Packaging the product

Full text: Traditionally, when the nuclear industry produces a brochure or video programme, the platform of our arguments is reasoned, factual, abstract, far-sighted and convoluted. It is all about things and processes: energy plants, machinery, numbers and percentages. Yet we know that people are interested only in people, in emotions, in reality, and in basic values about next week or next month. And this is probably the biggest incongruity. Our painstaking, in-depth research backed by technical evidence and statistics is no match for the other side's anecdotal speech making. Our perfectly designed graphics cannot compete against those visual cliches that can give instant life to an abstract idea. In the UK, pioneering work for the British Nuclear Forum's, the Nuclear Industry Education Programme (NIEP) breaks through the traditional approach, allowing passion and feeling to stimulate debate. Material about nuclear power produced for young people often promotes knowledge acquisition about particular aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle without conceptual or value change. NIEP materials build on the experience of developing packages that fully meet curriculum objectives, follow educational best practice, and place nuclear power in a real energy context. But they also make a positive contribution to the meaning a young person attaches to a concept such as radiation. Essentially, the materials are in tune with the way young people make sense of their experience of the real world and the issues in it. For further information about AEA Technology's public acceptance programmes, contact: Roy Newson or Meriel Lewis on +44 235 433650, fax +44 235 432123. (author)