As the nuclear crisis in Japan has played out, William J. Kinsella has been watching with particular interest.
An associate professor in N.C. State University's Department of Communications, Kinsella, 60, has spent the past decade studying how societies discuss and form public policy around complex scientific and technological issues, especially nuclear energy.
Last year, he spent four months in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship examining every aspect of that country's nuclear industry. He was in northern Japan in August touring a nuclear fuel processing facility.
"To many citizens, nuclear energy is mysterious or esoteric," Kinsella says. "It's my belief that people have that capacity [to understand it], but they're discouraged from engaging, and the argument that it's esoteric and mysterious kind of serves the interest of people who would rather not have a robust and therefore complicating public engagement."
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan is likely to test that capacity in the United States and around the globe. Kinsella believes the crisis is an opportunity for the general public to have a discussion that is long overdue.
"I think we have a little window of opportunity on this particular issue," he said. "This is a very timely issue right now. It will get attention from a broader public community in a way that it just wasn't getting previously."
Kinsella and his colleagues will try to spark some of that discussion. They are already at work on a research paper about the public dialogue that follows the disaster. And there's the occasional call for an interview, such as with Bloomberg Businessweek.
Nuclear physicist? No
The disaster is already drawing attention to the work of Kinsella and his colleagues in NCSU's Communication of Science and Technology project.
Started three years ago, the program is unlike any in the country. It conducts research into how we understand the risks and hazards of advances in science and technology and how that level of understanding shapes public policy.
Like most of his colleagues in the project, Kinsella is a trained scientist who drifted into communications research in search of a more personal way to share his love of science.
A native of the Bronx, Kinsella was described in his high school yearbook as a future nuclear physicist.
After graduating from Manhattan College with a degree in physics, he spent two years in an astrophysicist doctoral program at New Mexico State University. He left after realizing the work lacked a human dimension.
"You would literally observe the sky at night, and then you'd spend your day reducing data," he said.
For the next 18 years, Kinsella wrote educational scripts and managed planetariums.
He ended up at Rutgers University, where he earned master's and doctoral degrees in communication. His dissertation involved studying how researchers at Princeton University's nuclear fusion lab communicated with each other and outsiders.
Before arriving at NCSU in 2004, Kinsella taught at Lewis and Clark College outside Portland, Ore. There, he did extensive research at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.
"I think his biggest contribution is that he's not going to back off on the health and safety risks of these nuclear power plants," said David Berube, director of NCSU's Public Communication of Science & Technology Project. "And I think that's awesome."
Risks and benefits
Kinsella's views on nuclear energy are conflicted - the scientist in him is amazed by the engineering involved, but at the same time he's unsure whether the technology is a safe, effective and economically viable.
"The paradox is part of what fascinates me," he said. "There's something archetypical about humanity's relationship with nuclear energy. We've made it, but now we have to make big decisions about its risks and benefits."
Kinsella believes the more people who understand and engage in a complex issue such as nuclear power, the better the policy that results.
The problem with this theory, he acknowledges, is that most people have a limited number of issues they can follow closely.
"What I am saying about nuclear energy applies to 20 or 30 other issues as well," he said.
Kinsella and several colleagues are already preparing a research paper, likely to be published this fall, examining the public dialogue that occurred once the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant began unfolding.
Kinsella said he was struck by how much more sophisticated the dialogue became over the first eight days of the crisis. A broader range of experts were brought in, providing a more nuanced view.
But once the crisis in Libya flared up, the nuclear issue lost some of its immediacy, and the quality of the debate suffered, he said.
Kinsella also has been watching closely the actions taken by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The commission has ordered a 90-day review of the country's plants, and its chairman has said the country's reactors are safe.
"To me, that was a very limited vision for the conversation that needs to happen," Kinsella said.
As for what the ultimate lesson from Fukushima will be, Kinsella said the jury is still out.
"Two years from now, nuclear energy will be back to the same level of visibility as it was before Fukushima," he said. "Those who want to shape public policy have a special opportunity, as do the general public."
