The role of trust and risk perception in current German nuclear waste management

Abstract

One of the lessons learned in various countries that have to deal with spent nuclear fuel is that finding a proper place and siting a repository for high-level nuclear waste (HLW) cannot be achieved without public consent. After decades of obstruction, Germany recently launched a new, participatory, site-selection process for the disposal of HLW in deep geological formations. Nonetheless, significant opposition is assumed. Therefore, citizens' trust in the procedure and the agents involved may be paramount. We conducted an online survey (N ≈ 5000) in March/April 2020 to test a theoretical model on trust, perceived risks and benefits, and acceptance. We differentiated acceptance as a dependent variable according to distinct phases: the procedure, a possible decision on a disposal location, and the repository facility itself. The results show that trust is mainly important for explaining acceptance of the ongoing procedure and less so for the acceptance of the decision or the repository facility itself. Moreover, our investigation of the sample using a cluster analysis reveals characteristic patterns of trust, risk perception, and acceptance by three clusters: a cluster focusing on risk perception, an ambivalent cluster, and an indifferent cluster. Trust is lowest in the risk-focused cluster and highest in the ambivalent cluster.

The Influence of Knowledge, Trust, and Perceived Risk on Firefighters’ Preparedness and Willingness to Respond to Nuclear Emergencies: The Case of South Korea

“…As laypeople develop more trust in experts or authorities in these technologies, they are more likely to perceive fewer risks (Siegrist 1999(Siegrist , 2000. With regard to nuclear technologies, social trust has been closely related to risk perception (Pijawka and Mushkatel 1991;Dunlap et al 1993;Ryu et al 2018;Seidl et al 2022). Biel and Dahlstrand (1995) found that trust in experts and authorities was strongly and negatively related to perceived risk; specifically, the correlation coefficient between trust and risk perception regarding a high-level nuclear waste repository amounted to −0.63.…”