About half of the citizens of the U.S. support the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. The nuclear industry in the U.S. has been in decline for decades. The Biden administration has been pouring billions of dollars of tax-payers money into nuclear power as a way to cut greenhouse emissions in the U.S.
     A new Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted last week to assess public opinion on the use of nuclear power. Forty five percent of U.S. citizens support nuclear power. Thirty three percent oppose it and twenty two percent are not sure what they think about it. Of those who support it, forty eight percent cited energy reliability, forty three percent citied a reduction in overall pollution. Only thirty nine percent said they favor it as a low-carbon energy source. Of those who oppose nuclear power, sixty nine percent worried about the danger of nuclear meltdowns and sixty four percent were concerned about the disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
     The Biden administration believes that nuclear power is essential in fight climate change as well as boosting the reliability of the U.S. power grid. While the operation of a nuclear power plant emits little carbon dioxide, the construction of the plant and the mining and refining of nuclear fuel do emit a great deal of carbon dioxide.
     The Biden administration is also working to expand solar and wind power to help decarbonize the grid. The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that seventy six percent of U.S. citizens support solar power, seventy four percent supported wind power, and sixty eight percent backed hydro-electric power. Nature gas plants had forty one percent support while coal fired power plants got thirty six percent.
     The Biden administration is going to fund a six-billion-dollar project with money coming from the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The money will be spent to save existing U.S. reactors which are being threatened by high security and safety costs as well as competition from natural gas and renewable power.
      The initial phase of the program aimed to prevent the closure of two nuclear power plants that had announced plans to cease operations. Entergy Corporations Palisades facility in Michigan was one of the two plants and it shut down last month. It is not clear whether the second plant, PG&E’s Diablo Canyon plant in California, which plans to shut down in 2025 will be able to tap funds from the federal program to avoid having to close. Even among those citizens who oppose nuclear power, fifty six percent support keeping currently operating plants open while not building new ones.
      The U.S. currently has more than ninety operating nuclear power reactors that generate about twenty percent of U.S. power. The newest U.S. reactor was put into operation in 2016. This was the first new U.S. reactor in about twenty years.
      A series of high-profile nuclear disasters over the past several decades has undermined public support of the nuclear industry while high costs for building nuclear power reactors has slowed investment.
     The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English across the U.S. It collected responses from a total of one thousand adults. The poll included four hundred and thirty-one Democrats and three hundred and fifty five Republicans. It has a credibility interval of about four percentage points.