Renewables trounce nuclear in Newspoll

Clean Energy Council
15 December 2009

NATIONAL: A Newspoll survey commissioned by the Clean Energy Council (CEC) has shown overwhelming public support for the government to focus its support on renewable energy - such as solar and wind - over nuclear energy. Given a choice between supporting the development of renewable energy sources and nuclear energy, four out of every five people polled favoured the government giving greater priority to the development of renewables.

CEC chief executive Matthew Warren said the results show Australians want to see the development of renewable energy ahead of contentious options like nuclear. "This confirms what we have thought for some time – you need to exhaust every other alternative before talking about nuclear energy as a climate change solution for Australia.

"The answers in this poll show that some people may express support for nuclear energy in principle, but four out of every five people would prefer to see an effective renewable energy strategy as a priority. "We need to see what renewable technologies can achieve over the next decade. Renewables have enormous potential, but we still have a lot of work to do to find out how much energy they can deliver and at what cost," he said.

Respondents were asked two questions. The first was to baseline their support for each energy source individually and the second to gauge whether they thought the government should give a greater priority to the support of renewable energy or nuclear energy.

Baseline support
There appears to be broad acceptance for developing alternative energy sources:

• The baseline results for nuclear energy mirrored a Nielson poll from the last couple of months. 93 per cent of those polled favoured the Federal Government supporting the development of renewable energy.
• Just under half (49 per cent) also showed support for the development of nuclear sources

Greater priority for government
There is a clear preference for giving priority to developing alternatives to nuclear energy:

• On the matter of which approach should receive the greater priority, the vast majority (80 per cent) said that the government should give priority to renewables while only 15 per cent favoured priority being given to developing nuclear energy sources.
• Males, 22 per cent, were significantly more likely than women, 8%, to believe greater priority should be given to nuclear energy.
• Those aged under 50, 86 per cent, were significantly more likely to prefer renewables over nuclear, than those aged over 50, 71 per cent.