Thomas B. Farrell and Thomas Goodnight begin their classic 1981 essay on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident by arguing that “the inadequacies of accidental rhetoric at Three Mile Island point to a failure larger than the technical breakdown of 1979: the failure of technical reason itself to offer communication practices capable of mastering the problems of our age” (Farrell and Goodnight, 1981, p. 271). Technical reason, according to Farrell and Goodnight, asserts “visions of public competence and conduct” whose limits are exposed by the specter of nuclear disaster. In this paper, I provide a preliminary analysis of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, from a communication studies perspective, in order to ask whether and how technical regimes defend their “competence and conduct” through new media outlets. In particular, this study compares the rhetoric of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a non-profit organization whose aim is to serve as a nuclear “watchdog,” with the rhetoric of the Nuclear Engineering Institute (NEI), a nuclear industry-funded group. This short paper focuses its analysis on each group’s extensive blog posting in the three weeks following the disaster.

I argue that both nuclear proponents at NEI and opponents or “watchdogs” at UCS frequently invoked shaming rhetoric in their public messages, via their blogs, albeit with different subjects. Nuclear opponents in particular invoked what I call “institutional shaming,” a castigation of government and regulatory bodies that had failed—or which are projected to fail—in their duties to protect the public. Nuclear proponents, on the other hand, use a form of “public shaming,” a disciplining of public fear and concern in order to redirect attention away from institutional and industry accountability, and toward the “natural” disaster and its unavoidable fatalities in Japan, and the capable management and safety of nuclear power in the United States.