EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Nuclear energy is perhaps the most controversial technology ever created. Since the initial commercialization of nuclear reactors in the late 1950s, the technology has been broadly misunderstood by the public, while public opinion has been broadly misunderstood by elites.
Members of the public are apt to conflate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, associate it with fossil fuels, and overestimate the risks associated with nuclear accidents and waste disposal. They also underestimate how much energy nuclear produces, its environmental benefits, and its remarkable record of safe operation. Elites, in turn, have consistently overestimated how much the public knows and cares about nuclear energy while failing to appreciate the degree to which public opinion, when offered, is mostly just a proxy for various partisan, ideological, and cultural identities rather than indicating well-formed opinions about the technology itself.
This report plumbs the voluminous and diverse research on nuclear attitudes going back 50 years, with the goal of extracting actionable insights for nuclear communications — particularly in the US context. We find that nuclear energy is a low-salience issue for the American public. Most people think about nuclear energy only when pollsters ask them to offer an opinion about it. When asked, about as many people express support for nuclear energy as opposition, but few have strong opinions.
When responding to surveys, the public is prone to associate nuclear energy with its most salient negative associations — waste, accidents, and radiation. However, perceived benefits are a stronger predictor of nuclear support or opposition, and long-term fluctuation in public attitudes is strongly associated not with concerns about pollution or climate change, nor even the risks of nuclear energy, but with perceptions of energy scarcity.
Insofar as public opinion about nuclear energy is polarized, that polarization has been cued by political elites. Elite opinion toward nuclear energy (in contrast to public attitudes) has been characterized by strong, consistent, and ideologically coherent attitudes. From the 1960s onward, elite opinion became increasingly fractured along the fault lines of cultural worldviews. Nuclear energy became absorbed into this polarization of elite opinion, and public opinion followed suit. Egalitarian worldviews aligned with anti-nuclear sentiment, and hierarchical/individualist worldviews aligned with nuclear support. On both sides of the divide, polarization increased with education and political engagement.
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