THE UNDERLYING ROOTS OF PUBLIC OPPOSITION TO NUCLEAR POWER

The underlying roots of public opposition to nuclear power are complex. Almost any new activity or technology may stimulate at least some form of public opposition, and only some are inherent to the technology. Some are more deep-rooted than others; and some are rooted in how people perceive risks and benefits. Nuclear power has been the subject of extensive public polling, including in the United States, and a substantial literature in the social sciences exists that extracts and analyzes the attitudes of different publics toward the technology. This has been done both in the abstract and with respect to different facilities such as power reactors and waste repositories.

Public Opinion Polls

Rigorously eliciting the roots of public attitudes toward nuclear power requires careful social and decision science, and the importance of good experimental design cannot be understated. Nonetheless, the focus is on public opinion polls first. When done reliably and frequently, polling gives a general impression of how a community feels about a subject but rarely delves deeper than that. For example, why is this general impression held? Is it held strongly, or is it mutable? In the case of nuclear power, polls rarely extract the determinants of these impressions. In fact, patterns in public opinion often shift; the key is to maintain an approach to public engagement that follows the best practices that are discussed at the conclusion of this chapter. Moreover, high levels of support for a hypothetical plant do not necessarily translate into easier siting decisions.

In the United States, although the first commercial nuclear reactor in the United States was synchronized to the power grid in 1958, the technology remained psychologically distant from the public until builds commenced in earnest during the Great Bandwagon Market of the 1960s and 1970s. Protests began to be held, some of which were covered on national news outlets (OTA 1984, p. 211). Despite these protests, surveys only began explicitly asking the public for their opinion regarding nuclear energy in the mid-1970s. Those early polls suggested that the American public was either supportive of or ambivalent toward nuclear power, with organized opposition emerging among civil society and environmental groups. In the early years of the atomic age, the debate regarding the role of nuclear power in the energy system was impacted by the larger context of the Cold War, and by the role that nuclear weapons played in both that conflict and in the birth of nuclear science and technology. In other words, some of the opposition to nuclear power emanated from the same segments of the population that were supportive of nuclear disarmament.

By the mid-1970s at the latest, wiser and more forward-thinking members of the U.S. nuclear community had become cognizant of the degree to which broad public opposition was constraining further nuclear development. In 1976, Alvin Weinberg stated,

Opposition to nuclear reactor builds in the United States increased after the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979; it also increased after the Chernobyl accident of 1986. In each case, after a substantial period (several years) had passed, public opinion polls suggested that attitudes among the public settled back at levels of general ambivalence, with no evident majority (or, arguably, plurality) of respondents supporting or opposing the technology. The same happened after Fukushima in March 2011: opposition increased initially but by 2019

Americans were evenly split on the topic of nuclear energy. Figure 8-1 summarizes results from polls conducted over the past four decades.

The schism in attitudes toward nuclear power in the United States emerged in John Kemeny’s account of the lessons he learned while chairing the Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (Kemeny 1980). Kemeny identified a litany of “people problems”: among these are problems that the next section will discuss at length: the attitudes of technical experts; the difficulty of contending with deep uncertainty; the media’s treatment of scientific topics; and how institutions respond to large and complex challenges.

The one poll that consistently reveals support for nuclear power is the industry’s own. The Nuclear Energy Institute commissions and funds their own polls, and professional societies such as the American Nuclear Society play a role in distributing these polls. With one exception (around the time of Chernobyl), such polls have consistently shown levels of support for nuclear power to be higher than levels of opposition.

Other nations have different socio-political and cultural features that influence their publics’ attitudes toward nuclear power. For example, France’s reliance on nuclear power—a product of energy security concerns after the 1973 oil crisis—had engendered strong support for the technology, although the past two decades have seen that social contract fray. The country initially committed to reducing its reliance on the technology, but more recently, interest has grown in revivifying the French nuclear industry (Chrisafis 2022), driven by concerns regarding energy security and domestic political considerations. Similarly, Japan is restarting some of its dormant nuclear reactors. The salience of energy security as a factor in nuclear power deployment is especially clear in both France and Japan. The German and Italian publics have traditionally been opposed to nuclear power, although the 2022 global energy crisis is forcing Germany to reconsider its planned closure of its few remaining nuclear plants. Belgium decided to phase out nuclear power by 2025, as has Taiwan, although the former recently decided to extend the life of its nuclear plants. South Korea set out plans to phase out nuclear power by 2060, although its new president recently vowed to reverse the phase announced by his predecessor. The long-term stability of this growth in interest is unclear, especially because it seems mostly driven by an urgent but potentially transient global energy crisis.

Outside established democracies, the validity of public polling in establishing subjects’ attitudes toward nuclear power (and many other subjects) is much reduced. This applies to some autocratic nations that have recently joined the community of nuclear energy states.

Insights from the Social and Decision Sciences

It is difficult to develop a satisfactory taxonomy of the underlying roots of public opposition to nuclear power, but the key factors are certainly known and have been the subject of extensive research over the previous five decades by academics in engineering, psychology, the decision sciences, and the field of science and technology studies. Table 8-1 presents a classification of the roots of public opposition across two dimensions: first, whether the opposition is inherent to nuclear power or applies to other technologies or infrastructure; and second, whether the opposition is more related to the technology itself or the socio-technical institutions that govern it.

Nuclear power is not the only energy technology that contends with societal opposition, and some of the factors in Table 8-1 apply to other infrastructure, including pipelines, transmission lines, and potentially to emergent or unfamiliar energy systems. The implications of addressing the societal acceptance challenge thus extend beyond nuclear energy, making their resolution critical to the deep decarbonization of the global energy system.

Dread and Public Opposition

Social scientists have been exploring the public’s perception of nuclear power and the underlying roots of those societal attitudes since the 1970s. A psychometric study undertaken by a group of psychologists in 1978 (Fischhoff et al. 1978) analyzed the attitudes of 76 respondents to a variety of technologies and concluded that “nuclear power had the dubious distinction of scoring at or near the extreme negative end for most of the

TABLE 8-1 A Taxonomy of the Underlying Roots of Public Opposition to Nuclear Power

NOTE: Concerns regarding this (and other) technologies fall along the dimensions identified by decision scientists who pioneered the psychometric paradigm of risk perception (Fischhoff et al. 1978).

SOURCE: Committee generated from B. Fischhoff, P. Slovic, S. Lichtenstein, et al., 1978, “How Safe Is Safe Enough? A Psychometric Study of Attitudes Towards Technological Risks and Benefits,” Policy Sciences 9(2):127–152.

characteristics [under investigation]. Its risks were seen as involuntary, unknown to those exposed or to science, uncontrollable, unfamiliar, catastrophic, severe (fatal) and dreaded. Medical X rays, in contrast, had a much more benign profile. Nuclear power’s perceived benefits were also assessed and were found to be extremely low” (Slovic 1990, p. 6-3; see Figure 8-2). This general conclusion—that nuclear technology engenders a strong signal response in the public—has been replicated over time and across countries. It was also preceded by a

decade-long debate about how the public perceives the risks and benefits of different activities (Starr 1969): this debate helped articulate the importance of risks being voluntarily taken for the public to accept them. This was echoed in Roth et al. (1990), which describes the multiple dimensions of risk and the importance of accurate risk comparisons: making risk comparisons between voluntary and involuntary choices can foment mistrust. Furthermore, societal amplification of risk is a well-documented phenomenon (Solvic 1979; Kasperson 2005; Rothman 1987) that is revealed by Figure 8-2, originating from the fear of uncontrollable, involuntary, and potentially life-threatening outcomes.

This “dread” partly originates from the fear or radioactivity’s attributes and its effects. It is invisible and people cannot control their exposure to it in the event of a nuclear accident. This attribute—controllability—is key to risk acceptance: risks that are assumed voluntarily are more acceptable to people than risks that are thrust on them, which explains why people ski and mountain climb despite the risk of injury and death from those activities being demonstrably higher than the risk of injury or death from a nuclear accident (Starr 1969). Nuclear power is unique among energy technologies in that it is intimately associated with radioactivity, the release of which leads to “dreadful” health impacts like cancer. As a disease, cancer is known to engender dread; James Harrison famously called it “The Dread Disease” (Patterson 1989). This dread risk is equally applicable to non-power facilities like waste repositories, although it is compounded by the specter of long-term (>100,000 year) stewardship, and to dread-inducing events—like terrorist attacks¹—that could occur at nuclear facilities.

A recent study attempted to disentangle this “dread risk”—the large mix of “gut reactions” or “signals” that come with the nuclear “label”—from nuclear power’s catastrophic accident risk. It asked a sample of 1,226 Americans to build an energy mix for the year 2050 that would halve greenhouse gas emissions. Respondents were randomly divided into two subgroups; both subgroups were given information about the technical performance, emissions, and risk (in terms of both mortality and morbidity) of six energy sources; half were told the names—or labels—of the six technologies. Those who were “blinded” to the technologies’ labels deployed more NPPs as part of the low-carbon electricity generation mix than peers in the other group (on average, ~26 percent of total U.S. electric power generation versus ~19 percent). This study showed the extent to which the label “nuclear,” as opposed to its statistical accident risk, limits the deployment of this low-carbon technology (Abdulla et al. 2019).

Some efforts to explain the dread are rooted in demographics. One finding that has been extensively replicated is that women are more opposed to nuclear power than men (Abdulla et al. 2019). People with less expertise in either the nuclear field or in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields broadly are more likely to oppose nuclear power (Harris et al. 2018). Last, politically left-leaning respondents are more opposed to the technology than their counterparts on the political right. The last result warrants fresh study to see if it still holds, because two recent developments could have instigated a shift in the relationship between political alignment and support for nuclear power. First, there has been a bifurcation among political liberals recently, as industry, some governments, and energy experts promote the view that that nuclear power is essential to deep decarbonization. This strategy has been pursued by successive governments of the United Kingdom since 2000, and the result of that narrative has been what social scientists have termed “reluctant acceptance” among a subset of the population (Bickerstaff et al. 2008). The construction of a narrative that either advocates for nuclear power or frames it as necessary could thus change attitudes to nuclear power. Second, political conservatives have traditionally supported nuclear power precisely because they associate the industry with institutions (e.g., the military) they trust and support: recent developments have led to a precipitous loss of trust in institutions (Leiserowitz et al. 2012; Schank 2022; Pew Research Center 2022), which may or may not reverberate on attitudes toward nuclear power. While there is anecdotal evidence for both shifts, they remain speculative: more research is needed to determine the extent to which they increase of undermine support for nuclear power.

In addition, nuclear power is often seen as dirty: this perception is rooted in its production of harmful wastes (rather tangible and immediately lethal ones, unlike carbon dioxide) (Ansolabehere and Konisky 2014). This perception is especially consequential. More broadly, the public has serious misconceptions regarding different types of pollution: a recent study found evidence that the public does not distinguish long-lived greenhouse gases from short-lived criteria air pollutants (Dryden et al. 2017). In fact, they are quite different. Carbon dioxide lasts much longer in the atmosphere than criteria air pollutants. Consequently, people might not appreciate the risks of

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¹ Terrorism is known to induce the similar type of dread risk.

greenhouse gases and the importance of deep and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, believing instead that warming will cease a matter of years after any energy transition. This has large implications on the technologies and policies that the public is willing to support.

Weart identified “nuclear fear” to be prompted by the use of nuclear weapons in World War II and the consequent proliferation of those weapons in the United States and then-Soviet Union (1988). Weapons that could change all life on Earth, as found in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, have produced what sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed a “Risk Society” (1992). Again, this perception has much to do with radiation’s “invisibility” and “controllability”: radiation, Beck noted, was particularly insidious because its presence evaded all our senses to detect its potentially destructive force.

In the United States, managers of the nuclear enterprise now stress the value in “distinguishing the sunny side of the atom from its more sinister one” (Ford et al. 2018). The fact of the matter is that the military applications of nuclear technology and the civilian applications have a connection to each other: the two enterprises have a common origin and clearly rely on one another’s strengths, most clearly in the connection between civilian suppliers and the naval reactor program, as well as the revolving door that exists between civilian nuclear power and retired Navy personnel. David Lilienthal famously said that research on the two was “virtually an identical process: two sides of the same coin” (Gamson 1987). Social scientists in the United Kingdom recently documented the close links between civil and military nuclear industries resulting from pressures to ensure a steady stream of skilled workers in the nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine sector (Stirling and Johnstone 2018). This connection does not engender confidence among those parts of the broader population for whom the association is problematic. An appropriate response from the industry would acknowledge the link while seeking to strengthen the firewall that has been slowly built between the two enterprises. Beyond nuclear power’s military associations, any institutions that are secretive are generally viewed with suspicion and are thus subject to mistrust and misconceptions.

The other major challenge that is inherent to nuclear technologies is the demands it makes of our social institutions. Nuclear power requires the long-term stewardship of highly radioactive and long-lived nuclear waste. While safe storage can be accomplished, it requires credible and durable social institutions—a demand of society for “vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to” (Weinberg 1972). A companion study from the National Academies on the merits and viability of advanced reactor fuel cycles and waste (NASEM 2022a) has pointed out that the fact that the United States has failed to resolve the problem of nuclear waste forty years after the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act has further compounded the issue of lack of trust in institutions.

The Problem of Trust

Much research has been devoted to the role of trust in the persons and institutions who are responsible for the promotion and management of nuclear energy. This strand of academic research emphasizes the public’s lack of trust in the nuclear industry’s “risk communicators”—the scientists, engineers, regulators, and policy makers who aggressively support the technology.

The nuclear industry and its promoters make claims of safety, including instances from reactor accidents. For example, on the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima accident, one commentator claimed that, “Amid all the tsunami and evacuation deaths, the reactor itself proved to be close to harmless” (Saunders 2021). Another said, “[T]he radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people. In other words, the main lesson that should be drawn from the worst nuclear accidents is that nuclear energy has always been inherently safe” (Shellenberger 2019). Studies have broadly acknowledged that there are few (if any) deaths expected from radiation exposure in the case of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but it is debatable whether this argument changes enough minds for nuclear power to witness radically expanded deployment. In fact, the Fukushima accident is widely and correctly

seen as a disaster in many dimensions, including its impact on public trust in the institutions involved in advancing nuclear power.

Often, claims of public misunderstanding of nuclear power and radiation are made along with the assertion that if only the public had the proper scientific education—the right facts—they would not fear radiation and understand the benefits of nuclear power (Weart 1988). This lack of understanding as the source of the trouble is what has been termed the “deficit model of public understanding of science” (Wynne 1991). Most studies support at best only a small positive relationship between scientific knowledge and perception. Confidence in science varies based on age, race, educational attainment, region, political ideology, and other characteristics (AAAS 2020). As a result, social scientists now focus on other factors that play a larger role in shaping public attitudes (AAAS 2018).

Wynne pointed out that people judge whether scientific knowledge is trustworthy and therefore useful by comparing it to what they already know to be true based on their own experience. For instance, predicted incidences of cancer will be judged against known cancer incidences near facilities in question, even if those cancers were not caused by those facilities. Context is also important. Wynne gives an example of Sellafield workers who were ignorant of radioactive processes and didn’t feel that they needed to know about them because important safety information was incorporated into the ways in which they were trained and approached their work. In other words, the workers needed only to learn the procedures, not the science behind them. The important lesson is

Studies suggest that nuclear power is one of the safest means of power generation (Markandya 2007), but this does not mean that people will favor it. In the past decade, emerging research suggests that increasing levels of scientific literacy and numeracy are not correlated with increased acceptance of the dominant scientific and engineering consensus. Instead, more education enables people to selectively employ scientific information in support of their preconceived notions—notions already rooted in instincts, feelings, identities, or outlooks (Kahan et al. 2012). Indeed, recent research shows that underlying factors, such as group identity, can strongly influence people’s attitudes and acceptance of scientific information. That is, the foundational beliefs of a group can strongly influence its members’ willingness to accept and act on scientific evidence. The problem is more complicated than the deficit model acknowledges, and significant research is necessary to understand how cultural experience and group identity shape trust in scientific information (AAAS 2018, 2020). The bottom line is that more education is not likely to be an effective response to those who harbor misgivings of nuclear technology.

Claims of nuclear safety, as many social and decision scientists have highlighted over the past decades, often fail to convince a reticent public. Trust is essential to public acceptance and support of nuclear power. Without establishing public acceptance, any future deployment of nuclear power at a level that matters for climate change mitigation is destined to fail. The notion suggested by Alvin Weinberg 55 years ago, by John Kemeny 40 years ago; and by Paul Slovic stated 30 years ago, still holds:

Opposition Rooted in Factors That Are Common Across Technologies

Some of the factors that lead to opposition are not specific to nuclear power but are common across energy (and some non-energy) technologies. At the level of the individual, the notion of “proximity” or “place” figures prominently in social scientific research on public acceptance of energy technologies, including nuclear power

(Venebales 2012). The deployment of energy infrastructure, especially if it is large and strikingly visible, alters an individual’s relationship with the land—be it wind farms, transmission lines, NPPs, or carbon capture facilities. The concern is twofold. First, the disruption that is caused during construction—noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution (this concern is salient in rural areas that rely on groundwater wells), and construction traffic. If developers and workers are perceived to be outsiders, the concern is magnified. Second, once the construction phase is complete, there is the more permanent alteration of land, nature, or potentially community dynamics. These concerns manifest themselves at the level of both the individual and the community.

An additional factor is opposition that is rooted in distrust of the industry’s technical experts. To some extent, this is common across complex or sensitive technologies. One reason is the (correct) understanding among publics—be it implicit or explicit—that the generation of science and the dynamics of power and culture are inextricably linked; Jasanoff (2004) describes how scientific knowledge and the social order are “co-produced.” This affects trust in science, especially among the powerless (see Box 8-2 for a note on environmental justice). Another reason is the perceived arrogance of some experts—engineers, executives, and their allies. Trust is especially undermined if experts dismiss public concerns, or when these concerns are perceived to be dismissed by a

community engagement process that has been established to extract them. This is especially unfortunate: the field of risk assessment has known for decades about Normal Accidents² (Perrow 1999), the limitations of scenario analysis, and the cognitive limits of expert judgment. Social science has since evaluated this phenomenon in particular: Beck noted that “our risk assessment bureaucracies have found ways to deny systemic hazards” (Beck 1999) and Downer has written extensively about how complex risks are not “objectively calculable” (Downer 2013). The attitude reveals a cultural challenge that may be acute within the nuclear industry, but one that is not unique to it: all industries have analysts and employees who take an optimistic view of the benefits of their technology (and place an undue amount of confidence in its prospects). Motivated reasoning also exists among opponents of nuclear power.

The nuclear industry’s institutional practices have advanced greatly since Three Mile Island, and the formation of the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO)³ in the United States is rightfully lauded as one of the industry’s greatest successes. However, in community engagement sessions, the notion persists that most problems not only warrant but also have a technical solution. While technical solutions exist to many socio-technical problems, not all problems can be resolved with technical modifications. It would be prudent to ensure that these views change and not emerge during public engagement sessions, because such pronouncements end up undermining trust in nuclear energy projects and in the broader industry.

The factors described above mold societal preferences toward different energy technologies; some of them could be difficult to alter once established. They are the by-product of deeply engrained instincts, outlooks, feelings, or judgments. However, public acceptance or opposition is not entirely rooted in psychology and behavioral science. At one level, acceptance of new energy infrastructure hinges on the relevant stakeholders’ assessments of its benefits, costs, and risks. If a community’s calculus yields an assessment that nuclear power’s benefits exceed its costs, the community might become supportive of hosting a reactor. To achieve these beneficial assessments, developers need to consider two facts. First, evidence from the social sciences suggests that the benefits of nuclear power are undervalued: its electricity is not perceived to be “clean” (Ansolabehere and Konisky 2014), since it produces long-lived waste; its true benefits are either very concentrated (salaries paid to plant workers) or very diffuse (electricity that feeds into the bulk power grid, for which people know there are alternatives, some of which might be more acceptable). The second difficulty is that different individuals and communities attribute differing weights or values to different decision criteria.

Nonetheless, the characteristics and aspirational goals of new and advanced nuclear reactors—like reduced capital cost, smaller plant sites and emergency planning zones, and smaller radionuclide inventories—might alter people’s assessment of the benefits, costs, and risks, and make some willing to host reactors in their communities. For example, solving the economic challenge—which figures prominently in community engagement sessions, although behind safety and waste—can increase societal acceptance. Just like poor societal acceptance could incur costs to a project developer, demonstrating affordability and economic competitiveness while still achieving high levels of safety and reliability could increase societal acceptance: it is a two-way street. This is true across energy and non-energy infrastructure, especially for megaprojects which often end up over budget and behind schedule—the sheer size of the investment, the poor cost and schedule control that often exists, and the broader effects on the local community attract special scrutiny and reduce societal acceptance.

Many of these concerns manifest themselves at the level of both the individual and the community. Moreover, much of the social scientific research underpinning this section hinges on the crucial fact that there are multiple publics: a developer that focuses on the wrong publics when conceptualizing and executing a project—that is, when shaping the project’s context and articulating its benefits and costs to those affected by it—boosts the likelihood of project failure. For example, there is a difference between the broader public, the topic of this chapter’s discussion thus far, and local publics. Acceptance of nuclear power is higher among people who are proximate to some nuclear plants. Clearly, it is important to distinguish between the broader public and various local publics that extract rent or other, more diffuse benefits from NPPs.

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² The premise that a combination of human error and systemic failures across a multitude of systems can cause accidents to escalate, and that such accidents are inevitable in extremely complex systems.

³ INPO sets industry-wide guidelines for NPP operations. It is funded by the nuclear industry.

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⁴ The decision to extend reactor lifetimes has generated consternation among the owners. Engie has requested federal government support to finance the extension in the fear that the 2022 energy price spike will be short-lived, and that any extension will ultimately prove unprofitable (Carter 2022).

Those institutions should either be engaged with at the same level as natural opponents or, preferably, held at arm’s length while the community deliberates on the proposal.

Third is the question of communication strategy. Experts in public engagement exist: they should staff the community engagement process if engineers or executives do not have the requisite experience. Experienced staff include properly trained facilitators, mediators, or negotiators, as well as experts who know how to develop an understanding of the relevant actors and concerns in a given community. Relying on existing staff to take on these roles is a recipe for failure. Community engagement is not “the easy part” of the project. It is the most difficult and among the most important, and it must be engaged in sincerely and with due humility.

Multiple, credible communication channels must be developed and deployed between developer and community. These include channels to acquire information or data; channels to raise concerns regarding the project or its impact on the community; and channels to share time-sensitive information in cases where doing so is necessary (e.g., if there is an incident at the plant). Although multiple levels of government are likely to be involved in emergency response, the community must be empowered to hear of such developments from the developer itself—this contributes to trust, mutual respect, and the sense of partnership and control that communities need to feel and exercise.

Consistency is important. When presenting facts and figures, the developer’s vision for the project cannot change as the political (or social) winds change. Facts and figures must represent the developer’s best working knowledge of the issue at hand. Moreover, the developer’s treatment of different stakeholders cannot change midstream, especially if they raise concerns about the project. This undermines trust in the entire project and increases the likelihood of failure.

Successful community engagement is an iterative process, much like extended diplomatic negotiations. The developer must be prepared to invest the time and effort that is required to listen and act on the community’s concerns. Moreover, the communities must be given an opportunity to opt out at some point in the process, as well as a sense of control over the facility. This engenders trust and faith in both the developers and the process. This sense of control can take a variety of forms. Perhaps accessible, real-time radiation monitoring is adequate (as is done in South Korea at NPPs), or the ability for occasional full-body radiation scans (as is done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico). As it works to move its waste to an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI), the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station organizes occasional visits to the plant site for both nuclear opponents and members of the community.

Some projects have been successful through the formation of partnerships where the community has a real say in the design and implementation of the facility. This requires the implementer to cede a degree of power over the project (Bergmans 2008; Bergmans et al. 2015).

Most communities cannot be bought off. Some will require compensation in addition to the prospect of jobs; others will not. Developers keen on boosting the likelihood of success should provide funding to communities so that they can hire their own independent experts to understand the risks and benefits. This process will engender trust and reassure the community of the safety of the project. Enlightened developers should be prepared to provide some funding to opposition groups who will work to make the project stronger and better. They are a natural “red team”; supporting and addressing their critiques will further increase trust.

Last, be prepared to walk away if, after a concerted effort, the community decides that they are not going to willingly host a nuclear power facility (see Box 8-3). There are no guarantees with siting.

While following the recommendations in this chapter could potentially increase the cost and schedule of a new project, ignoring them could lead to more significant cost and schedule issues. Thus, a preventative strategy may be the best strategy for nuclear vendors—following best practices for community engagement will ultimately result in payoff in the later stages of deployment.

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