A research paper by Dr. Davide Contu, Assistant Professor at Canadian University Dubai, on the social costs of nuclear energy has been published in ‘Energy Policy’, the reputed international Scopus-indexed journal.
Dr. Contu’s research program employs a combination of methods from Environmental Economics and Environmental Psychology. In particular, it employs stated preference surveys to investigate social costs and benefits of nuclear energy across different countries.
The paper investigates preferences for current nuclear technology as well as preferences for the new advanced 4th generation nuclear energy technology, currently under research and development, with a nation-wide sample of the UK population. Overall, this research aims to contribute to the debate on public acceptability of nuclear energy after the Fukushima accident. In addition, it provides a framework to model individual preferences towards energy sources.
Dr. Contu is an empirical economist, whose research interests focus on stated preferences, choice modelling, and applied economics. He holds a PhD in Environmental Economics/Advanced Quantitative Methods and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.