We are not Spock: Emotion and Nuclear Power
Why even the most logical of us shouldn’t forget the persuasive power of feelings.
When Leonard Nimoy wrote his first autobiography, it was titled I Am Not Spock. Nimoy had mixed feelings about the title, but it did entice people to read the book.
Who would want to be Spock, after all? Though Spock is half-human, his character is close to being a computing machine. Spock will not let emotions rule his actions. Spock makes his choices through the use of logic.
When arguing in favor of nuclear power and especially Vermont Yankee, I sometimes felt I was channeling Spock.
- The opponents appealed to emotion — “I am so afraid.”
- I appealed to facts and common sense.
Sometimes I wanted to scream: “Nuclear energy is the ONLY way to keep our civilization without destroying our world!” I never screamed it.
In retrospect, I was Spock.
The plant closes
In 2013, Entergy announced that it would close Vermont Yankee. My inner Spock continued. The opponents celebrated. They chanted: “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” They threw parties. They wrote op-eds: “On Joy and Justice.” And so forth.
And what about me? In August, a few days after the closure was announced, I wrote a careful analysis of the causes of the shutdown: “Questions I Frequently Ask Myself about Vermont Yankee’s Shutdown.” In the post, I tried to understand Entergy’s decision and its implications for other nuclear plants.
I think I was still Spock.
Not Spock
A few weeks later, the sadness really hit me. By October I realized that I wasn’t Spock anymore.
I was sad. I still am sad about Vermont Yankee closing. I could not rationalize my way out of that feeling. Everything is not for the best, and this is not the best of all possible worlds.
What is sadness? For me, in the case of premature closures of nuclear plants, my sadness is a mixture of two emotions: sorrow and helplessness.
Sorrow:
Sorrow was my main emotion I felt when the plant closed.
My advice to myself was to stop pretending to be Spock. Still, I found it hard to know how to move forward, which is itself a typical emotion related to the bigger emotion of sorrow. When the plant closed, I became full of self-doubts. I know a lot about nuclear energy, why did I decide to concentrate on one power plant? Wasn’t “Yes Vermont Yankee” a silly name for a blog? This is also typical of sorrow.
My sadness was increased by the knowing that many people were happy about the plant closing. It seemed that nobody cared about the plant workers. My blog post Challenging Those Who Celebrate Vermont Yankee’s Closing describes the joyful opponents.
In the weeks right after the announcement, there was only only one human-interest article about the consequences of the plant closing: Vermont Yankee family faces uncertain future. In this article, Meghan Foley of the Keene Sentinel detailed the difficult choices that John Twarog’s family faced at the time of the closing. John Twarog expected to be laid off from Vermont Yankee (he was, but he has another job with Entergy). John expected he would have to leave the area (he did). He thought that his teenage sons would have to complete their high school education in a new town (they didn’t, because Cheryl stayed in Keene until the two boys had both graduated high school). To me, this Keene Sentinel article was the only article that was real. It was about what was actually happening to real people. Also, I admit…. I know the Twarogs.
Since that day, several years ago, there have been other articles on the difficulties caused by Vermont Yankee’s closing. I wrote some of the articles myself: for example, this one in Nuclear Engineering International, Circles of Pain Around Vermont Yankee closing. These articles (yes, including mine) were about big stuff: tax revenues down, schools and businesses struggling, people leaving the area. Facts and statistics. (Spock again!) There weren’t many articles that focused on one or two families. There weren’t articles about working people, people with whom readers could identify.
Meanwhile, I had to teach myself to acknowledge my sadness. Nuclear people are not automatons. Remember in the beginning of this article, when the opponents were always saying “I’m scared”, and I would answer with facts and figures? I learned that I should be willing to say “I’m sad.” It’s human to be sad. It’s okay. Other people will understand it.
Powerless
I felt powerless at the time because many people had worked so hard to save the plant, and it was closing. People I knew were going to have to leave the area. People were having their lives disrupted. Fossil fuels would increase on our grid. Circles of pain.
However, now I realize that “losing a battle” does not mean “completely powerless.” There is no such thing as a “wrong emotion” but in this case, there was a wrong interpretation of the facts. Nuclear supporters were not completely powerless. The work that the pro-nuclear people did in Vermont has echoed around the country. When there is an article about “the consequences of a nuclear plant closing,” Vermont Yankee is often a major example, because the struggle to keep Vermont Yankee open was so public and so well documented, by myself, Rod Adams, Howard Shaffer and others. For example, a few months ago, the Years Project released a video. It shows a father and son environmentalist visiting the Vermont Yankee site. Joshua Goldstein and Solomon Goldstein-Rose describe the shutdown as an environmental crime.
My experiences in advocating for Vermont Yankee also led to a book, Campaigning for Clean Air, Strategies for Pro-Nuclear Advocacy. People have told me that the book is helpful to them as they advocate for their own nearby power plants. In other words, Vermont Yankee advocacy was meaningful and remains meaningful. We were not powerless.
However, this is not a rah-rah blog post about how to be a nuclear advocate. Most of this post is about the painful and negative emotions of sorrow and powerlessness. Taking myself as an example, I think it is important that nuclear advocates acknowledge those emotions and allow ourselves to be human. Only after such an acknowledgement can we move on, acknowledge both our sorrow and the power that we still have. Then we can help save and build more plants.
Moving forward
As nuclear advocates, we need to be human beings first. We need to speak to other human beings. We need to be willing to acknowledge and share our own emotions. We need to tell personal stories of individual people working at a plant or affected by a plant’s closing.
We are advocates for nuclear energy.
We are not Spock.
Meredith Angwin is a physical chemist with long experience in the utility industry, including nuclear, renewable, and fossil fuel generation. From her first-hand experience with different forms of energy, she became an advocate for nuclear energy. Meredith has written several books on nuclear advocacy. You can check out her website here.
© Copyright Meredith Angwin, 2019. An earlier version of this post appeared in the ANS Nuclear Cafe blog We are not Spock: Emotion and Nuclear Power.
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