If you believe the opinion polls, more people are undecided about nuclear power than ever before. Last year, when MORI questioned the UK public about building new nuclear reactors, 30 per cent were in favour, 34 per cent against, and 36 per cent were not sure.

But what would it take to persuade undecided voters that a rebuild programme is in everyone’s best interest? What tactics could policymakers use to improve the public’s understanding of this technology?
The first consideration would be timing. As yet, we still do not know what to do with our current nuclear waste. The experts set with the task of finding a long-term solution to this problem, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, are still working on it. If the government was to decide to rebuild before the committee makes its decisions, the public would be unlikely to believe that sustainability was at the heart of its agenda.

But let’s imagine it is July 2006. The government has waited to listen to the experts. Happily enough, a set of long-term solutions to the problem of radioactive waste has been found. Unfortunately, policymakers have another set of communication problems to contend with. This time, it is investors who are sceptical, being understandably rather jumpy about the cost estimates from the power plant manufacturers.

The problem is that these new designs have not been built anywhere in the world. How is it, the investors ask, that you can tell us the cost of building these power stations, if all you have done is make individual components and models? Then the investors consider the construction timeframe (one of the most significant influences of the overall cost of a nuclear power plant) and figure that in the eight to 10 years it takes for a reactor to be built, the longest electricity price forecasts (three years or so) will be useless.

By the time it is pointed out that the regulators who need to approve these new designs are overstretched and retiring, our science communication problem has evaporated. The financiers have run for the hills.

So, what should a government do? This is indeed a hard policy to sell. We want nuclear power stations to be approved by regulators, and find investment by companies willing to commit to costs which cannot be calculated, using profit figures based on electricity prices that are too short-term to accurately forecast returns.

Under these conditions, the government might well call ‘market failure’ and decide to intervene. It knows that building one nuclear reactor would be uneconomic, and so, in response to a lack of investment interest, it decides to underwrite construction costs, set up long-term electricity sales contracts, and cap long-term liabilities to make nuclear operating capacity a realistic option in around 2025. But by doing so, it skews the market against investment in renewable technologies, which could deliver much over this long timeframe.

The need to build a large-scale, multi-site nuclear programme, and the lack of likely private investment has special implications for selling this policy to the public. What we are actually selling is the choice of nuclear over renewables. We would need to convince undecided voters that renewables have no future; that they are so unpromising it would not matter if our market interventions discouraged investment in them. In short, we have to conclude that to sell this technology, we would have to hope that the public did not understand it at all.