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Public awareness and perception of environmental, health and safety risks to
electricity generation: An explorative interview study in Switzerland
Article in Journal of Risk Research · September 2017
DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2017.1391320
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Public awareness and perception of environmental, health and safety
risks to electricity generation: An explorative interview study in
Switzerland
Sandra Volken1*, Gabrielle Wong-Parodi2, Evelina Trutnevyte1
1Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS), USYS Transdisciplinarity
Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
2Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), Carnegie Mellon University
(CMU), Pittsburgh, USA
* Corresponding author, [email protected], +41 44 632 30 81, ETH Zurich,
Universitätstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
Citation:
Volken, S., Wong-Parodi G., Trutnevyte E., 2017. Public awareness and perception of
environmental, health and safety risks to electricity generation: An explorative
interview study in Switzerland. Journal of Risk Research; forthcoming.
Public awareness and perception of environmental, health and safety
risks related to electricity generation: An explorative interview study
in Switzerland
Well-informed public preferences are key to enabling successful and sustainable
energy transitions worldwide. However, limited explorative evidence exists on
what the public already knows and wants to know about the electricity generation
technologies and their Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) risks.
Understanding these issues is important for preparing informational materials and
facilitating formation of informed preferences. We present results of an
explorative interview study with 12 Swiss people. Despite the public debate on
energy in Switzerland, we still identify significant awareness and knowledge
gaps as well as misconceptions related to both technologies and their EHS risks.
For accidental risks, the people tend to think beyond probabilities and
consequences and consider further aspects, such as risk controllability and trust in
experts and authorities. Most importantly, we find that people are able and tend
to think of the electricity system as a whole portfolio: they actively realize the
need to deploy multiple electricity technologies and accept some of the EHS
risks. We conclude with concrete recommendations for preparing informational
materials on electricity sector transitions in Switzerland and elsewhere. We also
argue that future social research on energy should pay more attention to public
perception of whole technology portfolios rather than single technologies.
Keywords: technology acceptance; public preferences; energy technology risks;
risk communication
Introduction
Global electricity demand is increasing and electricity generation portfolios worldwide
are expected to undergo major changes driven by ambitious carbon dioxide reduction
goals (EIA 2016, 81), such as in the European Union (EC 2011, 6), the UK
(Government 2009), or Denmark (Danish Ministry of Climate 2012). The most common
strategy to attain these reductions advocates that a great part of total energy supply has
to be switched to electricity and almost completely provided by low-carbon
technologies (Williams et al. 2012, 53). In addition, a small number of countries, like
Germany and Switzerland, aim to phase-out nuclear power due to concerns over public
acceptance and increasing safety demands after the Fukushima Daichii accident (NEA
and IEA 2015, 5 and 22). In Switzerland, the stepwise nuclear phase-out requires
replacing around 30 % or 22 TWh (SFOE 2016) of the total Swiss electricity generation
portfolio with efficiency measures, new renewables, and imports from the European
electricity marked (SFOE 2013). These imports would be comprised to large extent by
combustible fuels and nuclear, as of March 13, 2017, the EU listed on its website.
Such restructuring within any country’s electricity portfolio will likely shift the
types of risks to the built and natural Environment, as well as human Health and Safety
(EHS), posed by the electricity generation. For example, the nuclear phase-out prevents
the risk of nuclear accidents, but technologies that are deployed as replacement, such as
deep geothermal energy (DGE) or (pumped-) storage hydro power, will pose other
kinds of risks, such as induced earthquakes or dam failures. Historical records suggest
that renewables and natural gas similarly pose EHS risks, including accidents during
maintenance of wind farms or explosions of methane storage tanks used for biomass
electricity production (2016, Hirschberg et al. 2016). Considering the full complement
of possible EHS impacts, including greenhouse-gas emissions and resource use, (Bauer
et al. 2012, Masanet et al. 2013), it is evident that no single technology performs best
across all aspects of potential harm to EHS. Therefore, a portfolio with multiple
technologies can at best be balanced by considering the tradeoffs between EHS
(Burgherr and Hirschberg 2014).
The way the public perceives such EHS risks1 and makes risk tradeoffs
influences their preferences for and acceptance of specific technologies (Burgherr and
Hirschberg 2014, Perlaviciute and Steg 2014, Huijts, Molin, and Steg 2012). Especially
in Switzerland, with a direct democracy, public acceptance could critically inhibit or
facilitate new electricity generation projects locally, but also at national level (Devine-
Wright 2011, van Rijnsoever and Farla 2014, Demski et al. 2015, Wüstenhagen,
Wolsink, and Bürer 2007). For example, in a referendum in fall 2016, the Swiss public
voted against a premature nuclear phase-out (as of January 23, 2016, the Swiss Federal
Council describe on its website). In summer 2017, there will be another public vote on
the Energy Act that mandates efficiency improvements and deployment of new
renewables instead of nuclear power (as of March 13, 2017, the Swiss Federal Council
describe on its website). Therefore, it is of interest for energy project developers as well
as public administrations to understand people’s preferences, perceptions, and concerns.
The currently envisioned major electricity transition requires the deployment of
vast numbers of new renewable and low-carbon technologies that the public may not be
fully aware of or that will need to be sited in communities with no previous contact to
electricity generation. Thus, public perceptions of those technologies, their EHS risks
and the resulting technology preferences might not be well-informed (van Rijnsoever
and Farla 2014). Previous studies found that people hold different misconceptions about
electricity technologies: natural gas is perceived as renewable source, probably due to
1 Here, in line with [12], we define risk as a combination of the likelihood and the
severity of an uncertain negative EHS consequence of an electricity generation
technology and its associated activities. We define risk perception as an aggregate of
what risks people are concerned about, how they assess the probabilities and
consequences of these risks, and how they inform their assessments.
the term ‘natural’ (Devine-Wright 2003); in carbon capture and storage, due to a lack of
knowledge about CO2 and storage mechanisms, the carbon dioxide is perceived as being
stored underground in the form of gas posing the risk of gas release (Wallquist,
Visschers, and Siegrist 2010), or nuclear power is perceived by some people as
contributing to climate change (Poortinga, Pidgeon, and Lorenzoni 2006). Due to this
unfamiliarity and even misconceptions, people express opinions that are based on
selective information (Fleishman, De Bruin, and Morgan 2010, van Rijnsoever and
Farla 2014). In contrast, comprehensively informed preferences would be expected to
be more consistent with people’s values and be more stable over time (Mayer, Bruine de
Bruin, and Morgan 2014, van Rijnsoever and Farla 2014, de Best-Waldhober, Daamen,
and Faaij 2009). How one could inform the public about electricity technologies and
elicit informed preferences has been subject to a substantial body of research. It has
been found that providing information can change people’s perception and acceptance
of the technology and related EHS risks (Hobman and Ashworth 2013, Wallquist,
Visschers, and Siegrist 2011, Huijts, Molin, and Steg 2012, Fleishman, De Bruin, and
Morgan 2010, Trutnevyte, Stauffacher, and Scholz 2011).
Previous research also explored how to best design informational material for
the public in order to convey risk issues most effectively, in terms of relevant content,
appropriate wording or ways to report probabilities (Bruine de Bruin, Mayer, and
Morgan 2015, Fischhoff and Davis 2014, Fischhoff, Brewer, and Downs 2011) and
visualize uncertainties (McInerny et al. 2014, Spiegelhalter, Pearson, and short 2011).
Whereas technical experts, for example, tend to take a quantitative approach to risk
assessment by calculating probabilities and consequences (Aven 2012), laypeople are
likely to take a broader approach as well as follow simpler heuristics (Fischhoff, Slovic,
and Lichtenstein 1982, Tversky and Kahneman 1974, Slovic 1987, Slovic et al. 2004).
A well-designed informational material should therefore not ‘decide what people need
to know but respond to the questions of what people want to know’ (Renn 2005, page
57). To this end, Morgan and colleagues (Bruine de Bruin and Bostrom 2013, Morgan
et al. 2002) promote the usefulness of mental models interviews for the design of
effective informational material. The aim of these interviews is to listen to the target
audience in order to understand their information needs (Fleishman, De Bruin, and
Morgan 2010, Pidgeon and Fischhoff 2011), identify specific awareness and knowledge
gaps, as well as capture wording familiar to the target audience (Pidgeon and Fischhoff
2011). Pidgeon and Fischhoff (Pidgeon and Fischhoff 2011) refer to this concept by the
term ‘strategic listening’.
In Switzerland, previous research on public opinion and acceptance of electricity
technologies addressed nuclear power (Visschers, Keller, and Siegrist 2011, Siegrist and
Visschers 2013), nuclear waste repositories (Seidl et al. 2013), biomass and biogas
(Soland, Steimer, and Walter 2013, Schumacher and Schultmann 2017), carbon capture
an storage (2009, Wallquist, Visschers, and Siegrist 2010, Wallquist, Visschers, and
Siegrist 2011), run-of-river hydro power (Tabi and Wüstenhagen 2017), wind power
(Spiess et al. 2015, Walter 2014), and several types of technologies (Visschers and
Siegrist 2014, Trutnevyte, Stauffacher, and Scholz 2011, Rudolf et al. 2014). However,
the underlying awareness and perceptions of technologies and their EHS risks,
including perceived probabilities and consequences, uncertainties, and risk
controllability, remain under-investigated. There is also a need to further investigate
perception of whole portfolios of technologies instead of a single technology, and
investigate if and how people make tradeoffs between technologies (Fleishman, De
Bruin, and Morgan 2010, Demski et al. 2015, Pidgeon et al. 2014, van Rijnsoever and
Farla 2014, Trutnevyte, Stauffacher, and Scholz 2011).
With our explorative interview study, we aim to address the aforementioned
knowledge gaps and contribute to a better understanding of the content and format of
informational material about electricity generation technologies and related accidental
EHS risks and negative operation EHS impacts for the Swiss public. We address the
following research questions:
• RQ1: When reasoning about electricity technologies, what EHS risks and
negative operational EHS impacts do Swiss laypeople actively describe?
• RQ2: On what basis, do the Swiss people estimate the probability and describe
consequences of EHS risks related to electricity technologies?
• RQ3: What other factors besides EHS risks or negative operational EHS
impacts appear to be important?
• RQ4: Do Swiss people think of tradeoffs between technologies, EHS risks and
other factors, and do they attempt to evaluate portfolios instead of single
technologies?
Materials and Method
By adapting the mental models approach (Bruine de Bruin and Bostrom 2013, Morgan
et al. 2002), we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with members of the public
from the German-speaking part of Switzerland on their awareness, reasoning and
information needs about EHS risks related to the whole portfolio of electricity
technologies. We recruited people via personal contacts of family members or friends,
however, being sure that the interviewer did not know them personally. We followed a
purposive sampling method in order to gather a balanced quota of males and females,
rural and urban residents, various education levels (primary to higher education), age
(18 to > 65-year-old), and professional backgrounds. Each interview lasted 60 to 108
min. Participants received a 50 CHF coupon as a reward.
The interview included 30 open-ended questions on factors that were found
relevant in previous research (Slovic 1987, Perlaviciute and Steg 2014, Huijts, Molin,
and Steg 2012), including:
• Interest and familiarity with electricity production, perceived subjective
knowledge about the energy topics, and perception of the Swiss electricity
system and its change;
• Objective knowledge and general perception of eight electricity generation
technologies: nuclear power, (pumped-) storage hydro power, run-of-river hydro
power, natural gas, deep geothermal energy, solar photovoltaics, wind power,
biomass and biogas;
• Awareness and perception of EHS risk types, including perceived probability,
consequences, and risk controllability. Under the term “risk type”, we include as
well any cause that can trigger an accident or event that can follow after an
accident;
• Trust, responsibility and perceived confidence in expert knowledge;
• Concern and acceptance of technologies and EHS risks.
After a brief introduction to the project and an initial discussion of the electricity
technologies that are known to the interviewee, a short description and photos of the
technologies, as well as a list of EHS categories, including buildings and infrastructure,
flora and fauna, or injuries and fatalities, were provided to guide the rest of the
interview. For every technology, participants were at first asked to name all kinds of
risks they perceived somehow to be posed by a specific technology. Further, the
interviewer asked if they thought that a specific risk could actually occur in
Switzerland. If so, follow-up questions addressed perceived frequency or probability,
and potential consequences of the EHS risk.
Interviews were conducted in Swiss-German and transcribed in high-German. In
order to facilitate the analysis, one of two independent coders developed a codebook
based on open-coding of three transcripts as well as the interview guideline. The final
codebook comprised 53 codes, including subcodes. Each code could be used several
times in one interview. All 12 transcripts were coded by the first coder according to
these final 53 codes. No new codes where established. A second, undergraduate coder
partly coded each transcript. An assessment of inter-coder reliability found percentage
agreement of 98.2% and a Cohen’s kappa value of 0.66. Targeted queries were then
used to filter the interview material for analysis.
Results and discussion
Awareness of EHS risks and impacts related to electricity generation
technologies
We asked participants to describe risks to EHS (referred to as risks), posed by each
electricity generation technology. Table 1 shows people’s awareness and perceptions of
the risks. Participants also mentioned a similarly broad range of negative operational
EHS impacts (further referred to as impacts), indicating awareness of the different
nature of risks compared to impacts (Table 1). Any informational material should
therefore include both EHS risks and negative operational impacts and not be limited to
the one of them.
Table 1. EHS risks and negative operational EHS impacts that were actively mentioned
by the participants before the interviewer mentioned them. The number in parentheses
indicates how many participants mentioned it at least once (maximum of N=12).
Technology EHS risks Negative operational EHS impacts
Nuclear power
General (accident, something happens,
Fukushima, something breaks) (12)
Terror attack on power plant (6), on disposal
site (1)
Cracks in power plant or reactor (5), in disposal
container (1)
Risks due to plant’s age (5)
Leak at power plant [4], at disposal sites (1)
Earthquake at power plant sites (2), at disposal
sites (2)
Explosion (3)
Airplane (2)
Storm (2)
Wave (Fukushima) (1)
Other environmental hazards (1)
Reactor dismantling (1)
Loss of control (1)
Meltdown (1)
Disposal site (1)
Uranium enrichment (1)
Disposal tanks leak (2)
Health risk (cancer) close to disposal sites (2)
Radioactive radiation at disposal sites (1)
General, harm (1)
Impact on ground water at disposal sites (1)
Illegal disposal (1)
Transportation (1)
Uranium mining, health risk (1)
Impact on water temperature (1)
Cables, vibrations (1)
(Pumped-) storage
hydropower
Break of dam (6), due to earthquakes or
landslides (2) or pressure of water (2)
Overspill due to heavy rainfall (1)
Terror attack (2)
Insufficient maintenance (1)
Airplane crash (1)
Impact on landscapes (4)
Impact on villages (4)
Impacts on animals (3)
Impact on nature (3)
Change of rivers (1)
Deep geothermal
energy
Earthquake (7)
Fire (2)
Explosion (1)
Volcanic eruption (1)
Instability of area (1)
Economic risk if project fails (1)
Imbalance (temperature) (4)
Impact on plants and environment (3)
Unknown risks (3)
Impact on ground, tensions (2)
Noise (2)
Impact of chemicals (1), provided chemicals are
Drill into something (1)
General (1)
Machine breaks during drilling (1)
used (1)
Space (1)
Vapors released from the ground (1)
Vibrations (survey) (1)
Impacts on groundwater (1)
Natural gas
Explosion (6)
Leakage (6)
Fire (1)
General (1)
Unknown effect on nature (1)
CO2 emissions (but carbon capture and storage is
possible) (1)
Space, pipelines (1)
Run-of-river
hydropower
Overspill (1) due to a vast amount of water
Falling into the water (2)
General (e.g. something breaks) (1)
Human mistake causing a flood (1)
Drift wood (1)
Uncontrolled operation (1)
Explosion or fire (1)
Impact on fishes, other animals (4)
Impact on landscape (2)
Change of rivers (2)
Biomass and Biogas
Explosion (4)
Leakage (4)
Fire (1)
Poisonous inside (1)
General (e.g. something breaks) (1)
Competition with food production (1)
Impact on nature due to use of natural resources (1)
Poisonous (1)
Transportation of biomass (not ecological) (1)
Competition with wood heating (1)
Waste potentially hazardous (1)
Wind power
Break of rotor blades due to storm (1)
Out of a construction mistake (1)
Fire (1)
Paraglider accidents (1)
Impacts on bats and birds (4)
Noise (3)
Impact on nature (2), on forest (1)
Impact on landscape (1)
Similar impact on wind as heat extraction (DGE)
on ground (1)
Missing wind for pollination (1)
Conflict with heritage protection (1)
Space required (1)
Food production (conflict about agricultural area)
(1)
Solar photovoltaics
Explosions (1)
Fire (1)
Short circuit (1)
Fall on somebody’s head (1)
Blind transport users (1)
Weather damage (1)
Disposal, harmful (2), unsolved (1)
Impact on grid stability (2)
Production, health (1)
Heritage protection (1)
Figure 1 shows the total number of EHS risks and impacts our sample was aware of and
the total number of first-time references to those risks and impacts (mentions) on their
own, without prompting from the interviewer. For example, our participants referred to
52 nuclear-related risks of which 20 where unique. They described 10 different nuclear-
related negative operational impacts in total 12 references. To a less extent, participants
made reference to deep geothermal energy, (pumped-) storage hydro power, and natural
gas risks. Negative operational impacts they referenced pertained primarily to deep
geothermal energy and wind power.
Figure 1. Number of EHS risks and negative operational impacts actively mentioned by
all participants before the interviewer mentioned them. The number of risks and impacts
indicates how many different types of risks or negative operational impacts where
actively mentioned. The number of references (mentions) about risks and negative
operational impacts shows how often at least once any participant mentioned one or
several of that risks or impacts (see Table 1, sum of number in parentheses).
Table 1 reveals some active awareness gaps. For example, only one participant
mentioned CO2 emissions related to natural gas, and no one referred to local air
pollution related to biomass and biogas (Bauer et al. 2012, Masanet et al. 2013). Only
three participants mentioned accident risks related to wind power plants, even though
accidents causing few fatalities are comparatively frequent (Sovacool et al. 2016). Only
one participant mentioned the risk of overspill of hydro dams due to extreme rainfall-
related risks. Interestingly, for both risks as well as negative operational impacts some
misconceptions were also identified. For example, related to wind power or deep
geothermal energy:
‘… wind is used up and calm remains… If there is a farmer behind a wind power
plant, who grows apple trees and wants the apple trees to be pollinated by wind and
there is no wind… this is just an example. Could be that this has impacts on
vegetation and animals [ID 7].’
‘When I imagine that it is drilled into the earth crust [for deep geothermal], that’s
almost like a balloon that bursts… or like a small volcanic eruption [ID 7].’
‘This heat is extracted from the ground. I just have the feeling that the ground
would become colder… just like it happens with ocean currents… And then just
sometimes no more trees grow in the vicinity of the power plants… In Germany,
they have already discovered that nothing can grow anymore close to it [ID 4].’
In addition to providing some clues as to what people are aware of, Table 1 also shows
what risks or impacts people discussed, which are not often mentioned by technical
experts. For example, participants expressed concern about the disposal and production
of solar photovoltaic panels and related health effects or impacts on grid stability. When
considering deep geothermal energy, they mentioned the impacts of chemicals used or
the possibility of drilling into cables or pipes. With respect to biomass and biogas,
environmental harm due to biomass transportation and competition with agriculture or
heating was mentioned.
Participants also shared when they felt they did not know something or felt
uncertain about the extent of their knowledge. Participants most often referred to such a
lack of knowledge in relation to nuclear power, followed by natural gas, deep
geothermal energy, and to a smaller extent biomass and biogas. Interestingly, nuclear
power is the second most important source of electricity in Switzerland, which seems to
be in contrast with low levels of self-reported knowledge, including aspects of
functionality, risks, probabilities, consequences, or technology potentials. There were
also cases when participants asked the interviewer questions, for example on the type of
waste of biomass and biogas power plants or the possibility to renovate a hydro dam.
All these knowledge gaps would need to be addressed in the informational material.
Perceived probabilities of EHS risks
In the interviews we investigated participants’ assessments of EHS risks following the
technical risk concept as probability (this section) times consequence (next section)
(Aven 2012). Appendix A (A.1. and A.2.) shows some examples of interviewees’
intuitive feelings about the individual as well as relative possibility of many EHS risks,
which they were able to describe using general expressions. Deep geothermal energy,
nuclear power and natural gas seem to be seen as most risky. It is important to note that
some of these perceptions are not consistent with actual historical data or calculations
(Sovacool et al. 2016). For example, probabilities of EHS risk related to hydropower,
wind power and photovoltaics are underestimated, whereas those related to nuclear
power and deep geothermal energy are overestimated. Only perceived EHS risks of
natural gas reflected actual or modelled risk as compared with Sovacool et al. (2016),
(Burgherr and Hirschberg 2014).
One plausible explanation for the observed disconnect between perceived and
actual probabilities of EHS could be, as Fischhoff and colleagues (Fischhoff, Slovic,
and Lichtenstein 1982) summarize, people’s insufficient cognitive capacity to assess
complex probabilities, which prompts them to rely on heuristics in order to simplify the
task. The characteristic of ‘dread’ and ‘unknown’ (Slovic 1987) and the availability
heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) may explain our participants’ overestimation
and underestimation of the probabilities of EHS risks. Indeed we found our participants
expressed ‘unknown’ as well as dread (next section) when reasoning about some risks.
Familiarity and experience with the technology or related EHS risks is repeatedly seen
in literature as relevant to people’s probability judgments in the context of availability
and affect heuristics (Slovic et al. 2004). Although the link between familiarity and
probability judgements is complex, we found that known historical accidents – or lack
of known accidents – were linked to both low and higher probability estimates. For
example, in 2006 and 2013, two deep geothermal energy projects in Switzerland
induced earthquakes, which were highly covered in media (Stauffacher et al. 2015).
This type of media coverage may operate to enhance perceived risk due to familiarity
and higher cognitive availability (Bodemer and Gaissmaier 2015). Lack of subsequent
media attention may serve to signal reduced risk, although this may not in fact always
be the case (e.g. project ends or no new projects, hence no risk rather than less risk
during operations). For example:
‘… that (Basel geothermal project) was probably an exception, because otherwise
we do not hear anything about that. I think it was an exception because of the
ground conditions there [ID_1].’
In addition to the availability heuristic, our participants may have been subject to the
anchoring effect. For example, participants referred to analogous gas accidents when
talking about the EHS risks of natural gas, biomass and biogas (Renn 2005).
Figure 2 lists other factors that the interviewees refereed to, when discussing the
probabilities of EHS risks. One such factor that would need to be covered in
informational material was the cause of the EHS risk, such as the estimated likelihood
of a cause, such as human failure, natural hazards, terrorist attacks, or the level of the
cause that triggers the risk. At times participants expressed more or less accurate causal
relationships. For instance, the probability of a dam failure or overspill was related to
assumed probabilities of a human failure or a sufficiently strong mud slide. However,
the perceived probabilities of conjunctive events can be flawed (Tversky and Kahneman
1974), for example, when the likelihood of overspill or dam failure is insufficiently
adjusted as compared to the likelihood of its cause (Tversky and Kahneman 1974).
Other examples are as follows:
‘... the probability that something happens at a hydro dam is lower than the
probability that something happens at a natural gas or nuclear power plant, because
the most likely cause for a risk is human failure and at a hydro dam there is less
technology that humans need to control and therefore less potential for human
failure [ID_5].’
‘... even if a mud slide or parts of a glacier fall into the reservoir, a huge amount of
material is used that something happens and there is still a distance to the top of the
dam [ID_5].’
Figure 2. Factors that the interviewees mentioned when estimating probabilities of EHS
risks.
Another factor that contributed to probability judgements was the concept that
something can happen anytime and nothing can be completely excluded. This could
reflect a lack of subjective knowledge or perceived lack of expert confidence, as well as
perceived severity of consequences no matter how unlikely they are. For example:
‘You can’t completely exclude it (risk to (pumped-)storage hydro power). All the risks
are never completely excludable, for all power plants [ID_11].’
‘… No, nothing will happen (nuclear). But we anyway don’t want it in our backyard,
because it could somehow…it’s just that [ID_6].’
We therefore argue that informational material should also discuss experts’
(un)certainty about risks as well as the so-called remaining (or irreducible) risk.
However, a challenge remains here to know how people understand uncertainty and
how information about uncertainty should be conveyed (Fischhoff and Davis 2014,
Knoblauch, Stauffacher, and Trutnevyte 2017).
Previous studies suggest that trust in power plant operators and
authorities is critical for technology acceptance and risk perception (van Rijnsoever and
Farla 2014, Perlaviciute and Steg 2014, Huijts, Molin, and Steg 2012). In our
interviews, trust was also one of the most frequently discussed factors in relation to the
perception of probability, especially for low-probability high-consequence EHS risks of
(pumped-) storage hydropower and nuclear power. Our sample generally expressed
rather high levels of trust that may be unique to Switzerland, for example:
‘… but I am relatively confident that experts work on that and they control that and can
anticipate certain things and pre-intervene [ID_11].’ (Nuclear)
‘I am not concerned, because here (Switzerland) they do enough, operators and the
government and organizations work together, they control it and reduce the risk… they
don’t build it close to communities… and there are safety measurements [ID_3].’
(Pumped-storage hydropower)
Closely related to trust was the perceived controllability of EHS risks, determined by
technical specifications and perceived safety measures of a technology. This suggests
that informational material should refer to available safety measures and controllability
of risks in terms of both avoiding the risk in the first place (i.e. reducing the probability)
and minimizing its consequences.
Perceived consequences of EHS risks
The factors that our interviewees referred to when reasoning about consequences are
shown in Figure 3. Some of these factors were in parts prompted by the interviewer
when motivating participants to think of the consequences in terms of severity, damage
categories (types of consequences), spatial extent, controllability and expert knowledge.
Nevertheless, we identified some additional factors, marked by an asterisk in Figure 3,
which were brought up by the interviewees themselves. Some of the major differences
between perceived consequences of technologies were related to these additional
factors, such as contamination, persistence, and delay effects:
‘… and genetic consequences on future generations are not even known yet [ID_7].’
(Nuclear)
‘… Here I would not want to plant my carrots anymore afterwards (nuclear), here I
would (pumped-storage hydropower), and here probably (natural gas) [ID_3].’
Figure 3. Factors that the interviewees mentioned when reasoning about the
consequence dimension of EHS risks. Factors marked with an asterisk (*) were brought
up by the interviewees rather than asked by the interviewer.
The spatial extent, damage categories and severity of consequences were mentioned in
the interviews most often; Table 2 provides an overview. For nuclear power, spatial
extent and the type of adverse health effects belong to the major factors that make it
perceived significantly more severe than the second most impactful technology,
(pumped-) storage hydropower. Some interviewees, however, overestimated the
potential of nuclear power to destroy buildings and infrastructures (as of February 22,
2016 and 2017, the World Nuclear Association describe on its website). In contrast to
descriptions of consequences (Table 2) and to historical accident data (Burgherr and
Hirschberg 2014, Sovacool et al. 2016), (pumped-) storage hydropower interestingly
evoked only concerns of nature impacts, especially if further dams are built, or in terms
of living in close vicinity below a dam. The fact that the Swiss people associate high
benefits and positive emotions with hydropower that outweigh perceived costs could
explain this generally high acceptance (Visschers and Siegrist 2014, Rudolf et al. 2014).
However, it could also be that people accept it because of they perceive (pumped-)
storage hydropower is sited away from populations, is highly controllable, stably built,
or, in line with Visschers and Siegrist (2014), the operators are trustworthy.
Table 2. Aggregated descriptions of the consequence dimension of major EHS risks
related to electricity generation technologies.
Technology Spatial extent Damage categories Severity
Nuclear power
• Regional, national, or even international extent
• Mostly informed by what happened in Fukushima or Chernobyl and the radius in which iodine pills where distributed in Switzerland
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Everything destroyed, including buildings and infrastructures
• Natural environment: Everything eradicated, contaminated ground, impact on animals, environment, agriculture, groundwater and rivers
• Human health and safety: Health risk, cancer, impact on genetic material, evacuations, fatalities
• Massive damage, great consequences, crazy, huge danger, worst things could happen, enormous, tragic
• Not as bad in Switzerland, depends on type of risk
• Compared to other technologies much worse
(Pumped-‐)
storage hydro
power
• Regional, up to 100 kilometers, of flooding
• Affecting valleys or villages, caused by a dam break
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Everything destroyed, including buildings and infrastructure
• Natural environment: Large part of nature damaged, cleared, flora and fauna, huge damage to nature, no damaged soil, no impact on agriculture
• Human health and safety: Fatalities, evacuations
• Greater, many, terrible damage, massively destroyed, disastrous, depends on type of risk,
• Less severe than nuclear
Deep
geothermal
energy
• Local consequences, up to 5 kilometers, depending on the underground structures
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Houses (slightly) damaged
• Natural environment: Maybe changes structures of underground layers
• Human health and safety: Can cause fatalities or no fatalities, no damage, not felt earthquakes
• Not severe, very small to very big damage
Natural gas
• Local consequences depending on the wind direction
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Only the power plant
• Natural environment: Hazardous for the environment, birds, a bit of forest burnt, no long-‐term consequences
• Human health and safety: Gas could be hazardous, no impact, evacuation of power plant
• Gas leaks would not be funny, great damage, catastrophe of limited extent, not much happens
• Not as tragic as nuclear, but worse than biomass and biogas, and deep geothermal energy
Run-‐of-‐river • Alongside the river, close to the river
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Everything alongside the river, maybe
-‐
hydro power small boats • Natural environment: -‐ • Human health and safety:
Could cause fatalities, once a boy drowned
Biomass and
biogas
• Only in the immediate vicinity of the power plant or maximally 100 meters away
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Houses damaged
• Natural environment: Poisoning of environment, similar to CFCs causing ozone-‐hole, surrounding forest might catch fire
• Human health and safety: Suffocate, similar to silos, no long-‐term health consequences, maybe small scale evacuation
• Less severe than biomass and biogas, (pumped-‐) storage hydro power, and nuclear
Wind
• Not affecting anything except the power plant
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Only single power plants
• Natural environment: -‐ • Human health and safety:
Rotor blade that falls down could cause a fatality
• No catastrophe, less severe than nuclear
Solar
photovoltaics
• Maybe a whole building if it burns
• Infrastructure, buildings and economy: Only single panels, in case of fire maybe whole building
• Natural environment: -‐ • Human health and safety: If
it burns, hazard for people, could blind somebody if it reflects, snow that falls down is no hazard worth talking about
• Less severe than nuclear, not much happens, not worth talking about
For both low-probability high-consequence risks, such as a dam break or nuclear core
meltdown, as well as for high-probability low-consequence risks, such as induced
earthquakes, participants emphasized the lower importance of probabilities as compared
to the severity of consequences:
‘… but it’s not like houses would be destroyed or you would die… living close to a
hydro dam, I would see that different [ID_5].’ (Deep geothermal energy)
‘Knowing about very low probabilities would not change anything (in my perception of
nuclear power) [ID_5].’
Benefits, siting, technology potential and other factors
Besides EHS risks and negative operational EHS impacts, the interview participants
also mentioned other factors about electricity generation technologies (Huijts, Molin,
and Steg 2012, Perlaviciute and Steg 2014), such as the waste recycling benefits of
biomass and biogas, resource efficiency of solar photovoltaics and wind, or the ability
of (pumped-) storage hydropower to store electricity. Perceived benefits could be even
more important than perceived risks for the public (Visschers, Keller, and Siegrist
2011). Other factors that the interviewees referred to were economic aspects,
independence from other countries, aesthetic aspects, immaturity of technologies, noise,
or waste.
Three other prominent factors were the siting of technologies and a
technology’s maximum potential for development in Switzerland. For example, some
participants thought that solar photovoltaics were only suitable for rooftops, whereas
others referred to vast solar fields in Germany. Some participants expressed the wish to
consider heritage protection, integrate the solar panels into a building’s architecture, and
restrict their coverage ratio. For wind power plants, some people thought that a single
plant would not affect the surroundings much, whereas others emphasized the negative
implications of whole wind parks on landscape view. There was a common perception
among the participants that wind power plants are built in the mountain regions, not
close to communities. The participants believed that there is no potential to site wind
power plants in the Swiss Mittelland or even generally in Switzerland, and thus they
should be located elsewhere in northern Europe. For nuclear power, as expected, the
participants mentioned the issues related to the final disposal of nuclear waste, including
the site selection process, for which they expressed low subjective knowledge and
uncertainty. In general, there were many statements about the distance of the power
plants to communities or nature. The highest acceptance was shown for solar
photovoltaics, built within the communities.
Participants often referred to the technology potential in Switzerland, especially
when discussing nuclear power or its planned phase-out. A lot of uncertainty,
contradictory and ambivalent opinions were expressed as to whether the electricity
provided by nuclear could be realistically replaced by other technologies. As other
countries still rely on nuclear power, some participants thought it makes little sense to
phase out nuclear in Switzerland for the sake of reducing the EHS risks. They thought
that Switzerland would be exposed to nuclear risk by other countries, where operators
were also perceived less trustworthy and reliable.
Here we conclude that informational material on electricity generation
technologies should also include information on technology potential and siting issues
in order to reduce misconceptions and knowledge gaps as much as possible.
Informational material should balance between risk information and other relevant
aspects, such as negative operational impacts, benefits, or technical specifications
(Fleishman, De Bruin, and Morgan 2010, Mayer, Bruine de Bruin, and Morgan 2014).
Portfolio thinking and tradeoff-making between technologies
Most existing studies on public opinions of electricity generation focus on the public’s
perceptions and acceptance of individual technologies, (c.f. Visschers, Keller, and
Siegrist 2011, Siegrist and Visschers 2013, Soland, Steimer, and Walter 2013,
Schumacher and Schultmann 2017, Wallquist, Visschers, and Siegrist 2009, Tabi and
Wüstenhagen 2017, Spiess et al. 2015, Walter 2014, Wallquist, Visschers, and Siegrist
2011) rather than a suite of technologies in a portfolio. Some (Fleishman, De Bruin, and
Morgan 2010, Demski et al. 2015, Pidgeon et al. 2014, van Rijnsoever and Farla 2014,
Trutnevyte, Stauffacher, and Scholz 2011) have argued the necessity of adopting a
‘portfolio perspective’ as this is more reflective of how electricity demand is met in
practice. Despite this, researchers have yet to explore the extent to which non-experts
think in terms of portfolios. Our interviews indicate that people have some
understanding of and think about the electricity system as an inter-connected network of
power plants, imports, and demand. For example, the nuclear phase-out was perceived
to require increasing the capacity of other technologies or imports to cover the demand.
The participants also attempted to value such tradeoffs and acknowledged the need to
decide which aspects are more important than others:
‘…if nuclear power could be replaced by one of these, then good, but it depends a bit on
how the replacement would look like and if the rest needs to be imported [ID_2].’
‘If we exclude nuclear and coal, we cannot all drive an electric car [ID_1].’
Even more, some participants applied this portfolio thinking to trading off the
advantages, EHS risks and negative operation impacts of multiple technologies:
‘… with only renewables we cannot cover the whole demand, we need the big and risky
technologies [ID_2].’
‘If we depend on only one technology, the risk is too high… [ID_11].’
‘That will be funny, when everyone has solar panels on their roof, because the system
was not built for that [ID_6].’
‘… natural gas is something that can be stored easily. And water. And when we need it,
it can be converted to electricity [ID_7].’
‘… if we use wood for electricity, we cannot use it for heating [ID_6].’ (Biomass and
biogas)
‘…it’s only a potential risk, the real risk of CO2 emissions have priority [ID_9].’
(Nuclear)
‘…we have to live with that (induced earthquakes)… we can not have everything
[ID_5].’ (Deep geothermal energy)
Generally, such tradeoff-making indicates that people want to make decisions in the
context of other technologies and different attributes of technologies (Bruine de Bruin,
Mayer, and Morgan 2015). As the perceived technology potential in Switzerland is also
a factor people consider, at least on the abstract level, it is meaningful to elicit public
preferences for technology portfolios rather than single technologies. Furthermore, this
finding that people adopt portfolio thinking also supports the idea of Pidgeon and
colleagues (Demski et al. 2015, Pidgeon et al. 2014) that people prefer to make energy
decisions in the context that includes multiple technologies, as well as regulations,
policies, infrastructures, and other energy objectives, such as supply security.
Generalizability of the results
Our exploratory study provides highly relevant insights into people’s thoughts,
understanding and reasoning about EHS risks and negative operational EHS impacts
related to electricity generation technologies in Switzerland. Such insights remain
hidden in large representative surveys, as participants do neither have the opportunity to
express new ideas and ways of thinking nor to clarify their positions. This exploratory
study is the first step in understanding the intended audience, for developing
informational materials about EHS effects of electricity generation to facilitate
formation of informed public preferences in Switzerland.
Some of our findings are specific to Switzerland, such as high trust in
authorities, familiarity with hydro power and nuclear power, concerns over nuclear
phase-out, high share of import, and media coverage of seismicity induced by deep
geothermal energy. All these elements might not have been discovered in similar studies
elsewhere. However, our findings on the relevance of both accident EHS risks and
operational impacts, public view to risks beyond probabilities and consequences only,
and portfolio thinking are likely to be found in other countries too. In particular, our
finding that our participants in general tended to discuss technologies in relation to one
another rather than to talk about technologies in isolation without our prompting.
Interestingly, despite energy topics being extensively discussed in the Swiss public,
especially in relation to the recent and upcoming energy-related referendums, we still
find multiple misconceptions and awareness gaps. We thus believe that such
misconceptions and awareness gaps could also be found in other countries and be even
more prevalent, if the energy discussions are at earlier stages.
Several limitations of this study shall be kept in mind when generalizing
the results. First, after the open discussion at the start of the interview, we provided our
interviewees with descriptions of technologies, technology photographs, and damage
categories. This information could have influenced the participants’ responses. The
interviews were also semi-structured and not completely open and purely explorative.
Nevertheless, the benefit of providing the information was that we had a common
understanding of the technologies and could cover more aspects of EHS risks and
negative operational impacts, such as consequences on infrastructure or evacuations.
Second, as our focus was to investigate perception of EHS risks and negative
consequences related to electricity generation, we only marginally covered perceived
benefits or other factors that matter, such as aesthetic impacts, costs, or supply security.
However, our participants mentioned additional factors unprompted, such as preference
for a portfolio of technologies rather than a single technology or importance of
technology potential in Switzerland. Third, our study provides only a snapshot of
current views in the public. These views should be considered in light of the fact that
there have not been many accidents related to electricity generation or large-scale
industrial plants in recent years. Accidents, such as another core meltdown in a nuclear
plant or hydropower dam failure in Europe could change people’s perception of EHS
risks as well as the importance of these risks for preferences and acceptance
(Perlaviciute and Steg 2014). Previous research in Switzerland, however, found only
minor impacts of the nuclear accident in Fukushima on technology acceptance (Siegrist
and Visschers 2013).
Conclusions
This paper reported results from an explorative interview study with 12 lay people in
Switzerland on their awareness, perceptions and acceptance of environmental, health
and safety (EHS) risks and negative operation impacts posed by eight electricity
generation technologies. Following the mental models approach (Morgan et al. 2002),
these results will guide us in the development of informational material for the Swiss
public on the EHS risk and operational impacts related to the Swiss electricity sector
transition in the decades ahead.
We found that the interviewees actively referred to a similarly high number of
accidental EHS risks and negative operational impacts and could distinguish between
the two easily. Therefore, any informational material should cover both accidental and
negative operational EHS impacts and not only one type. We also identified multiple
subjective awareness gaps and misconceptions related to the type of EHS risks and
operational impacts, probabilities (frequencies) and consequences. These knowledge
gaps and misconceptions should be especially addressed in the informational material.
We found that the interviewees had difficulties in estimating probabilities of specific
EHS risks and tended to overestimate probabilities of nuclear and deep geothermal
energy risk, but underestimate those of hydropower and wind power. The consequence
dimension of EHS risks, including the spatial extent, damage categories, immediacy,
persistence and delay effects, was perceived by our interviewees more important than
probabilities. The consequences of EHS risks were likewise at times marked by
misconceptions. At times, the interviewees reasoned about probabilities using the fact
that risks are unknown to experts. Nevertheless, for actual (lack of) concern about risks,
the comparatively high level of trust in experts and authorities seemed to prevail. Still,
the interviewees were reluctant to completely exclude any possibility of the remaining
risk of unknowns, which might imply that probabilities, however small, still feed into
people’s preferences and decisions.
Most importantly, we found that our interviewees had an ability and tendency to
perceive the electricity system as an entirety of electricity demand, multiple
technologies (limited by maximum potentials), electricity imports and other
infrastructures. The interviewees actively made tradeoffs between technologies, related
EHS risks, negative operational impacts and other factors. They often demonstrated
rather ambivalent opinions about technologies, acknowledging both risks and benefits,
and showing willingness and awareness of the necessity to accept certain risks and
drawbacks.
Future research should further investigate the public awareness, perceptions and
misconceptions of EHS risks, negative operational impacts, and other factors, especially
using a representative survey to quantify the prevalence of views that we have
discovered in this interview study. On this basis, the aforementioned informational
material should then be developed, tested, and applied to facilitate the formation of
informed preferences for electricity generation technologies in Switzerland. In
particular, the focus should be put not on eliciting informed public preferences for
single generation technologies, but on helping lay people to understand the complexities
inherent in portfolios of multiple technologies and help make informed portfolio
judgements. We think that further public discourses, availability of balanced
information, and assisted tradeoff making are key to publically acceptable and thus
successful energy transition in Switzerland and elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Energy
Grant No. 160563. The authors thank Stefan Klenke for his help with coding the
interviews and the members of the ETH USYS Transdisciplinary Lab and Swiss
Competence Center for Energy Research – Supply of Electricity (SCCER-SoE) Task
4.1 “Risk, safety, and social acceptance” for discussions.
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