Risk communication and attitude change: Taiwan's national debate over nuclear power

This article reports the first analysis of the effects of a national risk-communication program that disseminated the facts about the risks associated with nuclear power plants. It relies upon a unique set of circumstances in Taiwan. The state-operated power corporation sponsored a national debate in an effort to promote greater public consensus on the need for a fourth nuclear power plant. This analysis uses statedrisk perceptions and attitudes toward the plant to evaluate the effect of the debate. The results are based on a panel of households interviewed before and after the debate. They suggest that the debate did not reduce respondents' perceived risks from nuclear power and had little perceptible effect on the attitude changes of our sample. The only systematic influences detected on the observed attitude changes imply that respondents reacted counter to the debate's objectives, and thus the debate seems likely to continue to erode support for the new plant.The authors are, respectively, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Economics, Academic Sinica; and University Distinguished Professor of Economics, North Carolina State University, and Resources for the Future University Fellow. Thanks are due Jin Long Liu for his excellent research assistance in developing these results, to Kip Viscusi for constructive comments, and to Barbara Scott for her helpful editing of earlier drafts of this article. Partial support for Smith's research was provided by National Science Foundation grant SES-8911372.