Reframing Nuclear Anxiety: From Irrational Fear to Fetishistic Ideology

Marco Visscher and the Cultural Reframing of Nuclear Fear

Environmental journalist Marco Visscher has emerged as a leading voice in challenging the deep-seated public anxieties around nuclear energy. In his recent book The Power of Nuclear, Visscher approaches the polarized nuclear debate not just as a technical or policy issue, but as a cultural and psychological phenomenon. He reflects on his own journey from anti-nuclear activist to pro-nuclear advocate as a way to probe why many people “still reject the evidence showing the atom can provide unlimited clean energy, free countries of their dependence on fossil fuels and combat climate change”. His work is driven by a critical insight: opposition to nuclear power often persists in spite of the empirical facts, suggesting that something other than rational risk assessment underlies nuclear fear.

Visscher’s reframing of nuclear anxiety begins with an appreciation for the emotional and symbolic dimensions of the issue. Rather than dismissing anti-nuclear sentiment as simple ignorance, he delves into the myths, metaphors, and memories that shape public dread of all things nuclear. For instance, Visscher was influenced by historian Spencer Weart’s observation that fears of nuclear power may be a displacement of the overwhelming horror of nuclear war. During the Cold War, the prospect of atomic apocalypse was so frightening that it became psychologically easier to shift that dread onto something more tangible and ostensibly controllable – nuclear reactors or waste. As Visscher summarizes, “Nuclear war was such a frightening idea in the 1950s and ’60s … it was too frightening to even consider. So what we did when nuclear reactors were built, is that we sort of moved our concerns about nuclear warfare onto nuclear reactors and nuclear waste, because it was easier to think about that and to protest against nuclear power plants rather than nuclear weapons.” In other words, the public’s nightmare visions of mushroom clouds and radiation sickness found a surrogate target in civilian nuclear technology. The anxiety was real – but it was rooted in fantasy and symbolic substitution as much as in any concrete harms of nuclear energy itself.

Visscher’s cultural work appreciates this psychological logic even as it challenges it. He notes how deeply imaginative and emotional factors have guided the anti-nuclear movement: from apocalyptic pop-culture iconography (think of The Simpsons’ ever-leaking reactor or disaster films) to the quasi-taboo status that “radiation” holds in the popular imagination. In interviews, Visscher acknowledges that even very intelligent people can harbor an irrational blind spot about nuclear power – a kind of ingrained cultural bias. He admits he once shared that bias; as a young reporter in 2000, he wrote an impassioned article claiming nuclear had “nothing good to offer to people and nature” and urging that “now is the time to kill the nuclear industry before it can ruin the planet”. Looking back, he recognizes this stance was driven less by data than by ideology and fear. Over time, as climate change made the costs of forsaking nuclear more evident, Visscher began to question why his anti-nuclear conviction felt so self-evident. This led him to peel back the layers of cultural narrative and emotional investment surrounding the atom.

Crucially, Visscher approaches nuclear anxiety with what could be called an implicitly psychoanalytic sensibility. He doesn’t practice therapy, of course, but he does treat the public’s nuclear phobia a bit like a symptom to be understood, not just a mistake to be corrected. Rather than simply bombarding skeptics with statistics, he “takes [their] concerns and suspicion in our society” seriously and investigates “where these deep-rooted emotions are coming from.” His book weaves historical storytelling – from the cockpit of the Enola Gay to Chernobyl’s control room – to gently guide readers through the sources of their nuclear fears, effectively interpreting those fears. By illuminating the narratives of accidents, weapons, and secrecy that have conditioned the collective imagination, Visscher aims to disentangle myth from fact. This narrative approach is an effort to shift nuclear fear from the register of unexamined dread and cultural fantasy back to the realm of reality and reason. In doing so, Visscher’s work is both appreciative of the psychological complexity of anti-nuclear sentiment (he understands it has origins in genuine anxieties and historical trauma) and critical of its distortions. He diagnoses anti-nuclear fear as disproportionate to empirical risk – less a calculated assessment than a kind of free-floating dread that seeks an object. By reframing the conversation in this way, he has opened the door for a more honest public dialogue: one that can acknowledge people’s feelings about nuclear energy while also challenging them to update those feelings in light of present-day realities (like the climate crisis).

Nuclear Fear as Fantasy, Displacement, and Irrational Dread

Visscher’s diagnosis of anti-nuclear ideology essentially casts it as a phantasmic formation – that is, a product of imagination, displacement, and projection, rather than a clear-eyed evaluation of risk. The recurrent themes in nuclear fear (e.g. invisible radiation as a lurking poison, reactor accidents as world-ending cataclysms, waste as a curse upon future generations) often reveal more about our psyches than about nuclear technology itself. In psychoanalytic terms, one might say that nuclear energy has become a repository for collective anxieties – a fantasy screen onto which society projects deeper fears and forbidden wishes. These could include fear of death and extinction (harnessed by nuclear war imagery), distrust of elite technocratic power, or even guilt about humanity’s abuse of nature (nuclear fallout as a kind of divine retribution). Nuclear power, in other words, symbolizes more than itself. As Visscher highlights through the concept of displacement, many of the fears pinned on nuclear power are displaced from other domains: the terror of the Bomb, certainly, but also the general unease of living in a high-tech, high-stakes modern world. The concrete risks of nuclear energy – which, empirically, include reactor accidents, radioactive waste management, and proliferation concerns – are routinely exaggerated by an irrational dread that vastly exceeds those actual hazards. That dread has an almost free-floating quality: a nightmare in search of an outlet.

By calling this dread irrational, we do not mean that people who fear nuclear are simply foolish. Rather, “irrational” here points to the gap between subjective perception and objective evidence. Visscher and others note that anti-nuclear activists often feel as if nuclear power is the ultimate threat to people and planet, even though the measurable harm from nuclear energy (in terms of accidents or waste) is far smaller than the harm already being inflicted by fossil fuels and climate change. This suggests that nuclear fear operates in the realm of psychic reality – the reality of feelings, images, and inner convictions – which can diverge dramatically from external reality. Psychoanalytic thinkers have long observed that psychic reality can trump factual truth in guiding human behavior. Sigmund Freud himself emphasized the “primacy of psychic reality over shared consensual reality,” meaning that what matters most to an individual is often not what actually happened, but what the mind believes and feels happened. In the cultural context, the belief that nuclear is unacceptably dangerous can persist even when real-world data disproves it, because that belief serves emotional and symbolic needs. The anti-nuclear imagination seizes on evocative symbols – melting cores, mutant creatures, irradiated landscapes – that powerfully grip the unconscious, in a way that dry statistics about kilowatt-hours or mortality rates cannot.

Visscher’s view can thus be seen as psychoanalytic in that it locates the anti-nuclear stance in mechanisms like fantasy (e.g. imagining worst-case scenarios or monstrous outcomes), displacement (shifting unrelated fears onto nuclear as scapegoat), and what Freud called irrational dread (a phobic reaction disproportionate to the real danger). By reframing nuclear anxiety in this light, Visscher effectively suggests that the stalemate in our energy debates is not simply about knowledge (or lack thereof) – it’s about desire and fear, about the stories and symbols through which people unconsciously make sense of technology. His cultural storytelling seeks to gently defuse the haunting images and displaced terrors surrounding nuclear power, so that policy discussion can proceed on a more rational basis. Yet, as valuable as this reframing is, it raises further questions: Why do such displacements and fantasies take hold in the first place? What deeper psychic function might anti-nuclear ideology be serving, such that it resists change even when confronted with contrary evidence? To answer these questions, we can deepen the analysis using some classic and contemporary psychoanalytic concepts – moving from Visscher’s (largely descriptive) account of nuclear fear as fantasy, into a more structural account of nuclear fear as a kind of collective fetish or ideological symptom.

Fetishism and the Splitting of Belief: Freud’s Insight

One of Freud’s most intriguing contributions was his theory of fetishism – a concept that, perhaps surprisingly, offers a powerful lens for understanding modern anti-nuclear ideology. In Freud’s 1927 essay on fetishism, he examined how a person can simultaneously know and not know a certain troubling truth. Fetishism originally described a sexual perversion, where (typically) a man fixates on an object or body part as an erotic substitute. Freud discovered that at the root of this fixation was a young boy’s traumatic realization that his mother does not have a phallus – a realization that the boy’s mind finds unbearable. The boy copes by splitting his ego: one part acknowledges the unsettling reality (the “castration” of the mother), while another part denies or disavows it, clinging to a substitute object (the fetish) as if the mother still had what was lost. In Freud’s words, fetishism “represents a position with respect to reality more complex than denial… it implies the coexistence of two contradictory attitudes”. The fetishist knows on some level that his belief is false, but he also believes in it intensely, because that false belief gives him a peculiar satisfaction. This paradox – knowing and not-knowing at once – is maintained by what Freud called Verleugnung, usually translated as disavowal. The subject disavows reality (rejects it) even as he unconsciously knows the truth, resulting in a sustained split in the ego.

What does this have to do with nuclear fear? Consider that many anti-nuclear activists today face a similarly traumatic realization as Freud’s child: the realization, in this case, might be that our modern way of life (fueled by fossil energy) is destroying the climate, and that there is no perfectly clean, risk-free escape – that even the “solutions” (renewables, etc.) have limits or hidden costs. This realization often runs up against cherished ideals of the environmentalist imagination – for instance, the dream of a pure, green world entirely freed from “dangerous” technologies. Nuclear power, as the one technology capable of replacing fossil fuels at scale, confronts the environmental movement with a kind of ideological castration: it imposes a limit on the fantasy of achieving a carbon-free society without any compromise or reliance on industrial might. The anti-nuclear Green thus finds themselves in a bind not unlike the fetishist’s bind. On one level, they know that rejecting nuclear energy perpetuates greater harm (continued fossil burning, climate injustice) and that many fears about nuclear are overblown. On another level, they cannot accept this knowledge emotionally – it feels like a betrayal of deeply held values about natural purity, decentralization, or anti-militarism. The result is a splitting of belief. We often hear it in the form of, “Yes, climate change is dire, I know we need big solutions, but not nuclear!” – an attitude that suggests a disavowal. In psychoanalytic terms, this is fetishistic disavowal at work: “I know very well, but all the same…”.

Indeed, cultural theorists have noted that ideology frequently operates in a fetishistic mode. People can acknowledge inconvenient truths with a shrug, yet continue acting as if those truths were not true – sustaining practices that symbolically deny reality. In the case of anti-nuclear ideology, one might argue that the nuclear scare scenarios (perpetual radiation plumes, mutant generations, etc.) function as a fetish: a distracting object of fascination and horror that allows activists to disavow something even more traumatic – namely, the fact that solving climate change demands choices that shatter the simplistic good/evil narrative of “green = good, nuclear = evil.” By fixating on the fetishized danger of nuclear energy, Green ideology can continue to “repudiate” a reality it finds unbearable (the necessary role of nuclear power) while still “registering” that reality in the background. As psychoanalyst Alan Bass observes, disavowal is essentially the mind’s way of “registration and repudiation of difference”. We see the uncomfortable difference (in this context, the break from ideological purity that nuclear represents), and we simultaneously refuse it. The anti-nuclear movement often registers the argument that “we need all the tools to stop climate collapse,” yet repudiates the particular tool of nuclear, almost as a reflex. This dynamic has become so ingrained that it defines the culture’s unconscious “common sense” about energy – a split mindset in which nuclear is extraordinarily dangerous in our imaginations even though we know at some level it’s statistically one of the safest energy sources. Such a split isn’t mere hypocrisy; it is a structured defensive position. Freud regarded fetishistic disavowal as a “ruse” the psyche uses to cope with an impossible situation – a strategy of having it both ways (believing and not believing) to avoid full confrontation with loss or change. Likewise, anti-nuclear ideology lets its adherents both acknowledge the climate crisis and refuse the one solution that challenges their identity, thereby avoiding a painful psychic reckoning.

It’s telling that anti-nuclear rhetoric often has an almost talismanic fixation on certain objects – uranium, spent fuel casks, “radioactive” contamination – investing them with all the evil from which the Green worldview seeks to purify the Earth. Psychoanalytically, one could say these objects are fetishized as stand-ins for dread. For example, the nuclear waste repository becomes a symbol of ultimate hubris (a sin buried in Earth’s flesh), drawing emotional attention away from the far larger “sin” of CO₂ waste in the atmosphere. The fetish, Freud noted, is typically a symbolic substitute for something absent. Anti-nuclear fetishism may substitute the absence of a perfect energy solution with a concrete demon that can be fought – the nuclear bogeyman. By rallying against that demon, activists derive psychic comfort (a sense of moral righteousness, of doing something tangible) while disavowing the deeper void (that we have already irreversibly altered the planet and must embrace imperfect remedies). The concept of jouissance – or illicit enjoyment – comes into play here: There is a kind of subterranean enjoyment in the act of disavowal itself. The Green movement gets to enjoy the drama of fighting “evil nuclear” (a struggle that confers identity and purpose) even as it maintains an outward stance of righteous concern. This enjoyment is evident in how anti-nuclear campaigns often carry a passionate intensity, a flair of the sacred (nuclear as unholy) and the heroic (activists as protectors of life) that goes beyond rational policy debate. Such libidinal intensity hints that more is at stake psychologically than the mere adjudication of energy options.

Foreclosure and the Return of the Repressed: Lacanian Perspectives

Moving from Freud to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we encounter another useful concept: foreclosure. Foreclosure (forclusion in Lacan’s terms) is an even more radical form of rejection than repression or disavowal. It refers to what happens when a fundamental signifier – an essential piece of accepted meaning – is blocked out of the symbolic order entirely. In the context of individual psychology, Lacan famously linked foreclosure to psychosis: when a crucial element (like the Name-of-the-Father, which represents paternal law and the limits of enjoyment) is foreclosed, it leaves a hole in the person’s symbolic universe, and the excluded element tends to return in hallucinatory, unmastered forms. “When the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed for a subject, it leaves a hole in the Symbolic order… [and] the foreclosed element reappears in the Real,” as one summary puts it. In plainer terms, if something is not allowed into our framework of understanding at all, it doesn’t simply vanish – it comes back to haunt us, but in a distorted, often extreme way.

Now consider how nuclear power has been treated in the symbolic order of modern environmentalism. For many in the Green movement, nuclear energy is not just debated and found wanting – it is taboo, essentially unspeakable as a valid option. It has been foreclosed from the acceptable discourse of “clean energy” in much the way certain cultures declare particular foods untouchable or certain ideas heretical. This foreclosure can be seen in how some environmental groups historically refused to even include nuclear in discussions of climate solutions; it was off the table, a non-option, a named evil rather than a technology to be rationally assessed. By ejecting nuclear from the symbolic field of “green solutions,” the anti-nuclear stance created a kind of hole or blind spot in its worldview. And according to Lacan’s theory, what is ejected in this way tends to return in the real, but in a monstrous or unacknowledged form. Is it any surprise, then, that nuclear risks loom so large in the environmentalist imagination? The very unthinkability of embracing nuclear power means that nuclear exists only as threat and horror within the Green psyche. Every mention of it summons specters of catastrophe because it has no normalized, symbolic place as just another energy source with pros and cons. The cultural script did not allow, for decades, the notion of “good nuclear.” So nuclear appears only in its return of the repressed guise – as Chernobyls and Fukushimas, as three-eyed fish in The Simpsons, as the ultimate negation of ecological harmony. In Lacanian terms, anti-nuclear ideology foreclosed the signifier “nuclear = positive,” and thus nuclear re-appeared only as a kind of imaginary apocalypse, unintegrated and terrifying.

We can also interpret foreclosure here in relation to symbolic castration. In psychoanalysis, castration is not really about literal mutilation; it signifies the child’s acceptance of limits – that you can’t have it all, that certain powers are renounced to enter societal order (often embodied by the father’s “No!”). Symbolic castration is basically accepting reality’s terms and one’s own lack. One could argue that Green ideology refused a kind of castration when it came to nuclear power. Embracing nuclear would have meant admitting that the renewable-only utopia cannot fully meet reality’s demands – a loss of the imagined purity of the energy revolution. It would mean conceding that Mother Nature alone (sun, wind, hydro) might not provide abundantly enough, that we must use a technology born of wartime laboratories and requiring rigorous control. This is experienced by some greens as a painful compromise, a loss of innocence – in short, a symbolic castration of their ideal. By foreclosing that option, they avoid the sacrifice of their ideal vision. But the cost is that the truth of our energy needs returns in distorted ways. For example, many anti-nuclear countries quietly end up importing nuclear-generated electricity from neighbors or continue to burn fossil fuels while officially celebrating “100% renewable” goals. The reality that they need what they claim to reject comes back as hypocrisy or as perpetual energy crises. Psychically, the enjoyment (jouissance) they get is in refusing the paternal injunction (“use this powerful but imperfect tool”) and instead indulging in a kind of rebellious stance: “No, not that, never!” There is a secret pleasure in this absolute refusal, a jouissance of self-righteous purity, even as it undermines their stated aims.

Dominique Scarfone, a contemporary psychoanalyst, offers concepts that help here. Scarfone emphasizes the inherent “symbolic inconsistency” in human reality – the idea that our symbolic frameworks (our systems of meaning) are never complete or perfectly accurate, and this inconsistency is what allows psychic reality to flourish. We fill in the gaps of understanding with our own beliefs, fantasies, and unconscious meanings. Subjectivity itself, he notes, arises by “presentifying” itself at the expense of an inconsistency in the symbolic order. In other words, whenever there’s a gap or ambiguity in what is socially acknowledged or symbolized, the psyche will compensate with its own narrative, often drawn from desires or fears. The foreclosure of nuclear power in mainstream environmental symbolism left just such a gap – a major inconsistency when confronting climate change, an “elephant in the room” that wasn’t allowed in official doctrine. That gap has been filled by what Scarfone would call psychic reality: the elaborate constellation of fears (radiation, mutation, contamination) and utopian wishes (a world powered solely by gentle natural forces) that constitute the Green imagination on this issue. These fantasies and nightmares are real to the people experiencing them – they carry real emotional weight – even if they appear inconsistent with empirical evidence or practical exigencies. The libidinal investments (emotional investments) in these narratives are enormous, which is why they are defended so staunchly. The passion one often encounters in anti-nuclear discourse – the vehemence, the almost religious conviction – signals that what’s at stake is a lot more than technical debate. It is identity, desire, and unconscious enjoyment that are at stake. In short, anti-nuclear ideology functions not as a simple factual error to be corrected, but as what psychoanalyst Eric Anders (Earthrise Accord’s founder) argues is a full-fledged cultural formation structured by fetishistic disavowal, jouissance, and a refusal of symbolic castration. It is a structure that resists change, because it is satisfying some deep psychic agendas.

Beyond Facts vs. Fears: The Limits of Rational Persuasion

Understanding the unconscious logic of Green anti-nuclear ideology allows us to see why the typical pro-nuclear rhetorical strategy has often fallen flat. Traditionally, proponents of nuclear energy have tried to win the argument with data, reason, and sometimes smug dismissiveness toward “irrational” fears. They reel off statistics about how many deaths coal causes versus nuclear, point out France’s exemplary safety record, note the minuscule land footprint of reactors compared to wind farms, and so on. All of these points are true and important – yet as countless frustrated engineers and scientists have learned, facts alone rarely dissolve a phobia or an ideology. If the anti-nuclear position were merely about lack of information, it would have softened long ago in the face of so much evidence. Instead, what we see is that facts often bounce off the protective shell of a fantasy. The popular pro-nuclear approach can come across as tone-deaf to this psychological reality. It is, as Visscher observed, like accountants coldly reciting numbers while the public trembles at a ghost story. The climate community has been stuck in a narrative where one side speaks to fear and the other to facts. “The old story was about fear; the new one is about facts,” as Eric Anders writes of the shift needed in nuclear discourse. But the problem is, fear is not truly old – it’s very much alive in the collective unconscious, and it cannot be exorcised by facts alone.

If anti-nuclear sentiment indeed operates like a fetishistic ideology, then confronting it purely with rational evidence might be as futile as telling a fetishist his beloved object is “actually worthless” – it misses the point of why the attachment exists. The unconscious enjoyment (jouissance) that people derive from their ideological stance – say, the moral high ground of opposing nuclear as a proxy for opposing war and pollution, or the thrill of apocalyptic imaginings that make one feel like a vigilant guardian of life – will not be surrendered just because an expert shows a bar chart of deaths per terawatt-hour. In fact, purely rational confrontation can even backfire, because it threatens to deprive people of something that gives them unconscious satisfaction. A person whose identity is entwined with fighting “nuclear evil” may experience pro-nuclear arguments as an attack on their very sense of self and virtue – which triggers defensiveness and doubling down. We see this in how some activists respond to pro-nuclear data: often by intensifying their focus on any counter-example (no matter how statistically rare), or shifting goalposts (if safety is proven, then cost or waste become the focus, and if those are addressed, then a more nebulous distrust remains). This fluidity of objections suggests that the objections are symptoms of an underlying fixed idea, rather than the root cause of the opposition.

Moreover, the Green movement’s unconscious investments in anti-nuclear ideology have been skillfully reinforced over decades by narratives and even disinformation. Fossil fuel interests historically fanned the flames of nuclear fear on the political left, while climate denial was pushed on the right – a “dual lie” that paid off handsomely in delaying action. This means the anti-nuclear narrative comes with an entire moral framing – casting nuclear as a corrupt corporate enterprise, a danger to the vulnerable, a hubristic sin against nature – which aligns with other left ecological values. It becomes part of a grand story about opposing “the system.” Thus, when pro-nuclear advocates simply insist “nuclear is safe and necessary,” they are inadvertently asking people not only to drop a fear, but to betray a whole storyline and community that gave their activism meaning. It’s no wonder there’s resistance.

In short, conventional pro-nuclear rhetoric often fails because it addresses the conscious mind (providing information) while the anti-nuclear stance is being driven largely by the unconscious mind (providing identity, outlet for anxiety, and narrative satisfaction). The clash isn’t just over facts, but over fantasy. Without recognizing this, pro-nuclear communicators risk coming off as arrogant or insensitive, and they make little headway in changing minds. As psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek might put it, it’s not enough to refute people’s knowledge; one must also reckon with their enjoyment. The green anti-nuclear narrative has enjoyment embedded in it – the enjoyment of fear and of righteousness. To loosen the grip of that narrative, an alternative narrative must somehow offer a different satisfaction, or at least take away the special aura of the fetish.

Earthrise Accord: A Symbolic Intervention in the Collective Imaginary

This is where Earthrise Accord’s project comes in as a fresh attempt to recode the nuclear conversation on a symbolic and imaginative level. Earthrise Accord (EA) is an initiative explicitly trying to bridge climate justice advocacy with a pro-nuclear stance, and it recognizes that it’s not engaging in a simple policy debate but in a battle within the collective imaginary. The organization’s very name and origin story are instructive: it invokes the iconic 1968 “Earthrise” photograph – that sublime image of Earth hanging in space, which famously helped spark the environmental movement by reframing our planet as a fragile shared home. EA aligns that symbol of planetary unity with nuclear energy, noting that the astronaut who took the photo (Bill Anders) was also a pro-nuclear pioneer. In doing so, Earthrise Accord is attempting something subtle and powerful: to resituate nuclear power within the symbolic order of environmentalism, rather than outside it. In essence, EA is saying: Nuclear belongs in the picture of a livable Earth’s future; it’s part of the solution, not the negation of our dreams. This is a bid to reverse the foreclosure – to bring the “unthinkable” into the realm of thinkable, speakable ideas. If anti-nuclear ideology made nuclear into a fantasy of destruction, EA tries to make it a symbol of hope and repair.

Importantly, Earthrise Accord’s approach is not a psychoanalysis in the clinical sense – there is no therapist and patient, no couch, no free association of a single analysand. As an activist and educational endeavor, EA cannot provide the kind of one-on-one working-through that a neurotic symptom might get in therapy. However, it is attempting a kind of cultural therapy or interpretive intervention. It operates by deploying symbols, stories, and reframed meanings to shift how the public unconsciously relates to nuclear energy. In psychoanalytic terms, one might say EA is offering a new Master Signifier for nuclear power – anchoring it to values of justice, truth, and sustainability, rather than allowing “nuclear” to drift as a floating signifier of dread. For example, EA emphasizes how fossil fuel corporations cynically manipulated the left’s fear of nuclear, thus reframing anti-nuclear sentiment not as a pure grassroots wisdom but as, partly, a manufactured and exploitative narrative. By exposing this, EA aims to interpret the anti-nuclear ideology as a kind of dream concocted by an external deceiver – akin to an analyst helping a patient see that a nightmare might carry an embedded message from outside (in this case, the message being: “keep fearing nuclear, so we oil barons can keep drilling”). This interpretation can rob the fetish of some of its allure, by revealing the cynical mechanism behind it. In a way, it’s an attempt to induce a cultural moment of “aha, so that’s what my symptom means!” – to destabilize the certainty that nuclear must be bad by showing how that certainty was implanted.

Another tactic is restoring historical perspective. Visscher’s work, which Earthrise Accord amplifies, serves to contextualize nuclear fear in its 20th-century origins, thereby subtly telling people: that was then, this is now. By narrating how early promise of nuclear was derailed by emotional reactions to accidents and weapons, and how that narrative “kneecapped” our response to climate change, EA tries to convert what was a moral absolute back into a tragic mistake that we can learn from. The difference is key. If refusing nuclear is seen as an eternal moral truth, there’s no discussion to be had. But if it’s seen as a historical contingency – a path influenced by fears and propaganda – then the spell is partially broken; nuclear can re-enter discourse as something to reconsider. Earthrise Accord is thus performing the role of the analyst who re-symbolizes the symptom. They are, in effect, saying: “Your fear (symptom) made sense given your past experience (the traumas of Hiroshima, Three Mile Island, etc.), but let’s update its meaning in the present context (climate emergency).” This is analogous to helping a patient understand that a childhood fear now holds them back in adult life – not by invalidating the fear, but by reframing it.

Additionally, Earthrise Accord seeks to tap into the libidinal energy of environmentalism but redirect it toward productive ends. Rather than fight the jouissance outright, EA tries to offer a new form of jouissance around nuclear – one centered on hope, empowerment, and even righteous anger at fossil fuel deception. For example, EA’s concept of “Clean Energy Reparations” recasts nuclear build-out as an act of justice for communities harmed by fossil fuels. This merges the moral fervor of climate activism (holding polluters accountable, uplifting the marginalized) with a positive vision for nuclear technology as a tool of reparative justice. In doing so, it gives environmentalists a way to embrace nuclear without feeling they’ve sold out their values. On the contrary, it becomes an expression of those values. This strategy addresses the unconscious fear of symbolic castration: activists no longer have to feel they’re “giving in” to an Establishment technology, but can see themselves as appropriating nuclear for their own ethical aims. The enjoyment shifts from the negative (the purist pleasure of saying “no” to nukes) to a positive (the galvanizing excitement of demanding massive clean infrastructure as a right and reparation).

Of course, these changes do not happen overnight. Earthrise Accord’s project is ambitious and unorthodox. It acknowledges that psychoanalysis proper – with its intimate, gradual uncovering of unconscious conflicts – cannot be directly applied to a whole society. You cannot put a culture on the couch. However, you can inject psychoanalytic thinking into the culture: offering interpretations, highlighting inconsistencies, and providing new symbols that allow people to re-imagine their relationship to a once-foreclosed object. In essence, EA’s work is an effort to guide the collective through a kind of symbolic transition: from seeing nuclear energy as the embodiment of death and danger (the Thing to be feared), to seeing it as a bounded, governable part of our social contract with technology – just another signifier in the chain of meaning, not the hole that blows the chain apart. By reintegrating “nuclear” into the language of climate solutions, they aim to dislodge the libidinal investments that have kept it foreclosed. If anti-nuclear ideology was a cultural fetish – a beloved/disgusting object that held a certain thrill – then Earthrise seeks to take that object and make it a lot more banal and pragmatic, draining some of the fetishistic charge. As one might say, they want to turn nuclear from a phobic object back into a policy object.

Will it work? The outcome is not guaranteed. Human fantasies and fetishes are tenacious. Yet, by combining critical analysis of disinformation with empathetic engagement with fears (in the spirit of Visscher’s narrative approach), Earthrise Accord is charting a novel course. It recognizes that winning acceptance for nuclear energy in the climate movement is not just a matter of engineering, but of meaning – of shifting the symbolic coordinates. And in doing so, it implicitly pays homage to a psychoanalytic truth: that the route to change often passes through understanding the stories we live by and the unconscious attachments we harbor. Only by bringing those into the open – by speaking the unspeakable, by naming the hidden enjoyments and acknowledging the fantasy at play – can we hope to truly transform the cultural psyche.

Conclusion: Reimagining the Atomic Future

Marco Visscher’s cultural reframe of nuclear anxiety and the psychoanalytic deepening we have explored both point toward a crucial realization: our energy debates are as much about the soul as about science. The anti-nuclear impulse cannot be addressed by facts alone because it is woven from the fabric of history, fear, desire, and identity. By viewing anti-nuclear ideology through the prism of fetishistic disavowal, foreclosure, and jouissance, we come to see it not as a mere deficit of understanding but as an over-determination of meaning – a kind of mass psychic event that has taken on a life of its own. This understanding carries a certain compassion (we are all subject to such irrational formations in one area or another), but also a challenge: it means that changing minds on nuclear energy will likely involve a sort of cultural therapy. It requires careful symbolic work – much like easing a patient out of a long-held delusion, not by ridicule or force, but by interpretation and the offer of something new to desire.

Earthrise Accord’s experiment in this regard is a hopeful one. It suggests that with creativity, honesty, and yes, analysis, we can begin to loosen the grip of nuclear phobia and restore a more sane perspective – one in which nuclear energy is neither a nightmarish specter nor a magical panacea, but a tool that humanity can choose to use wisely. The goal is not to “brainwash” anyone into loving nuclear, but to lift the pall of irrational dread so that nuclear power can be seen and evaluated clearly, on its actual merits and risks. In psychological terms, it is to move from a position of acting out (driven by unspoken fears) to a position of reflection and deliberation. If we can achieve that, the public sphere would be freed of one of its long-standing neuroses, and our collective decision-making about climate solutions could proceed with greater lucidity.

In the end, reframing nuclear anxiety is about more than just advocating for a particular energy source. It is about maturing our relationship with technology and accepting the limitations and trade-offs of reality – the very process of symbolic castration that marks the move from fantasy to adulthood. It asks environmentalists (and all of us) to give up the fetish of an absolute evil (or an absolute purity) and embrace a more nuanced, ambivalent view – one where hope and fear can be balanced rather than split. Paradoxically, in giving up the fantasmatic extremes, we stand to gain something far more solid: a livable future on a cared-for planet, achieved with clear eyes and a steady resolve. To reach that future, we must, as Freud might say, “speak openly of the unspeakable” and as Lacan might add, recognize in our fear the inverted image of our desire. Only then can we truly dispel the spell of nuclear anxiety and work through to a new reality.

Sources:

• Marco Visscher, The Power of Nuclear (Bloomsbury, 2025); interview in Titans of Nuclear Podcast – “Why We Need Not Fear Nuclear Energy”.

• Freud, “Fetishism” (1927); discussion in Encyclopedia.com.

• Lacan’s concept of foreclosure (Name-of-the-Father) – see Wikipedia summary.

• Dominique Scarfone on psychic reality vs. factual reality.

• Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros – disavowal as general mechanism.

• Eric Anders, Earthrise Accord – critique of anti-nuclear disinformation and “irrational fears”.