New York, Mar. 23 (ANI): in the wake of the nuclear crisis in Japan, the support for building nuclear power plants in the United States dropping slightly lower than it was immediately after the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979, according to a CBS News poll.
Only 43 percent of those polled after the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan said they would approve building such new facilities in the United States to generate electricity.
That is a steep decline from the 57 percent who said in 2008 that they approved of new plants, the New York Times reports.
Support for nuclear power has waxed and waned over the decades, going up as the power-hungry nation looked for ways to meet demand and driven down by nuclear accidents at home and abroad.
Support for more nuclear power plants was 69 percent in 1977, the highest level ever recorded in a poll by The New York Times or CBS News. But two years later, it plummeted to 46 percent after the Three Mile Island accident near Harrisburg, Pa.
After the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1986, support dropped to 34 percent in a CBS News poll.
The new poll found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans think that nuclear power plants in the United States are generally safe. But nearly two-thirds of those polled said they were concerned that a major nuclear accident might occur in this country - including 3 in 10 who said they were "very concerned" by such a possibility.
Fifty-eight percent of those polled said they did not think the federal government was adequately prepared to deal with a major nuclear accident.
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted March 18-21 among 1,022 adults, and it has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. (ANI)
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