RAPID Proposal: The Impact of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

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This work assesses the impact of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster on Americans' views about the fairness of decision makers and their willingness to accept nuclear power decision making. The project focuses on the degree to which such views are associated with attention to media coverage of the Fukushima incident. The research involves a survey of respondents who previously participated in polls about nuclear power in March 2010 and then again during the late summer of 2010. This second poll took place just after the massive oil spill that originated with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. An additional sample of respondents will be added to the original panel to obtain a final sample size of 800 participants to enable future research. The use of a partial panel design provides a unique capacity to understand the reasons for any changes in attitudes about nuclear power that occurred because of the Fukushima disaster. The participants in the surveys are being drawn from an academic-quality, probability-based online panel. In addition to the issue-specific value of knowing more about nuclear power perceptions, the research addresses several questions of relevance to risk communication researchers in the area of media effects and the role of fairness perceptions on views about technology. In doing so, the proposed research will integrate theory from past media effects research into the sub-field of risk communication.This RAPID proposal fulfills the NSF RAPID funding criterion of the need for urgent support as well as the other funding criteria of intellectual merit and broader impacts. NSF reviewed this proposal internally.