Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
After fifteen years of vigorous national debate about a possible site for storing high-level radioactive waste from commercial power plants in the United States, the US Congress on 22 December 1987 amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and authorized the Department of Energy (DOE) to determine whether Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is a geologically sound and technically feasible site. If this site passes a set of prescribed technical criteria, a repository will be constructed 2000 feet below ground in which nuclear waste shipped in casks from power plants all over the United States will be permanently stored. The state of Nevada is currently attempting to disqualify the Yucca Mountain site on the grounds that the storage of nuclear wastes at the site and the transportation of waste to Nevada pose unacceptable risks to the state`s population. There is also concern that the addition of a repository to an area that already houses a nuclear weapons testing site may create an image of Nevada as a nuclear wasteland. Elected officials appear to be skeptical of the merits of the siting process and are concerned that the repository could stigmatize Nevada, thus affecting economic activity. These concerns provide a rational formore » investigating public attitudes toward the siting of a high-level nuclear waste repository in Nevada or elsewhere. In order to address this issue, we conducted two telephone surveys; a national sample of 1201 US households and a sample of 1001 residents of Nevada. These surveys are part of a larger study commissioned by the Nuclear Waste Project Office in the state of Nevada to determine the potential socioeconomic effects of the construction there of a high-level waste repository.« less
Kunreuther et al. (Sat,) studied this question.