What’s on your “For You” page? TikTok has been home to a diverse range of content, from dance challenges to comedy bits to lip syncing, since the social media sensation burst into the public consciousness in early 2020, capturing the under-25 demographic like no other app could.

With time, some older members of our society have flocked to the app. Some are just getting in on the fun, and some are struggling to put their own weird spin on popular topics, but one man is espousing the benefits of nuclear energy to all who will hear. If he pops up on your “For You” page, you may deduce his NC State affiliation through the case of Old Tuffy sitting in his office.

Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at NC State, has amassed a following of over 34,000 TikTok users with his account @nuclearsciencelover. 

His TikTok videos include explaining engineering terms, comparing other renewable forms of energy to nuclear fission, and the development of Thorium reactors. In one video, he explains, despite popular thought, the Fukushima reactor accident of 2011 was not directly attributable to any adverse health effects among residents. Despite the complicated subject matter, the videos are broken down into something digestible to the layman, often with sources linked in the comments for further reading. 

Hayes’ videos often lead to inquisitive comments, which spawn further videos.

“The perspective I take is an elevator pitch — when I told you about Fukushima, I gave you sound bites. I could have put that whole thing into a TikTok, and I have a number of times, and some people just freak out,” Hayes said. “It’s like, ‘How can you be spewing such evil, horrible, apocalyptic nonsense?’ And it’s like, ‘That’s why I’m doing this. Because there are people like you that are convincing other people that what you said is true.’”

Hayes worked for 15 years as a government contractor doing radiological emergency response and nuclear waste management before joining NC State’s faculty six years ago to work with the best of the best in what he calls his dream job.

His students are what got the ball rolling for him to eventually join TikTok. Hayes said that when he read their research projects, which often addressed the American Nuclear Society’s public engagement grand challenge, he saw a common thread: they felt the key to making nuclear energy more accepted was to have a “respected source of information that was widely disseminated on social media.”

“So I said, ‘Well, then if nobody else is going to do it, then I’m going to do it,’” Hayes said. “My students kept saying ‘Somebody’s got to,’ ‘Somebody got to,’ ‘Somebody’s got to be able to be an authority that can speak to these narratives that are based on fear and not on fact.’”

Hayes wasn’t sold on TikTok vs other apps’ features like Facebook’s Instagram Reels, but his family caused him to come around.

“One of my sons, he actually has a viral channel; he’s got almost a million followers, 10s of  millions of likes on his TikTok account, and he was telling me to use TikTok, I’m like ‘No, I don’t want to use TikTok,’ Hayes said, laughing. “I want to reach people that think, you know, not people that just want to vegetate, right?”

Ultimately, Hayes decided to take the plunge, convinced of TikTok’s staying power, and he quickly realized there was more than meets the eye on the app.

“The image that my generation has of TikTok is that there’s teenage girls dancing around,” Hayes said. “It’s like, ‘No thanks. I do not want to be associated with that in any shape, or form,’ right? So I had to overcome that perception that I had, and I did see that … there are about a dozen other university faculty, they’re doing the exact same thing. There’s just nobody doing it in nuclear.”

Though much of the discourse in his comment sections is productive, there has been a number of unsupportive comments both in terms of not supporting nuclear energy, and personally. Hayes is a Christian and given his profession, that led to some controversy. 

“Once I just addressed it, I said, ‘I’m a Christian, and I’m a scientist, and that’s just how it is and I know I’m not alone,’” Hayes said. “Scientists are people too. We have kids, we have spouses, we have feelings, we have bias, right? We just happen to really love science and have devoted our lives to learning more and just sharing what we’ve learned with other people.”

On the whole, Hayes calls the audience he’s drawn “surprising,” noting that most University department social media accounts struggle to build a following. His peers have also taken note, with the response there being “very favorable.” Professionally, the account is yielding benefits as well.

“The one thing that really convinced me that I was doing the right thing was when I got the independent peer reviews back from the National Science Foundation on my grant proposals, where they said, ‘This is exactly what faculty should be doing for broader impacts, you should be reaching out to the public, sharing your research and making it digestible,’” Hayes said. “I don’t know that I could have come up with a more positive response.”

Hayes’ TikTok account has made an impact far beyond what could’ve been expected. While he initially went to college for his love of math and physics, and then decided on a grad school move to engineering for its lucrative prospects, he chose nuclear because it’s “the coolest one that there is.” Now he’s making it cool for the young.