By Kwaak Je-yupCanadian students won the first-ever International Nuclear Energy Olympiad, beating out nine other two-person national teams with their report on the demographics of public support in their home country.Hosted by the Korea Nuclear Energy Promotion Agency (KONEPA) and the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the competition asked the students to conduct a public opinion survey, analyze the current promotion efforts by respective national associations, share lessons with each other and finally suggest future directions.First-place winners Alex Wolf, a second-year MBA candidate at York University, and James Harrington, first-year master’s student in health and radiation sciences, said they found publicity campaigns should cater to specific groups and focus on fighting misinformation targeting the as-yet-undecided majority of the population.“They get caught in the crossfire between those who support and those who oppose strongly,” said Wolf, in the roundtable interview after the ceremony. “Their questions are left unaddressed.”Harrington added, “We try to focus on talking to those people who haven’t made up their minds already.”Rhee Jae-hwan, the agency’s chairman said, “States hoping to introduce nuclear energy or to expand their current programs always face the need to answer the same question: public acceptance,” before the awards ceremony at the Palace Hotel in southern Seoul Thursday. He admitted he was “pleasantly surprised” by the level of interest and the participants’ ideas.Organizers pledged to continue this event in the future, hoping that the Olympiad paves the way for wider public awareness and transparency of information.Findings from other teams were noted for their local differences but the public in most countries seemed to suffer from limited sources of information.Joint second-ranked Korean students Jeon Ji-hye of Seoul National University and Lee Kyoung-hwan of Dankook University found local public opinion largely influenced by the news, namely the country’s winning the U.A.E. nuclear contract swaying it to the positive side and the Fukushima disaster this year pushing it the opposite way.Turks Ceyda Mine Polat and Berkin Turkiz Pinarbasi of Hacettepe University, who also took second prize, found that neither supporters nor critics had enough information to make a fair judgment.The third-ranked teams also presented important points for promotion. Nitendra Singh and Sunil Kumar of India’s University of Delhi found that public meetings prove useful for promotion yet left some room for convincing people, as participants expressed their wish to be more involved in decision-making.Yulia Belova and Victoria Sannikova of Russia’s National Research Nuclear University also found the public worried about transparency of information and called for inviting independent scholars to confirm Russia’s security standards.