Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

China encounters significant environmental challenges along with its fast economic development, and Chinese governments tend to adopt clean energy like nuclear power for sustainable development. However, the deployment of nuclear power plants has aroused severe public oppositions, even anti-nuclear riots. Thus, the governmental agencies try various policy instruments to gain public acceptance in practice, such as scientific education, site visit, community building activities and advertisment of nuclear as a national strategy. However, less has been studied on the actual effects of these policy instruments on public acceptance towards nuclear power.

Along with the movement of “Public Understanding Science”, previous studies mainly focus on the role of scientific education to gain public support, as scholars believed the public tend to accept nuclear if they have accurate and plenty of scientific knowledge. China follows the same policy instrument design logic and had spent large amount of budget on nuclear exhibition construction and nuclear education and so on. However, hardly any attention has been put to distinguish the different influencing power various instruments have in the nuclear education practice. Inspired by the “dual process” theory, we especially pay attention to the interactive relationship between individual knowledge level and instrument effectiveness, that is, whether the effectiveness of different instruments might vary according to people’s existing knowledge level of nuclear power. This research tends to adopt structural equation model to explore three questions: Firstly, among all existing educational instruments, which are effective? Secondly, what are the influencing channels different policy instruments have to alter public acceptance? Thirdly, does these influening channels vary between people with different level of nuclear knowledge?

This paper tested the effectiveness of policy instruments (i.e. scientific education, station visiting, community building activities, and advertisement nuclear as a national strategy) on public acceptance via five moderators: perceived risk of nuclear, knowledge of nuclear, benefit perception, trust in governmental agencies and perceived capacity of participation. Individual characteristic variables such as age, education, gender, income and environmental concern are treated as control variables. We randomly sampled 350 residents in Haiyan county locating next to Qinshan Nuclear Station. To delineate the interaction of individual knowledge level and instruments effectiveness, we run the model with the whole sample, sample with low level of knowledge, and sample with high level of knowledge respectively. According to the preliminary study of 322 valid questionnaires, the result shows that the advertisement of national strategy is effective and significantly affects public acceptance through enhancing political trust and perceived benefit. Knowledge moderators instrument as following: for people with low level of nuclear knowledge, site visiting and national strategy advertisment have significant influence on their acceptance through enhancing benefit perception. Whereas, scientific education influences high knowledge level group’s acceptance directly and positively, but not through any other intermediate factors. For personal characteristic variables, the elder are less willing to accept nuclear power deployment.