Support For Nuclear Power Research Articles

Support for nuclear power and proenvironmental attitudes: The cases of Germany and Poland

Europe's energy system faces significant challenges in reducing its dependence on imports and decarbonising itself. In this context, a resurgence of discussion has occurred in recent years about the future role of nuclear power, which currently supplies one-quarter of the European Union's electricity. Public support for the development of nuclear energy plays an important role in the debate on the future role of the energy sector, as it influences legal regulations and political decisions.We investigate the relationship between support for the development of nuclear power and environmental values, knowledge, cognitive abilities, and assessment of the effectiveness of climate change mitigation measures using data from random-quota surveys in Germany (n = 933) and Poland (n = 878). Using a logistic regression model, we demonstrate that support for nuclear power is substantially higher in Poland than in Germany, and that in Poland, support for nuclear power relates less negatively to environmental values than it was observed in previous studies conducted in Western Europe. It also relates positively to the degree of public knowledge—both about nuclear energy and the causes of climate change. Our findings contribute to understanding of the mechanisms that shape attitudes towards nuclear power and to assessing its potential for public support in the European Union.

Young Chinese people's perceptions of nuclear power: Connection with enthusiasm for information, perceptions of nuclear reactor technology and NIMBY

People's attitude toward nuclear power is crucial to the development of nuclear power in China. A survey was conducted to analyze the relationship between Young Chinese people's perceptions of nuclear power with three factors: enthusiasm for information on nuclear power, perceptions of nuclear reactor technology, and Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) syndrome. This study adopts a different approach to probe these factors, and most options of our questionnaire were given in plain language rather than on a scale. It is found that questionnaires with different styles may result in different responses, and validity and reliability are discussed. Our results (N = 850) suggest a positive correlation between enthusiasm for information on nuclear power and perceptions of nuclear power. Most respondents showed pride in Chinese nuclear reactor technology even though it seemed independent of their perceptions of nuclear power. However, having a perception of nuclear reactor technology positively correlates with their perceptions of nuclear power. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that people with a nonnegative perception of nuclear power tended to accept construction of a nuclear power plant near their residence, but a perception of nuclear power may not be the dominating factor that influences the respondents' support for nuclear power. The results are considered pilot findings with the intent to provide a stronger social science foundation in future work. Note that the results may only represent the opinions of those who had access to the Internet.

Young Chinese people's radiological beliefs significantly associated with their opinions on nuclear power

Previous studies suggest a significant correlation between risk perception and acceptance of nuclear power, but opinions of people with different perceived radiological risk seemed not captured. A national online survey was conducted to learn about the correlation between young Chinese people's beliefs about radiation and their opinions about nuclear power. Correlation between the proximity to a nuclear facility and beliefs about radiation is found. Gender and occupation are not revealed as statistically influential. In addition, the analyses suggest that respondents' perceptions of radiological risk are significantly associated with perception of and support for nuclear power. Even though most respondents supported inland nuclear power plants, fear of radiation is likely to result in a more serious NIMBY syndrome. Most respondents overstated the effect of low-dose radiation, worried about a negative impact of radioactive materials released from a nuclear power plant, and wanted to know more about radiation protection and emergency procedures. It implies that many nuclear issues were driven by fear of radiation, and perception of radiological risk appears a critical factor to mitigate worries and implement radiation protection and emergency procedures.

Market strategies for large-scale energy storage: Vertical integration versus stand-alone player

New projects using existing storage technologies such as Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS) face uncertainty due to the lack of clear business models. Market regimes have generally tended to embed storage and generators within the central management of operators with multiple assets such as the French EdF (Electricité de France). By means of back-casting, this study depicts the role of storage in the power market, within the vertical integration in the governance portfolio of EdF. A dynamic algorithm simulates hourly operation under two different storage strategies, daily and weekly, and the results are compared with actual patterns over the period 2015–2019. This reveals missing money for a stand-alone player due to price arbitrage caused by low spread, and missing market opportunities. This suggests that the economics of storage are not driven by spot prices alone, but by other services, such as the energy block provision in support of nuclear power. Differential calculus is used to estimate the value of flows integrating the duration of storage and its seasonality. These findings further support the French regulator to install new PHS despite the lack of profitability, by means of capacity-energy hybrid contracts for new competitors in place of the existing government-industry structure.

Support for nuclear power in Central Asia: examining historical and spatial separation

ABSTRACT The countries of Central Asia have a perilous nuclear legacy inherited from the Soviet Union. Using survey data from Aktau and Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, a generalised ordered logit model is used to analyse relationships between people’s attitudes, location, and demographic characteristics and their support towards construction of NPPs. Results suggest there is complex association between historical proximity and support for NPPs. Furthermore, the general public can be separated into two groups: (1) those who oppose nuclear power and (2) those that have become complacent towards future risks. Perceived risk to human safety, radiation, and environmental damage are found to be associated with higher levels of opposition to the building of an NPP, whereas importance of job creation is found to be associated with higher levels of support for an NPP. These results are important as they indicate a need to promote public engagement prior to constructing an NPP.

The Effect of Statement Biased Popular Media Consumption on Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power

This study assesses the effect of popular media consumption, as a function of education level, on the public’s opinions about nuclear power. Opinions concerning ten statements about nuclear power were collected before and after participants read a news article in support of or in opposition to nuclear power. The purpose of the study was to determine the degree of malleability of people’s opinions about nuclear power and whether this malleability increased or decreased with the subject’s education level (high school students, college students, and college graduates). We hypothesized that, despite an evident agenda by the article’s author, public viewpoints on nuclear power may fluctuate from their original standpoints after reading the article. The results indicate that participants, regardless of education level, were willing to change their opinions about nuclear power after consuming a single popular media article. After reading the media article, supporting nuclear power, participants showed more positive opinions about nuclear power. Conversely, participants who consumed the media article that was critical of nuclear power showed a more negative overall opinion about nuclear power. This indicates that respondents, regardless of education level, are open to modifying their opinions about nuclear power after consuming popular media, even if the media has a clear statement bias in support of nuclear power or against it.

Nuclear accident reminders and support for nuclear energy: Paradoxical effect

Three experiments investigated the impact of nuclear accident reminders on support for nuclear power, as a function of initial attitudes towards environmental protection. Data were collected in France, where nuclear plants produce approximately 80% of the country's electricity, and where this is a highly politicized issue. Nuclear accident reminders were expected to lead individuals relatively low in environmental protection concern to paradoxically increase their support for nuclear energy (compared to a control condition), while those high in environmental protection concern were expected to decrease their support for nuclear energy. Taken together, results confirm the hypothesis for those weakly concerned with environmental protection. Also, this effect persisted for at least two weeks, effects of nuclear accident reminders were parallel to effects of mortality salience, and subliminal primes were as efficient as supraliminal primes, suggesting that the effect is unconscious. The processes that produce these effects and their policy implications are discussed.

Is nuclear economical in comparison to renewables?

The European Union is divided on the issue of electricity production. While there is consensus that generation technologies need to be low on greenhouse gas emissions, the question of whether to use renewables or nuclear to meet this power demand is highly controversial. Both options still require financial support and this is not going to change in the near future. This raises the question of where public money should be invested in order to achieve greater economic efficiency: into support for renewable energies (RE) or support for nuclear power plants?This paper sets out to answer this question. The detailed model-based prospective scenario assessment performed in this study provides the basis for estimating future cost developments. After discussing the existing support schemes for renewables, the paper compares these with a nuclear model. The comparison is conducted exemplarily for the United Kingdom (UK) at a country level and for the EU 28 overall. The recent state aid case for the construction of the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant (NPP) in the UK serves as the model for the nuclear option.

Nuclear Power Plants Safety and Maintenance

With growing concerns about global warming, building more nuclear power plants is becoming one of the inevitable options to provide the world’s electricity. This is mainly because nuclear power is considered as the major source of “carbon-free” energy. Currently, extensive preventive maintenance, inspection, andmonitoring programs are developed to ensure safe and reliable operation of nuclear power plants. These programs involve safety analysis codes, equipment health monitoring, degradation-specific inspections, and plant lifecycle management (PLM). Although extensive effort has been invested to develop such programs, nuclear power plants continue to experience problems and therefore more accurate analysis and related researchwork still receive a great attention. This is mainly because the unresolved safety problems or lack in systems monitoring often causes significant safety-related events at nuclear power plants. Therefore, the demand for applied research work continues to grow in order tomitigate such events, increase the plant capacity factor, and gain public support for nuclear power as an alternative power source. This special issue identifies and analyzes major practical problems in nuclear energy and it contains 7 articles out of 14 articles that were initially received for publication. Even with the limited number of articles presented in this special issue, a wide range of topics are covered to present different experiences from several nuclear power plants and research institutions around the world. These topics are gathered in this issue to present the best engineering analyses, research effort, and practice with as little prejudice as possible. The issue starts by the novel method for optimization of the maintenance activities presented by A. Volkanovski and L. Cizelj in the nuclear power plant in order to improve plant safety. The authors consider different constraints on the optimization of the maintenance activities in the nuclear power plants. Three severe accident sequences of nuclear plants are discussed by G. Shao et al. to show that the natural circulation phenomenon results in heat transfer from the core to the pipes in RCS and consequently may cause the creep rupture of pipes in RCS and delay the severe accident progression. Also, S. Liu et al. were able to show that thermal stress failure caused by alternating operational loads is one of the important damage mechanisms in the nuclear power plants. Furthermore, R. K. Ur et al. discuss the impact of instrumentation and control components on the architecture of reactor protection systems. On the numerical and statistical analysis side, the article of S. U.-D. Khan et al. presents a modification to the neutron kinetics code, which originally works for the cylindrical type fuel elements, to plate type fuel nuclear reactor. Moreover, the study performed by M. El Nakla et al. has stressed the importance of the local scale observation leading to better understanding of the CHF phenomena in large pipe. They were able to predict the occurrence of critical heat flux in horizontal tubes using an extra correction factor to account for flow stratification. Finally, T. H. Woo contributed to this special issue with a paper on the nuclear power plant security. He presented dynamical assessment, which helps operator to find the dangerous situation in the site and avoid possible incidents that could be a catastrophe for theNPPs.We believe that this special issue provides interesting information on the recent progress in nuclear power research.

Safety features in nuclear power plants to eliminate the need of emergency planning in public domain

Following the Fukushima accident, the safety features of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) are being re-examined worldwide including India to demonstrate capabilities to cope with severe accidents. In order to restore public confidence and support for nuclear power, it is felt necessary to design future NPPs with near zero impact outside the plant boundary and thus enabling elimination of emergency planning in public domain. Authors have identified a set of safety features which are needed to be incorporated in advanced reactors to achieve this goal. These features enabling prevention, termination, mitigation and containment of radioactivity for beyond design basis accidents arising from extreme natural events are essential for achieving the goal of elimination of emergency planning in public domain. Inherent safety characteristics, passive and engineered safety features to achieve these functions are discussed in this paper. Present trends and future developments in this direction are also described briefly.

Three Mile Island: The driver of US nuclear power’s decline?

It is tempting to attribute variations in support for nuclear power to prominent accidents such as Three Mile Island in the United States or Fukushima in Japan. To illuminate how such attribution can be problematic, the authors discuss the historical context of the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. They point out that the US nuclear industry faced major challenges even before the 1979 accident: Forty percent of all US reactor cancellations between 1960 and 2010, they write, occurred before the accident in Pennsylvania. While safety concerns were undoubtedly a driver of public aversion to new nuclear construction in the United States, the nuclear industry already faced substantial economic and competitiveness obstacles, much like the nuclear industry worldwide before Fukushima.

Nuclear Power in the Second Obama Administration

The Obama Administration is pursuing numerous actions and policies that directly or indirectly promote nuclear power. The place to start is the Administration's statements reintroducing climate change to the national public agenda in his second inaugural address as an ‘all of the above’ energy policy, explicit support for nuclear power even after the Fukushima accidents, and implementing various federal legislative provisions that favor nuclear power.

Facing a Crisis with Calmness? The Global Response to the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

AbstractLiterature expects that an attitude toward nuclear power is in direct proportion to the perceived risk of accidents at an operational nuclear power plant; that is, the oppositional attitude is based on the view that nuclear technology is risky and support for nuclear power is related to a perceived low risk and/or potential benefit. However, it is misleading to assume that individuals’ risk perception alone can linearly explain their position after such an accident. The association between risk perception and attitude toward nuclear power varies significantly according to country but, until now, has been largely unexamined. This article takes into consideration the effects of structural factors on that relationship by examining public attitudes toward nuclear energy after the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011 and reveals that the need for the efficient production of electricity (i.e., nuclear energy) outweighs concern for the potential danger of a nuclear incident. Although a country's dependence on nuclear power for the production of electricity engenders anti-nuclear attitudes, it is evident that a level of economic development largely alleviates any negativity relative to that energy source.

Nuclear power and the public

Opinion polls show that public support for nuclear power has declined since the Fukushima crisis began, not only in Japan but also in other nations around the world. People oppose nuclear power for a variety of reasons, but the predominant concern is the perception that it is a risky technology. Some communities that are closely associated with it even suffer from stigmatization. The nuclear industry has tried a variety of strategies to break down public resistance to nuclear power—including information campaigns, risk comparisons, and efforts to promote nuclear power as a solution to climate change. None of these strategies has worked well, mostly because the public lacks trust in the nuclear industry. Public resistance to nuclear power is likely to continue, making it difficult to site and build new reactors. This resistance may be a major obstacle to the rapid expansion of nuclear power.

Meltdown of the Public Interest and the Need for an Engaged Public Sphere: A Critical (Re-) Interpretation of the Nuclear Accident at Three Mile Island

We argue the need for a national public debate re-assessing the nuclear industry in light of recent Bush Administration initiatives for expansion of the nuclear industry in the US, and expressed support for nuclear power by Barack Obama. Specifically, we use a critical theoretical lens to re-examine the worst nuclear accident in US history at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant in 1979. Our three-part argument includes a focus on the conflicting imperatives in institutional and economic spheres; critique of the ideology of nuclear science and technology; and a discussion of processes by which the public sphere is de-politicized and, potentially, re-politicized. Through the critical re-interpretation of the TMI accident, we assert the essential importance of a deliberative, engaged public sphere.

Delivering Nuclear Power: Challenges for the Obama Administration

This article considers two key problems that the Obama administration may face in respect of delivering a revival of nuclear power in the United States. It is shown that previous attempts to promote nuclear power have created an institutional infrastructure that exposes the U.S. government to considerable financial risk. If the Obama administration continues with its support for nuclear power, it risks billions of dollars of public money. It is also shown that the Obama administration's decisions regarding the management of nuclear waste have actually undermined the viability of nuclear power. It is concluded that the challenges are such that the U.S. federal government may have to assume direct control of any future nuclear program.

Swedish Nuclear Power and Economic Rationalities

The economic characteristics of nuclear power, with high investment cost and fuel costs lower than conventional fuels, make it possible to achieve low electricity prices when reactors supply marginal electricity. The support for nuclear power by the Swedish electricity consuming industry may be understood as efforts to create and defend a situation of over-capacity in the electricity production sector rather than as support for nuclear power as such. Politically the external costs of routine emissions of radioactive materials are difficult to internalise because they, like carbon dioxide, have global long-term effects. However, like the air pollutants already regulated, costs of reactor accidents, as well as the motives for taking on management costs of nuclear waste, are regional and within a generation in time. The market evaluation of accident risks has been deliberately destroyed by legislation set to favour nuclear power reactors. Societal economic rationality may be successfully applied in the energy sector. This paper describes how climate change risks were internalised in Sweden using carbon taxes under favourable political conditions. The resulting development of biofuels was surprisingly successful, indicating a potential for further modernisation of the energy supply system. Possible ways to restore the nuclear risk market in order to internalise nuclear reactor accident risks and waste costs by legislation are described. This may be done without the difficult quantification of environmental costs. Appropriate legislation may internalise the cost while creating conditions for market evaluation of these uncertain costs.

Intergenerational issues regarding nuclear power, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons raise substantial public concern in many countries. While new support for nuclear power can be found in arguments concerning greenhouse gases and global warming, the long-term existence of radioactive waste has led to requirements for 10,000-year isolation. Some of the support for such requirements is based on intergenerational equity arguments. This, however, places a very high value on lives far in the future. An alternative is to use discounting, as is applied to other resource applications. Nuclear weapons, even though being dismantled by the major nations, are growing in number due to the increase in the number of countries possessing these weapons of mass destruction. This is an unfortunate legacy for future generations.

Computer Modelling of the Impact Performance of Containers for the Transport of Radioactive Materials

Abstract ABA Technology is an acknowledged world expert in the structural dynamics area through its research programmes in support of nuclear power. Initially, the impact and blast response of metal and reinforced concrete structures relevant to nuclear power plants were studied. Since the mid 1980s these studies have been expanded to include containers for transporting radioactive materials. These programmes are continuing and new areas of interest are being addressed. Experimental transport performance studies are conducted using large gas guns and drop test facilities to achieve impact velocities at, and above, regulatory conditions. Instrumentation allows monitoring of transient pressures, accelerations, displacements, strains and loads. The data are used to predict full-scale structural response from scale models, and to verify calculation methods which range from PC-based mechanistic models to non-linear finite element codes on AEA Technology's CRAY-2 computer. Emphasis is placed on verifying proced...

Nuclear Reactions: Public Attitudes and Policies Toward Nuclear Power

The declining public support for nuclear power has political costs. In the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, public trust in the nuclear industry has reached an all-time low. Recognition of this lack of trust sets up a counterweight to the industry pressures for relaxed regulation. The authors present the historical background behind the current debate, then summarize the available scientific survey data on the actual levels and trends in public attitudes. They find little reason for optimism. With the exception of gender, most demographic factors have only modest influence on nuclear power attitudes, which suggests that public uneasiness about the technology has become a fact of life. They conclude that a significant weakening of federal safety standards would not be consistent with public preferences. 49 references, 3 figures.