The social acceptance of nuclear fusion for decision making towards carbon free circular economy: Evidence from Czech Republic

The social awareness and acceptance of new energy technologies are the key factors of their commercialization in Europe. The decision making in energy sector also requires integration of social preferences. In the context implementation of circular economy and moving towards carbon free economy target in 2050, all carbon free technologies require attention of decision makers including new nuclear technologies. The cutting-edge technologies, such as big data, have the potential to leverage the adoption of circular and carbon free economy concepts by the society. Therefore, the big data can play a major role in terms of acting as a facilitator for gaining the desired information for decision making in energy sector. In this paper, the big data was used for assessment of social acceptance of nuclear fusion. The diverse and representative sample from the Czech Republic (N = 1026, aged 15–95 years, 48.80% women, 18.50% with higher education) was employed to show the dynamics of the formation of public support in a country effectively unaware of the nuclear fusion (NF) (the total pre-survey awareness was 16.6%). The analysis of presentation on NF in Czech mass media concluded that similarly to other European Union countries, the presentation fragmented, insufficient, technical, aimed at people interested in technology with effectively no public discussion on the topic. When briefed with pros and cons of NF, three quarters of the respondents developed an idea on their support of NF in general and in Europe with the level of support reaching one third of the sample. We analyze the relation of NF support using a set of ordinal multinomial regression analyses with spline corrections of ordinal predictors to the four groups of factors: self-claimed awareness and knowledge of NF, sources of information including education, pros and cons of NF, and psychological and value aspects. We show that more information on NF positively influenced the support. Internet news were (negatively) and printed newspapers and magazines were (positively) related to support. The NF being and unlimited source of energy (positively) and using radioactive material and competing for renewables money (negatively) were related to support. Our findings have clear implications for public engagement and communication efforts on NF projects. We suggest that in order to change the level of acceptance for NF more communication and media presentation is needed. We present the ideas on how to frame the communication. Our results are in accord with similar studies from other European countries and therefore our outcomes might find practical applicability there.