Public Opinion and Nuclear Waste Policymaking

Michael E. Kraft, Eugene A. Rosa, and Riley E. Dunlap

The safe disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants and national defense activity is a highly complex technical and managerial problem. It is also a profoundly difficult social and political issue. For the more than forty years during which high-level waste has accumulated in the United States and other nations, far more attention has been devoted to the technical and management problem than to the social and political one. Yet understanding the social and political dimensions of nuclear waste disposal may be far more crucial to the resolution of conflicts over repository siting. For that reason, this book brings together some of the most recent and extensive empirical research available on public concerns about radioactive waste and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) repository program, both nationally and within selected states.

The role that public perceptions and opinions may play in nuclear waste policymaking is vividly illustrated by recent controversies over several different DOE programs. In the fall of 1988, a series of news reports documented widespread chemical and radioactive contamination at seventeen DOE nuclear weapons plants and laboratories in twelve states, attributable in large part to the department's previous neglect of health, safety, and environmental responsibilities. With site clean-up costs estimated at over $100 billion, the revelations provoked public outrage, lawsuits, and congressional investigations. That response, in turn, prompted Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins to call for a fundamental change in DOE culture, emphasizing a commitment to environmental protection and open decisionmaking that he hoped would improve the department's credibility with the American public (Watkins, 1989).

Also in 1988, DOE was forced to postpone the opening of its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico (designed to store transuranic wastes from atomic weapons production), and in 1989 DOE had to abandon its initial two-year, $2 billion effort to assess the technical suitability of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, site being considered for the nation's only civilian high-level nuclear waste repository (HLNWR). In the first case, experts both within and outside of DOE, including the National Academy of Sciences, had questioned the design and construction of the facility and the expected environmental impacts (Schneider, 1988), bringing further public scrutiny of the project. In the second case, criticism of the quality of DOE's technical work by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and others, and adamant opposition from the state of Nevada, led Secretary Watkins late in 1989 to overturn the department's prior assessments of the site's suitability. He launched a major reorganization of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and promised to increase attention to "institutional" issues such as public opinion and federal-state relations (Wald, 1989; Lippman, 1989; DOE, 1989).

As these and similar developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s have shown, public acceptability can be a vitally important and even a determinative force in the nuclear waste policy process. For that reason alone, the public's views of radioactive waste and repository siting merit careful assessment by scholars and decisionmakers. We need to understand the public's perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward nuclear waste and toward a repository to store it: the nature of these cognitions, how they are formed, what forces shape them, how they change over time, and how they differ among various population subgroups. Such understanding is essential to evaluating public acceptability of various waste disposal options; it is also crucial to decisionmakers charged with formulating and implementing nuclear waste policies.

The study of the public's views of nuclear waste is also an interesting topic in its own right, particularly as a case of perception of risky technologies. The substantial literature on risk perception (e.g., Gould et al., 1988; Slovic, 1987; Covello, 1983) raises intriguing questions about the public's view of technological risks in modern society, as does survey research on public attitudes toward nuclear energy and radioactive waste (Nealey, Melber, and Rankin, 1983; Walker, Gould, and Woodhouse, 1983; Freudenburg and Rosa, 1984; Nealey, 1990). The new research collected here follows the path of previous work by attempting to describe and explain public perceptions of and attitudes toward nuclear waste, but it does so in a diversity of geographic contexts, from a variety of perspectives, and through the use of various methodologies. It also emphasizes questions related to repository siting that we believe have significant implications for nuclear waste policy.

To underscore the relationship between public sentiment and the policy process, in this introduction we review the status of nuclear waste as a policy problem, trace the development of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 and its amendment, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987, and assess the public's role in policy implementation to date. We also discuss conceptual and methodological issues in the study of public views of nuclear waste. We reserve questions concerning the policy implications of the research for the individual chapters that follow and for our concluding chapter.

Nuclear Waste as a Policy Problem

The need for a high-level nuclear waste repository derives chiefly from the federal government's decision forty years ago to promote and to subsidize heavily the commercial use of atomic energy. Since the first nuclear reactor was put on-line at Shippingsport, Pennsylvania, in late 1957, commercial wastes (unavoidable by-products of fission reaction) have been accumulating in water-filled basins at reactor sites around the nation (U.S. Office of...