Crisis Communication about Nuclear Accidents with Psychological Approaches

Abstract

Different from other natural disasters and health emergencies, nuclear accident is a kind of special crisis of organizational crises, which tends to generate public and media interests and criticism more easily. In this paper, we reviewed literatures on risk and crisis communication and analyzed the cases of risk and crisis communication after three famous nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima) and studied the public risk and crisis communication after these accidents with psychological methods, including (1) discussing the source of nuclear panic with needs theory and cognitive theory and (2) studying the irrational behaviors in nuclear accidents with psychoanalytic theory. After the above analysis, some methods of public risk and crisis communication about nuclear accidents are given. Furthermore, it shows that new media such as Wechat and Microblog play a very important role in this process.