“I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy,” U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell said on Fox News Sunday in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
But if the Senate majority leader thinks Americans will leave the crisis in Japan out of account in their assessments of nuclear power, he has another think coming. That’s according to a poll, done for the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute by market research specialists ORC International, that finds Americans’ views of nuclear power dramatically influenced by Fukushima.
In a survey of 814 people on March 15 and 16, pollsters found respondents particularly unwilling for the government to go on extending financial aid, such as taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and accident insurance, for nuclear power.
Asked if they thought taxpayers should “take on the risk for the construction of new nuclear power reactors in the United States through billions of dollars in new federal loan guarantees,” 73 percent of those polled answered no.
Asked if they favored “a shift of federal loan-guarantee support for energy away from nuclear reactors” to safe, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, 74 percent said yes.
Asked whether Congress should reconsider the Price Anderson Act of 1957, a law that indemnifies the nuclear power industry from paying the full costs of health and property claims in the wake of a nuclear accident (see “The Nuclear Money Trap,” March 31, 2011), 73 percent of respondents said yes. The nuclear utilities, they said, should be held liable “for all damages resulting from a nuclear meltdown or other accident.”
Ninety-two percent of those polled said they were following the news about the Japanese reactors. Only one in seven said the crisis at the Fukushima plant had had no effect on their views of nuclear power. Fifty-eight percent said they are “less supportive of expanding nuclear power in the United States” than they had been a month before the poll, which was taken four days after the beginning of the disaster in Japan.
And less than half—only 46 percent—said they thought more nuclear power plants should be built in the U.S. Fifty-three percent said they would support a moratorium on new nuclear plant construction here if the U.S. could meet its energy needs through energy efficiency and use of renewables such as wind and solar.
