A study on the public awareness of nuclear safety in Japan

This paper presents the results of a public opinion survey conducted in January 1987 on the Japanese public awareness of nuclear safety and the possibility of setting quantitative safety objectives for nuclear power plants in Japan. The result of the survey indicates that a considerable fraction of the public can understand the probabilistic argument related to nuclear safety issues. At the same time, however, the survey revealed that many issues should be overcome before using this quantitative safety objective as a tool to discuss the nuclear safety among the public and the experts. Especially it is important to develop creative new indicators and analogies to help each individual of the public translate abstract risk concepts into simple, intuitively meaningful terms