Salt Lake City Consent-Based Siting Workshop
On June 8th we traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to host our second consent-based siting workshop. As we arrived in Salt Lake and admired the juxtaposition of snow-capped mountains with semi-arid desert landscape, we began to ponder about what it would take for Utah to shift from using mainly coal power to nuclear energy, which would help protect open spaces from energy sprawl and air pollution. The landscape is certainly beautiful, and Utah boasts some of the most amazing open space in the country. Zion is an amazing Yosemite of the desert, and we love Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase Escalante, Kodachrome Basin, and so much more.
Since the launch of our project in August 2023, our team has met weekly to discuss strategy for content and format of our workshops. We considered our first workshop in Raleigh in January to be a dry run because the audience was largely a friendly audience of nuclear engineering students and industry colleagues. For our second event though, we had done lots of high touch outreach to various community members including government officials, nonprofit organizations, media, academia, and the general public, and so this felt like a true first test of our implementation plan.
After arriving in Salt Lake, our team gathered in person for even more preparation. A strength and challenge for our team is delivering an overall perspective and product that meshes together some pretty unique messaging from each of our constituents. We have nuclear engineering professors and students, the Tribal Consent-Based Coalition who are building multiple tribes and voices to input to this process, and us, who are walking a fine line between our technical precision work at a nuclear power plant and running a nonprofit of mothers and women focused on empathic communications.
Our mission in supporting the consent-based siting process outlined by the Department of Energy is of such importance (with tendrils connecting the protection and expansion of nuclear energy worldwide) that we feel a mix of emotions related to our work here - honor to be selected to help, immense pressure to perform, skepticism that anyone can have a good solution, worry that we could do damage to public perception, hope for a future with diverse perspectives inputting to expansion of clean energy for humans and in protection of our planet.
As we converged on the Marmalade Branch of the Salt Lake City Municipal Library and began to greet our participants, all these feelings melded into a focus on being welcoming, available, interesting, and curious, not just to share our perspectives and process, but to hear from people with diverse and even internally conflicting views on nuclear energy and fuel storage.
We are not event planners. As with our nonprofit Mothers for Nuclear, our CBS team also leans toward doing it all ourselves. This leads to various challenges as our team members step outside personal comfort zones and lead in areas where they may have no prior experience or necessary skill set. At MfN, we have been begrudgingly turned from nuclear power plant operators and engineers into all-of-the-above amalgamations of people with skills in graphic design, outreach, media relations, communications, website development, financial management. We similarly see our CBS team learning and growing, with our nuclear engineering grad students doing event support and IT verification, Wyatt Kohler of TC-BC stepping into role of MC when Lisa Marshall couldn’t attend, and each of us being flexible to fill whatever role was needed to make the event successful.
While we had several friends and family members in the audience, we quickly noted several people who we felt might need some personalized attention. Heather told one pretty abrasive skeptic “I would really love to spend about 5 hours with you!” Fortunately, the second half of our workshop is designed specifically with this in mind, and we hosted several small tabling sessions to allow for these more intimate types of conversation.
As we started our small group discussion, we were feeling anxiety over how we were going to manage specific skeptical people and still have productive dialogue with everyone else. But our instincts took over and we got more curious to dig in and understand their concerns, ask questions, and listen to them. This isn’t easy, and while we may sometimes seem critical of our industry, these types of interactions are highly individualized, time-intensive, and emotional for all involved. We must keep trying to get it right.
By the end of the hour, one skeptic told us that he’d love to keep in touch and that he was going to reexamine a lot of his prior assumptions, which he had earlier been emphatically stating repeatedly as reasons for why he just couldn’t support nuclear energy.
A deep tenet of our philosophy on communicating about nuclear is to listen and ask questions first, before trying to explain away someone’s concern or feelings. So why do we continue to be surprised that it works? We were happily baffled to see this turnaround. Whether he ends up learning something new or reaffirming his past position, it’s encouraging to see others willing to consider changing their minds.
Another participant was quiet until called upon, and we immediately recognized why - he was an English language learner and we had no resources for translation in his native tongue. Language barriers are difficult, and so important to overcome if we are truly intending to make conversation about nuclear and consent-based-siting accessible to everyone. As we struggled through translation and took the time to check our understanding, we were all learning an important lesson about accessibility that we will incorporate into planning for future workshops. And we thought back to some other translation issues as we had just visited Japan.
On the plane ride to Salt Lake, we had overheard some fellow passengers discussing languages like Tagalog and Japanese and how many different ways there are to say “Nice to meet you!” “Dou zoyoroshiku” is what Heather learned on Duolingo before our recent trip to Japan and had been using the phrase to greet our hosts and other members of the public, but when she heard “there are so many ways to say this!”, she looked up the exact translation and realized she had probably been saying “please be nice to me.” Language barriers are hard. But regardless of whether we’re making fools of ourselves, it’s important to make an effort.
And finally, we heard from participants who had recently been asked to vote on a local measure to allow transport of nuclear waste through their community. This ballot measure included absolutely no context for this proposal, and no information about what it meant, what are potential impacts, and what might be some benefits. They said that all they could picture was that they were going to get cancer if they said yes, so of course they defaulted to no. In our minds, we were thinking - what in the world did we think was going to happen?!? We have so much work to do.
As we wrote this blog post in the airport on our way home, we were struggling to find power for our computers, working around broken chair-fed electric outlets and crawling on dirty floors to access other electricity. The length of our cords necessitated that we sit in the brilliant and hot San Francisco morning sunlight, which turned out not to be the cool break we were expecting after the 90 degree heat of Salt Lake City. We connected this experience with the importance of power availability in our modern society, for communication, air conditioning, and generally supporting our human quality of life.
As we struggle to find the words to explain the complex situation and feelings we have surrounding nuclear energy and how to communicate about it, we look to each other and feel the energy radiating off each other, giving us each strength and boldness to navigate this difficult balance of leaving our children, asking our partners for support, and juggling our time and mental energies to support this mission we care about so much. Moms are managing a lot of priorities but can find strength in those around us who care about the same things we do - navigating a complex balance of providing good lives for our children now while also preserving and protecting our planet and its resources for the future.
You can email us to request a PDF copy of our presentation materials.
You can read about the overall consent-based siting program or our first workshop in these other posts.