Precautionary attitudes and the acceptance of a local nuclear waste repository

There has been little previous research on public attitudes about precaution and their significance for risk opinions and attitudes. The present case of application is that of the siting of a repository for spent nuclear fuel, a controversial issue in most countries. Data from a representative sample of the Swedish population were collected with a mailed questionnaire, which covered risk perceptions and attitudes towards nuclear waste. A reliable unidimensional scale measuring precautionary attitudes was constructed. It was found that women were more likely to accept items expressing a precautionary attitude than were men. Precaution was related, as expected, to epistemic distrust and size of negative consequences if an accident should occur in the handling and storing of spent nuclear fuel. Epistemic trust and size of consequences contributed about equally strongly to the variance of precautionary attitude. Adding the scale to a set of explanatory variables in models of attitudes and voting intentions with regard to a repository resulted in a significantly improved power of the models. Emotional reactions emerged as important explanatory variables in accounting for precautionary attitudes, political ideology to a smaller extent. The results based on intra-sample variability were mirrored at the level of between-sample variation. Results from the two samples from municipalities where a siting was under evaluation (Oskarshamn and Östhammar) showed that respondents there were much more positive to a repository and at the same time less likely to accept pro-PP statements.