Students' attitudes towards nuclear energy: Russian and Italian experience

Abstract

Nowadays, the energy sector faces a lot of challenges because of environmental issues, the potential depletion of fossil fuels in the future, problems of technological development, etc. Despite the fact that alternative energy is a key factor of the energy sector's development, it still has several controversial questions, and one of them is "to what extent is nuclear energy safe for the world?" As a consequence, public acceptability has a role to play as it significantly affects the way nuclear energy should be developed in the next decades. In this paper, we provide the main results of the research made in December 2018 in Italy and Russia on students' attitude towards nuclear energy and its development in their homelands. The research method is a questionnaire which was carried out at the University of Trento, Italy, and at Ural Federal University, Russia. According to the given results, most of the students from both countries do not have a negative perception of nuclear energy. However, the opinions on its development in Italy and Russia are completely different: Russian students support the government's energy program in which nuclear energy is one of the most promising trends for the future, whereas Italian students do not accept the possibility that nuclear energy could come back into the Italian energy sector. © 2019 WIT Press.