CCS to Release Statewide and Regional Nuclear Survey Results

Purpose and Background for these Studies:

The Center for Community Studies at Jefferson Community College completed its 26^th Annual North Country Survey of the Community in October 2025.  This study is a longitudinal study of quality-of-life in the region measuring attitudes and behaviors among residents and has been completed locally since April 2000.  The study is currently fielded each year in Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego, and St. Lawrence Counties. This annual study also involves an omnibus survey component, in that the Center offers the opportunity to local individuals and organizations to suggest survey topics and questions that could be included in the study each year.  These additional omnibuses, or add-on, survey items are a free service that the Center provides to local communities and groups.  In October 2025, the additional survey topic that has been studied involves new advanced nuclear energy technology with investigation of residents’ familiarity, concerns, perceived importance of attributes, levels of support versus opposition of nuclear development, and level of interest in being further educated regarding the new technology. As a follow-up to this Northern and Central New York research, during the first week of November 2025 the Center completed a similar statewide survey of adult residents regarding quality-of-life, including energy generation issues, including participants from all 62 counties in New York State.

In addition to its public opinion survey research activities, the Center has a mission of providing forums for education and discussion of emerging important topics or issues for North Country residents.  In partnership with 116^th Assemblymember Scott Gray, the Center for Community Studies will be hosting a public forum regarding Nuclear Energy on campus on Wednesday evening November 12^th, from 6:00-8:00 pm in the Sturtz Theater, on campus in Watertown, New York.  This forum will address newly developed Advanced Nuclear Energy technologies that could impact or shape the state and local municipalities’ electric energy policies and economic development in the years ahead.  Specifically, a panel of nuclear energy experts at the forum will explain new technologies, and address safety, waste disposal, economic impact, jobs, the environment, and future electricity prices. 

Highlighted Findings from these Survey Studies:

To support the upcoming nuclear energy public forum at JCC by providing current local and statewide public opinion data, the Center included the following four survey questions regarding nuclear energy in its recent omnibus surveys.

1. Have you heard anything at all about Advanced Nuclear Energy generation power plants?

Adult residents in the four-county Northern and Central New York region are slightly more likely to have heard of Advanced Nuclear Energy power generation plants as they are to have not heard (49% versus 42%, respectively) with the largest familiarity with this form of energy generation reported in Oswego and St. Lawrence Counties.  Statewide there is significantly less familiarity with Advanced Nuclear Energy generation plants, with only 33% of participants reporting familiarity.

2. Please indicate whether you have concerns with each of the following aspects of an Advanced Nuclear Energy plant if it were to be constructed in the North Country (or, "Oswego County", or “the region of NYS that includes your county”). How concerned would you be with:
   1. The impact on long-term electricity rates?
   2. The handling of spent fuel?
   3. Safety for local residents?
   4. The dependability of the power supply?

Among four potential concerns that were studied, clearly the aspect of an Advanced Nuclear Energy power plant that is of most concern to Northern and Central NY residents is a pocketbook issue – concern with the impact on long-term electricity rates, with 61% of participants expressing that they are very or somewhat concerned with future rates.  Statewide, concern with long term electricity rates is found at a similar 64% rate, however, when residents of the entire state are sampled, there is a much higher percentage of adults who express concern with the handling of spent fuel than was found in Northern and Central NY (69% versus 52%, respectively) and concern with safety for local residents (58% versus 44%, respectively).

3. How important to you are the following considerations with how electricity is produced in the future?
   1. Affordability of electricity.
   2. Preservation of open agricultural land.
   3. Strengthening the local economic development.
   4. Creating local jobs.
   5. Reducing emissions.

Among five studied considerations, or potential positive impacts of Advanced Nuclear Energy generation, clearly the aspect of an Advanced Nuclear Energy power plant that is of most importance to residents is a personal economic issue – importance of the future affordability of electricity. A very large 91% of Northern and Central NY participants express that this consideration is “extremely or very” important to them (60% responded “extremely”, 31% responded “very”, while 0% responded either “not too” or “not at all” important), and similarly, on a statewide basis 89% of participants express that this consideration is “extremely or very” important to them.  Reducing emissions is of least importance to residents of Northern and Central NY with only 57% responding “extremely or very” important, while this rate is higher, at 66%, on a statewide basis.

4. Are you familiar enough with Advanced Nuclear Energy technology to confidently know whether you support or oppose the potential future development of these power plants in the North Country (or, “Oswego County”, or “the region of NYS that includes your county”), or do you feel that you need to learn more about the technology and its impacts before you could decide whether you support or oppose?

The final survey question in these studies was designed with two goals: (1) identification of the level of desire to learn more about nuclear energy technology, and (2) among those residents who do feel that they know enough about the technology to confidently decide – do you support or oppose potential future development of these power plants in the region that includes your county?  Two key findings emerge from the data.  First, a majority of adult residents, more than three-in-five in Northern and Central NY (61%), and  on a statewide basis (64%), feel that they need to learn more before they could confidently decide whether they support or oppose the future development. Second, among those who feel that they are well enough informed to confidently decide, it is more common that residents are in support rather than in opposition to the development of nuclear power generation plants in the future (by a wide 4:1 ratio in Northern and Central NY, 32% to 8%, respectively, and on a statewide basis by almost a 2:1 ratio 23% to 12%, respectively). 

Finally, as illustrated in the following graph for the Northern and Central NY study, it is clear that a majority of residents wish to learn more about Advanced Nuclear Energy before confidently making a personal decision about support versus opposition, and a large majority support for development among those who are already well-informed.  These are consistent findings, quite independent of other socio-demographic factors.  In other words, often-times in our current society, attitudes and behaviors are very polarized among societal subgroups.  In particular, polarization due to political ideology and/or political party is now often-times the rule, rather than the exception when researching public opinion.  However, this survey item that investigates familiarity and support for Advanced Nuclear Energy shows very similar findings among all studied subgroups, even among the subgroups of political ideology and political party affiliation that commonly have great divides.    As an example, among registered Republicans the majority in Northern and Central NY (52%) indicate that they wish to learn more about Advanced Nuclear Energy before deciding whether or not they are in support of future development, while among those Republicans who feel confident in their current understanding they are approximately four times more likely to support rather than oppose (39% versus 9%, respectively). Similarly, among registered Democrats the majority (63%) indicate that they wish to learn more about Advanced Nuclear Energy before deciding whether or not they are in support of future development, while among those Democrats who feel confident in their current understanding they are also almost approximately four times more likely to support rather than oppose (29% versus 8%, respectively). The current study data suggests that Alternative Nuclear Energy opinion among Northern and Central New York is one of the rare bipartisan agreement topics in our society in 2025.  On a statewide basis, there is noticeably greater support for the development among Republicans than there is among Democrats. 

Methodology Employed for these Studies:

Between October 21-25, 2025, a mixed-mode sampling method of contact was employed in this study to complete a total of 2,109 interviews of adult residents of a four-county region in Northern and Central New York.  Surveys were completed by 593 Jefferson County residents, 515 Lewis County residents, 472 Oswego County residents, and 529 St. Lawrence County residents. Working under the supervision of the Center for Community Studies research staff in both a physical call center in Watertown and a virtual remote call center, statistics students enrolled at the College and trained in interview techniques completed 505 live interviews via telephone on both the landline and cellular phones of adult residents.  An additional 1,511 surveys were completed online, with 629 via random email invitation and 882 via random MMS text message push-to-web invitations to cellular phones.  Finally, 93 intercept surveys were completed at Fort Drum to assist in attaining accurate representation of the military-affiliated subpopulation in the sample collected in this study.  After sampling, all data were weighted within-county for gender, age, education, military affiliation, and racial background to ensure representativeness of samples within each county, and when generating aggregate region-wide estimates a further weight for county population sizes was applied. The result of this sampling of 2,109 Northern and Central New York residents is an approximate margin of error of ±2.4% after this weighting sample survey results toward Northern and Central New York population characteristics. County-specific margins of error are approximately ±5% due to smaller within-county sample sizes. 

Between November 6-8, 2025, text message push-to-web sampling methodology was employed to complete a total of 972 interviews of adult residents of New York State.  After sampling, all data were weighted for gender, age, education, geography/region, and racial background to ensure representativeness of the sample. The result of this statewide sampling of 972 residents is an approximate margin of error of ±3.8% after this weighting sample survey results toward New York State population characteristics.

The full reports of socio-demographic analyses for each of the Advanced Nuclear Energy survey questions in each of these two studies are included as separate files below.

4-County Advanced Nuclear Energy Generation - Cross-tabulations

NYS Statewide Advanced Nuclear Energy Generation - Cross-tabulations

Final Comments and Acknowledgements:

This Northern and Central NY Advanced Nuclear Energy survey has been completed as a subset of the annual omnibus annual survey of the attitudes and opinions of a representative sample of adult residents of the region.  This annual survey by the Center for Community Studies has been completed each year in Jefferson County since 2000. The survey expanded to include Lewis County annually in 2007, and further expanded to include St. Lawrence County in 2015.  This is the first year of including Oswego County in the regional surveying.  The primary goal of the annual survey is to collect data regarding quality-of-life issues of importance to local citizens, and as a result this study provides an annual “snapshot” of life in the region.  Additionally, analysis of the 26^th Annual Survey data provides an information-rich “motion-picture” of changes in the lives of residents over the past two and a half decades when trends are investigated via comparing with earlier-year results. The longitudinal trended data included in this study summarizes results of over 25,000 interviews that have been completed in a total of 57 county-specific surveys of the community in the four counties since 2000. Typically, the results of this large survey study are released in December, after sampling is completed in October.  This year an unprecedented early release of the Advanced Nuclear Energy survey results s being employed to facilitate their use in the aforementioned public forum to be held at the College on November 12^th.  The remainder of the longitudinal survey results that have been collected in this omnibus study and an associated full longitudinal report of findings will be released to the public in December 2025, following the normal schedule.

The sponsors of these annual surveys of the Northern and Central New York communities are Jefferson Community College, CarFreshner Inc., the Northern New York Community Foundation, the Development Authority of the North Country, and the Lewis County Board of Legislature, who all provide financial support to assist in the funding of these projects.

The statewide study completed in November 2025 has been funded as a community service by Jefferson Community College, to enrich the public forum to be held on November 12^th.