Sustainable online initiatives for the dissemination of nuclear energy culture

The paper reports about three initiatives that partly preceded and then followed the groundbreaking experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, by offering a university level course available online, a series of webinars and an online career event, all including educational content that pertains to the category of nuclear energy culture. These initiatives had different characteristics and varied content, but all share the feature to be prepared for online delivery with the intention to make sound nuclear related contents available to possibly interested audiences in a remote and both synchronous and asynchronous way. The first in chronological order of these initiatives was set up in a pre-Covid-19 period, when the use of online teaching was already insistently proposed and implemented in academy and industry as a powerful means to create contents available to a vast public of attendees; in that period, resistances and inertia to the introduction of these new means were anyway witnessed and an effort was made in order to propose online a classically structured university course. On the other hand, the other two initiatives benefitted of a post-pandemic environment, in which any doubt about the necessity, the feasibility and the effectiveness of such initiatives had been ruled out by witnessing the need to continue education and information during an unprecedented historical event that disrupted teaching schedules worldwide. The three initiatives and their outcomes are commented and general conclusions are proposed on the potential of distant teaching techniques in relation to its appropriateness in supporting the in-presence teaching to make nuclear energy culture available remotely without any remarkable loss in quality of the conveyed information.