Technology and Culture

Every country has its own history of nuclear power, but we rarely get a chance to learn about the pathways into (and also out of) nuclear power in countries other than our own. We tend to believe that our own country's history of nuclear power is the same as the global one and, also, tend to envisage it within the paradigm of scientific and technological development, oblivious to the fact that our perspectives are biased, framed to a large extent by the national politics of the country we grew up in.

The book under review offers a tremendously valuable opportunity to relativize perspectives on nuclear power. Consisting of five reports on "the [End Page 1283] political, economic, and cultural conditions of nuclear energy politics" in five countries—Austria, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden—it was made possible by an interdisciplinary project, the History of Nuclear Energy and Society (HoNESt). The research covered a number of other countries as well, and the five were selected as they "are democracies with a market-oriented economy and a strong civil society" and also "[t]hey have all taken journeys from optimistic interest to national decisions to phase out the use of nuclear power" (p. 7).

Setting up a common framework with a focus on the events, the actors, and the public engagement that played the most crucial roles in the history of nuclear power, the book elucidates the "parallels and discrepancies" between the countries. A number of events—including Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" policy, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents—were transnational in nature, affecting the nuclear energy politics in all countries. International and transnational connections, including those with the United States, the United Nations, and between the countries analyzed, have also been instrumental in pushing ahead the development of nuclear power plants, as well as the anti-nuclear movements and protests. The research shows, however, that the influence of such transnational events and international connections has been profoundly dependent on the internal actors—scientists, politicians, industries, and civil society—and their interactions. The national trajectories of nuclear power politics were also greatly influenced by natural and historical environments and the narratives that surrounded them: the country's natural resources, the part it played in WWII, and its local environmental problems.

The comparative perspective of the research indicates that the pathways to nuclear power are varied and highly complex, with many elements at play. Politicians were the initial driving forces behind the euphoric science- and technology-based futuristic narratives in Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and Austria, while in Italy, industrialists were more influential, due to the prevalence of apprehension towards the previous Fascist State and its links to the development of the nuclear bomb. Also, the development of nuclear power in the five countries—although an organized endeavor—has been in many ways accidental. The phasing out of nuclear power, being much less organized, was influenced even more by accidental occurrences. For instance, just as pro-nuclear policies were reappearing against the will of civil societies in Italy and Germany, Fukushima dealt a fatal blow to the proponents of nuclear energy.

To explain how and why these five countries with similar perceptions of the risks and benefits of nuclear power eventually phased out of it, the authors analyze the different levels of public acceptance of nuclear energy within these countries. They argue that the main issue at stake is trust: how people perceive their relationship with the various institutions, the state, and the companies comprising the industrial complex. From this point of [End Page 1284] view, they persuasively show that informing the public transparently and giving civil society a voice in politics and policies regulating the industries builds up trust and minimizes opposition between actors. However, this does not fully explain the different levels of acceptance of nuclear...