initiatives limiting new reactor construction in 1980 and 1982.

In California, State legislators approved a law restricting nuclear power development in 1976 to head off a more stringent Statewide referendum with similar provisions that was then turned down only a few months later. The law passed by the legislature was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1983. Other State legislatures and a few PUCS have limited further construction of nuclear plants by legislation or regula

tion. A complete list of State laws and regulations (including those enacted by voter referenda) affecting nuclear power is given in table 33. Because of these laws and regulations, utilities in 10 States cannot obtain State licensing of proposed nuclear reactors until certain conditions, such as a clear demonstration of high-level waste disposal, are met.

Even in those States where nuclear power development is not limited by law or regulation, State politics can influence utility decisions about

Provisions

No licensing of new plants until Federal Government approves a demonstrated high-level waste disposal technology and fuel rod reprocessing technology is available. No licensing of a fifth plant until Federal Government approves a demonstrated highlevel waste disposal technology.

Limits construction costs of Millstone 3 to rate-payers to $3.5 billion.

Declares the State's intention to prohibit construction of plants.

No licensing of new plants until Federal

Government demonstrates high-level waste disposal and a majority of voters approve in a referendum vote.

No licensing of new generators of nonmedical low-level waste until Federal Government demonstrates waste disposal or an interstate compact is in effect.

No licensing of new plants or nonmedical low-level radioactive waste disposal sites until a Federally approved storage facility is operating, and other conditions, including voter approval, have been met.

No licensing of new plants until all liability limits for an accident are waived, a bond is posted against decommissioning costs, and other conditions, including voter approval, are met.

No licensing of new plants until Federal Government provides high-level waste disposal and a majority of voters approve in a referendum.

No licensing of new plants without General
Assembly approval.

No licensing of new plants without progress on waste disposal, fuel supply, decommissioning, and other economic issues. No issuance of bonds for major new energy facilities (including nuclear plants) without voter approval.

aOn Apr. 21, 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law. SOURCES: Atomic Industrial Forum, State Codes, NRC Office of State Programs.

nuclear plants. Whether Public Utility Commissioners are directly elected or appointed by an elected Governor, they are sensitive to State politics and broad public opinion. Public concerns about nuclear power may lead Utility Commissioners to disallow rate increases needed to finance completion of plants under construction or to simply deny a license entirely. Public opposition at the local level, too, can discourage utilities from implementing planned nuclear plants. For example, Portland General Electric in Oregon canceled its planned Pebble Springs reactor in 1982 following a lengthy siting controversy that made the project less economically attractive. The approval of a State referendum in 1980 banning licensing of new plants until waste disposal technology was available contributed to the utility's decision.

Over the past few years, public concern about reactor safety in reaction to the accident at TMI has encouraged additional NRC safety studies and new regulatory requirements, increasing nuclear power costs and making it less attractive to utilities. (A more detailed analysis of the costs of regulatory requirements is included in ch. 6.) This trend is partially a continuation of increasing public concern about environmental quality that began in the late 1960's. Translated into laws and regulations, those concerns drove up the price of both nuclear and coal-fired powerplants as utilities were required to incorporate more pollution

control technology into new and existing plants. Negative public perceptions may also affect the availability of financing for new nuclear plants. The financial problems caused by the accident at TMI discouraged some investors and brokers from investing in utilities with nuclear plants underway, driving up the cost of capital for those utilities. Finally, negative public attitudes affect nuclear power's future in less tangible ways: The most gifted young engineers and technicians may choose other specializations, gradually reducing the quality of nuclear industry personnel. And, utilities simply may not choose nuclear plants if they perceive them as bad for overall public relations.

The future of nuclear power in the United States is very uncertain due to a variety of economic, financial, and regulatory factors outlined in other chapters of this report. Both parties to the nuclear debate are bringing these factors before the broader public. Some may argue that the issues are too complicated for the general public to contend with. However, as Thomas Jefferson said, "When the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government." None of the conditions seen by utilities as a requirement for a revival of the nuclear industryregulatory stability, rate restructuring, and political support-can be met without greater public acceptance. Thus, unless public opinion toward nuclear power changes, the future prospects for the nuclear industry will remain bleak.

In contrast to the public, most "opinion leaders," particularly energy experts, support further development of nuclear power. This support is revealed both in opinion polls and in technical studies of the risks of nuclear power. A March 1982 poll of Congress found 76 percent of members supported expanded use of nuclear power (50). In a survey conducted for Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Co. in 1980, leaders in religion, business, the military, government, science, education, and law perceived the benefits of nuclear power as greater than the risks (19). Among the categories of leaders surveyed, scientists were

particularly supportive of nuclear power. Seventyfour percent of scientists viewed the benefits of nuclear power as greater than risks, compared with only 55 percent of the rest of the public.

In a recent study, a random sample of scientists was asked about nuclear power (62). Of those polled, 53 percent said development should proceed rapidly, 36 percent said development should proceed slowly, and 10 percent would halt development or dismantle plants. When a second group of scientists with particular expertise in energy issues was given the same

choices, 70 percent favored proceeding rapidly and 25 percent favored proceeding slowly with the technology. This second sample included approximately equal numbers of scientists from 71 disciplines, ranging from air pollution to energy policy to thermodynamics. About 10 percent of those polled in this group worked in disciplines directly related to nuclear energy, so that the results might be somewhat biased. Support among both groups of scientists was found to result from concern about the energy crisis and the belief that nuclear power can make a major contribution to national energy needs over the next 20 years. Like scientists, a majority of engineers continued to support nuclear power after the accident at Three Mile Island (69).

Of course, not all opinion leaders are in favor of the current U.S. program of nuclear development. Leaders of the environmental movement have played a major role in the debate about reactor safety and prominent scientists are found on both sides of the debate. A few critics of nuclear power have come from the NRC and the nuclear industry, including three nuclear engineers who left General Electric in order to demonstrate their concerns about safety in 1976. However, the majority of those with the greatest expertise in nuclear energy support its further development.

Analysis of public opinion polls indicates that people's acceptance or rejection of nuclear power is more influenced by their view of reactor safety than by any other issue (57). As discussed above, accidents and events at operating plants have greatly increased public concern about the possibility of a catastrophic accident. Partially in response to that concern, technical experts have conducted a number of studies of the likelihood and consequences of such an accident. However, rather than reassuring the public about nuclear safety, these studies appear to have had the opposite effect. By painting a picture of the possible consequences of an accident, the studies have contributed to people's view of the technology as exceptionally risky, and the debate within the scientific community about the study methodologies and findings has increased public uncertainty.

The Controversy Over Safety Studies

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) completed its first major study of the consequences of a reactor accident involving release of radioactivity in 1957. Commonly known as WASH740, the study was based on a very small (by today's standards) 165-megawatt (MW) hypothetical reactor. In the worst case, an accident at such a plant was estimated to kill 3,400 people (5). While the study itself did not become a source of public controversy, its findings contributed to concern about the impacts of an accident.

In 1964, AEC initiated a new study to update WASH-740 based on a larger, 1,000-MW reactor. The study team found that a worst-case accident could kill as many as 45,000 people but was unable to quantify the probability of such an accident. Rather than publish these disturbing findings, AEC chose to convey the results to Congress in a short letter. Nuclear critics were very disturbed by this action, which they viewed as an attempt to keep the facts away from the public (22). In recent years, awareness of AEC's handling of this early safety study has added to public skepticism about the credibility of both that agency and its successor, the NRC.

In 1974, AEC published the first draft of the Reactor Safety Study, also known as WASH-1400 or the Rasmussen report. A panel of scientists organized by the American Physical Society (APS) found much to criticize in this report. The panel noted that AEC's fatality estimates had considered only deaths during the first 24 hours after an accident, although radioactive cesium released in an accident would remain so for decades, exposing large populations to adverse effects. The most serious forms of illness resulting from a reactor accident, the APS reviewers argued, would be forms of cancer that would not show up until years after the accident. Other APS reviewers found fault with the Rasmussen report's methods used to predict the performance of emergency cooling systems (23).

On October 30, 1975, the NRC, which had assumed the regulatory functions of the former AEC, released the final version of WASH-1400. Again, there was an extensive, widely publicized

debate over the document. The Union of Concerned Scientists released a 150-page report critiquing the study, and in June 1976, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment held hearings on the validity of the study's findings (71). As a result of these hearings, NRC agreed to have a review group examine the validity of the study's conclusions.

Three years later, in September 1978, the review group concluded that although the Reac-. tor Safety Study represented a substantial advance over previous studies and its methodology was basically sound, the actual accident probability estimates were more uncertain than had been assumed in the report (35). The panel also was critical of the executive summary, which failed to reflect all of the study findings. The following January, the NRC accepted the conclusions of the review panel. In a carefully worded statement, the agency withdrew its endorsement of the numerical estimates contained in the executive summary, said that the report's previous peer review within the scientific community had been "inadequate," and agreed with the panel that the disaster probabilities should not be used uncritically (47).

Two studies published in 1982 continued the debate over the validity of accident probability estimates included in the Rasmussen report. The first, conducted by Science Applications, Inc. (SAI) for the NRC, was based on the actual operating history of U.S. reactors during the 1969-79 period. By examining the frequency of precursors that could lead to an accident involving core damage or meltdown, SAI estimated that the probability of such an accident during the preTMI decade was much greater than suggested by the Rasmussen report (43). In response, the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO-a nuclear industry safety research group) published a report arguing that SAI's probability estimates were about 30 times too high, and that the actual probability of a core-damaging accident was closer to the 1 in 20,000 reactor years estimated in the Rasmussen report (28). This controversy has not yet been resolved.

While debate over the SAI report was limited to a small community of safety experts, a more recent study aroused a widespread public con

troversy that continued for several weeks. This analysis, known as the Sandia Siting Study, was initiated to determine the sensitivity of the consequences of reactor accidents to local site characteristics (2). While the Sandia team did not study accident probabilities in depth, they estimated the probability of a "Group 1" or (worstcase) accident involving a core meltdown, failure of all safety systems, and a large radioactive release, at 1 in 100,000 reactor years. The consequences of this and other less severe hypothetical accidents were estimated for 91 U.S. reactor sites using local weather and population data and assuming a standard 1,120-MW reactor. At the current site of the Salem, N. J., reactor on the Delaware River under the most adverse weather conditions and assuming no evacuation of the local population, a Group 1 accident at the hypothetical reactor was estimated to cause 102,000 "early" deaths within a year of the accident. If the hypothetical reactor were located at Buchanan, N.Y., where the Indian Point plant now stands, a Group 1 accident under the worst-case weather conditions (the accident would be followed by a rainout of the radioactive plume onto a population center) might cause $314 billion in property damage, according to the study esti

mates.

Although the Sandia report itself did not include estimates of the "worst-case" accident consequences, background information containing the estimates and a copy of the draft report were leaked to the press on November 1, 1982. Media accounts that day highlighted the high death and property damage estimates, while downplaying that part of the analysis which indicated that consequences of this severity had only a 0.0002percent chance of occurring before 2000 (51). Some accounts suggested that the worst-case consequences had the same probability as the Group 1 or worst-case accident, which was estimated to have a 2-percent chance of occurring before the end of the century.

That same day, the NRC held a press conference to clarify the purpose and findings of the study, and on November 2, Sandia National Laboratory issued a statement saying that wire service accounts "seriously misinterpret the consequences of nuclear power reactor accidents. The

probability of a very severe nuclear power reactor accident is many thousands of times lower than stated in these accounts" (63). The nuclear industry took out full-page ads in major national papers to try to counteract the story. At the same time, however, nuclear critics emphasized that the Sandia draft report itself had excluded the worst-case consequence data and argued that "the NRC is once again feeding selective data to the public on the theory that they know best what information the public should have'' (73). While nuclear advocates argued that the report's findings on accident consequences had been greatly overstated by the press, critics charged that data were used incorrectly in developing those estimates. Examining the same information on accident probabilities at individual plants used by the Sandia team, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that the likelihood of an accident involving a release of radioactivity might be much greater than assumed in the Sandia report (65). This debate, too, has not been resolved.

The Impact of Risk Assessments

on Public Opinion

The release of the Rasmussen report raised particular concerns about nuclear power for some people because of the public disagreements among the "experts" that resulted. In June 1976 hearings held by the House Interior Committee, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton and Stanford Universities, as well as a high-level official of the Environmental Protection Agency, testified about the methodological weaknesses and limitations of the report. Thus, as Princeton physicist Frank Von Hippel pointed out at the hearings, "Instead of dampening the fires of controversy, the publication of the Rasmussen report has had the effect of adding fuel to them" (71).

The controversy over the Rasmussen report, like the rest of the nuclear debate, contains many elements of "disputes among experts" as characterized by sociologist Alan Mazur: arguing past one another instead of responding to what the opposing expert has actually stated; rejecting data that develop the opponent's case; interpreting ambiguous data differently; and, con

sequently, increasing polarization (41). Both critics and supporters of the study focused on the methodology and quality of data. The debate over the study continues today, with critics arguing that NRC's 1979 statement was a "rejection of the report's basic conclusion," "repudiating the central finding of the Rasmussen report" (23). Meanwhile, INPO challenges the methodology and data of SAI's more recent safety study, arguing that the Rasmussen report's probability estimates are still valid.

Although the general public is uncertain about nuclear power, most people have more faith in scientific "experts" than in any other source on nuclear power questions (20,39,57). Because of this faith, public disputes among scientists and other energy experts, as in the case of the Rasmussen report, have a particularly negative impact on public acceptance of nuclear power. Rather than attempting to follow the debate and sort out the facts for themselves, many people simply conclude that nuclear technology has not yet been perfected. In other words, if the "experts'' cannot agree on whether or not nuclear power is safe, the average citizen is likely to assume it is probably unsafe. In Austria, the government attempted to resolve the growing controversy over nuclear power by structuring a series of public debates among scientists with opposing views. Rather than reassuring the public, the debate led to increased public skepticism and ultimately to a national referendum that killed that country's commercial nuclear program.

If public debates about nuclear safety studies have only fueled the fires of controversy and added to public skepticism, what can be done to make nuclear power more acceptable to the public? In order to answer that question, we need a better understanding of the public's perceptions of nuclear power. In particular, it will be useful to compare the public's view of the risks of nuclear energy with the risks estimated by most nuclear experts. For example, if public perceptions of risk were based on misinformation, improved public education programs might be an appropriate response. However, this does not appear to be the case.