The struggle over risk : the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of protest against nuclear technology

Abstract

This thesis examines the social struggle over nuclear risks. The birth and subsequent development of anti-nuclear protest are closely interwoven with the creation of nuclear risks, the public perception of risks, and the ongoing debates over the acceptability of these risks. The spatial scope of the anti-nuclear movement has varied from international protests against nuclear weapons to national protests against nuclear power and local protests against the siting of nuclear waste facility. The focus of these protests has also varied in the course of time. The protest against nuclear weapons emerged immediately after World War II, whilst the use of nuclear power for civilian purposes was at that time greeted with satisfaction. However, public enthusiasm over civilian applications declined rapidly at the end of the 1970s when the anti-nuclear power movement expressed serious doubts about the safety of nuclear power plants. The next phase of the antinuclear protest in the 1980s and 1990s involved disputes over the siting of nuclear waste facilities. The long struggle over nuclear technology has created a special global nuclear culture, which is actively constructed in interaction between antinuclear protesters and pro-nuclear actors. This global nuclear culture consists of knowledge, beliefs, and values, which are compressed into interpretative packages for and against nuclear technology. At the core of this nuclear culture is the concept of 'risk', which creates collective consciousness on the one hand, and is itself a collective construct on the other hand. One of my findings is that the societal evaluation of any new technology is always carried out in varying political, social, and cultural contexts. The thesis consists of five articles and a summary article. The first article deals with international anti-nuclear protest, which is composed of the anti-nuclear weapons and the anti-nuclear power movement. The second article is a study of local nuclear waste conflicts in three Finnish municipalities. The study of local conflicts is continued in the third article; this time from the viewpoint of risk perception. The fourth article is a joint effort of my Swedish colleague, Rolf Lidskog and myself. It is a comparative analysis of Finnish and Swedish nuclear waste conflicts in the context of national nuclear power and nuclear waste policies. In the fifth article, I examine the development of the nuclear issue by analyzing several time-series of people's attitude surveys as well as previous studies of the nuclear debate.