Years of non-communication from the nuclear sector has left the whole field wide open for the, often very well organised and vocal, opposers. And even though research shows that a lot of people don’t actually have an opinion on the subject, the absence of those who work in the sector leads to a one sided, and often very stereotypical debate. To attack nuclear energy and applications, the mere mention of ‘Tsjernobyl’, ‘Nagasaki’ and now ‘Fukushima’ largely suffice, but to actually explain why we’re using these technologies is a lot harder.

Rather than addressing the public, we wanted to get them involved in the debate again. But, since it’s so far removed from their daily realities (and frankly, sometimes they just prefer not to listen), we came up with solutions that brought up the topic within unexpected settings. In several movie theatres, we installed an aquarium filled with water coming from a nuclear cooling tower and, in different art exhibitions, we installed a piece of art created by a well known artist with parts used in nuclear reactors. In both cases, people could communicate their questions or concerns via digital screens. We then used all the questions in a media campaign to instigate further questions and for each of them we gave an answer on le-nucleaire-en-clair.be

The first phase of the campaign consisted of the public installations: an aquarium with live fishes filled with water from the cooling towers, and a modern art installation constructed from used reactor materials. By placing these objects in high traffic areas we got the first public questions in and posted them on the website.In the second phase we used these questions to incite a broader audience to get involved, using newspaper ads, banners, tv ads, billboarding in railway stations and boomerang postcards. Some of these sources yielded unexpected amounts of questions (stations and boomerang got record numbers), and the biggest difficulty lied in answering all these questions in a timely manner. At the time of writing though, every one of the questions, even the most awkward ones, have been answered personally by a team of specialists.

In total, more than 2,000 useful questions were entered, and all of them were personally answered by a team of experts. Stationcubes with interactive screens yielded 483 questions while Boomerang (a hard copy card format!) gave us 664 entries.

More than the actual questions though, the campaign got people talking about the subject again: of the people who recalled the campaign (as measured in a posttest), 1 in 10 talked about it with other people. 8% went on an active search for more informatoion about the issue and 1 in 10 visitied the website.Written press reported on the campaign in over more than 20 articles, 9 online articles (social media activity excluded) reported on it, and 2 radioshows had specific debates on the campaign and the questions.