greatest challenge is no longer technical. It is social. It is a matter of trust, transparency, and narrative.
The hopeful message is this: the public already accepts radiation in medicine. They can learn to accept it in energy. The physics is ready. The story is not.
1 BBC News, “Ukraine Nuclear Plant: Russia in Control After Shelling,” BBC News, March 4, 2022. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60613438)
2 Reuters, “Europeans Rush to Buy Iodine After Zaporizhzhia Fighting,” March 6, 2022.(https://www.reuters.com/world/europeans-rush-buy-iodine-after-zaporizhzhia-fighting-2022-03-06/)
3 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine. Vienna: IAEA, March 2022. (https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine)
4 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Status of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant Reactors. Vienna: IAEA, 2022. (https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-updates-situation-at-zaporizhzhia-npp)
5 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO). Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts. Vienna: IAEA/WHO, 2006.
6 United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). Sources, Effects and Risks of Ionizing Radiation: UNSCEAR 2013 Report to the General Assembly. New York: United Nations, 2014.
7 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Archives. Hiroshima: Hiroshima City, accessed 2024. (https://hpmmuseum.jp)
8 Our World in Data. “What Are the Safest and Cleanest Sources of Energy?” Oxford: Our World in Data, 2020. (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
9 National Geographic. “The Largest Bomb Ever: Tsar Bomba.” National Geographic Magazine, 2017. See also: CIA Declassified Archives, USSR Nuclear Test Records.
10 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO). Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts. Vienna: IAEA/WHO, 2006.
11 International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). The 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP Publication 103. Annals of the ICRP 37, no. 2–4 (2007).
12 UNSCEAR. Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation: UNSCEAR 2008 Report to the General Assembly. New York: United Nations, 2010. See also: Radiation Research journal, review of ARS cohorts, 2008.
13 Kusumi, Takashi, Rumi Hirayama, and Yoshihisa Kashima. “Risk Perception and Risk Talk: The Case of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Radiation Risk.” Risk Analysis 37, no. 12 (December 2017): 2305–2320. (https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12784)
14 Jean McSorley, “Contaminated Evidence,” The Guardian, October 10, 2007. [Details the secrecy and cover-up after the 1957 Windscale fire (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/oct/10/guardiansocietysupplement.environment) See also: UK National Archives, Windscale Fire, 1957: 30th Anniversary and Release of Papers (declassified files, 1987).
15 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts(Vienna: IAEA/WHO, 2006).
16 European Parliament News, “Forsmark: How Sweden Alerted the World about Chernobyl” (May 15, 2014). (https://www.eumonitor.eu/9353000/1/j9vvik7m1c3gyxp/vjjsgtu2qkyq)
17 Cabinet Office of Japan, White Paper on Disaster Management 2012 (in Japanese, 2012). See also: World Health Organization, Health Risk Assessment from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident (Geneva: WHO, 2013).
18 Fukushima evacuation deaths (>2,000) and tsunami context (Japanese Gov’t White Paper 2012; WHO).
19 IAEA, “Update on Zaporizhzhia NPP – Reactors in Cold Shutdown, Radiation Levels Normal” (IAEA Press Release, March 4, 2022).
20 Reuters, “Europeans Rush to Buy Iodine After Zaporizhzhia Fighting,” March 6, 2022. (https://www.reuters.com/world/europeans-rush-buy-iodine-after-zaporizhzhia-fighting-2022-03-06/)
21 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Hinkley Point C: A New Spin on Nuclear Energy (London: IMechE, 2019); and EDF Energy, Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station Technical Overview (London: EDF, 2019).
22 YouGov. Flat Earth: One in Six Americans Are Not Entirely Certain the World Is Round. Survey conducted February 2018. Reported in ScienceAlert, April 2018. (https://www.sciencealert.com/one-third-millennials-believe-flat-earth-conspiracy-statistics-yougov-debunk)
23 I, as not a scientist or policy maker, would not have read this footnote.
24 Health Effects Institute. State of Global Air 2024: A Special Report on Global Exposure to Air Pollution and Its Health Impacts. Boston, MA: HEI, 2024.
25 Our World in Data. “What Are the Safest and Cleanest Sources of Energy?” Oxford: Our World in Data, 2020.
26 Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk (London: Earthscan, 2000); and Independent Investigation Committee on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident (Tokyo: TEPCO Commission, 2012).
27 Paul Slovic. The Perception of Risk. London: Earthscan, 2000.
28 UNSCEAR. Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation: UNSCEAR 2008 Report. New York: United Nations, 2010. See also: WHO, Global Initiative on Radiation Safety in Healthcare Settings, Geneva: WHO, 2012.
29 Leveson, Nancy G., and Clark S. Turner. “An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.” Computer 26, no. 7 (1993): 18–41. (https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.1993.274940)
30 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Radiological Accident in Goiânia. Vienna: IAEA, 1988.
31 EDF Energy. Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station: Technical Overview. London: EDF, 2019.
32 Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). Hinkley Point C: A New Spin on Nuclear Energy. London: IMechE, 2019.
33 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Principles and Improvements in Reactor Safety Post-Accident (Paris: NEA, 2015).
34 IAEA, Report on TEPCO’s Communications and Public Trust After Fukushima (Vienna: IAEA, 2014).
35 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Annual Review of U.S. Civil Aviation Accidents. Washington, DC: NTSB, 2022. See also: New York Times, “Boeing and the MCAS Crisis,” 2019.
36 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Public Communication and Stakeholder Engagement in Nuclear Safety and Security. Vienna: IAEA, 2020. See also: academic media studies on science communication.
37 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Inside Fukushima Daiichi. Tokyo: TEPCO, accessed March 2025. https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/insidefukushimadaiichi/index-e.html.
