Paper Title
Attitude toward the Construct of High Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Facilities and Spiral of Silence: Results from Online Survey Experiment

Abstract
Many problems of radioactive waste management in Japan have not been solved. For example, the final disposal facilities of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) have not been agreed on by the residents of candidate municipalities, even after Fukushima accident. In order to move this agenda forward, it is important to know people’s attitudes toward this issue. We investigated whether and how “Spiral of Silence” phenomenonis observed in attitude formation on claims related to HLW disposal. We analyzed the results of an online survey in 2016, and confirmed that “Spiral of Silence” works in attitude formations and that it can be interpreted in a dual-process model of information processing. We also found that “Spiral of Silence” works not only in the associative process (System 1) but sometimes in the reflective process (System 2) and even in the opposite direction from what “Spiral of Silence” predicts. Index terms - High-Level Radioactive waste (HLW), NIMBY, Dual-Process Model, Spiral of Silence.