Public Attitudes towards Local Agreement over the Restart of Nuclear Power Plants: A Questionnaire Survey on the Case of Hamaoka

Abstract

Not just whether nuclear power stations should be restarted, but how local agreement over the restart should be achieved has been controversial issues in Japan since the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. In this paper, public attitudes towards local agreement in the case of Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plants are explored with a postal questionnaire survey in Shizuoka prefecture. Through descriptive statistics and factor analysis, the study shows that extending the "local" scale and judgement by ordinary citizens is given more support than the conventional local agreement process. Factor analysis reveals three factors behind respondents' attitudes towards local agreement: "conventional decisionmakers", "narrow localism" and "national interests". The analysis of the factor scores reveals that attitudes towards local agreement differ depending on attitudes towards the restart of the plant and the prefectural referendum, as well as generation, while no significant difference is found among genders and residential areas excluding the second factor. By clarifying the public attitudes towards how local agreement should be made, this study makes a significant step toward the design of a socially more agreeable local agreement.