BAYESIAN-ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC VIEWS ON THE SAFETY OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENTS

The sodium leak accident at Monju, a prototype fast breeder reactor th at the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) ha s operated since 1995 in Japan, in combination with the PNC's manageme nt of the accident, has created public distrust not only in the safety of Monju, but also in the nuclear development policy of Japan. In ord er to learn a lesson from these events and to assess how a relationshi p of mutual trust can be established with the public, this paper simul ates the processes of establishing public confidence in reliability of a nuclear plant in cases of accidents, no accident, a cover-up, and s o on. In this paper, public confidence is defined as the public evalua tion of cumulative probability under a certain level of accident rate, conditional on the information available to the public. The condition al probability is estimated by use of Bayes' Theorem. The simulation s hows that (1) public confidence is lost by only one accident in an ear ly stage of operation, and can then be recovered only by many subseque nt years of accident-free operation, but never by a cover-up, and (2) the more information that is provided to the public, the better the re lationship of mutual trust that will be established, especially at an early stage of plant operations. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All ri ghts reserved.