The environment as a policy problemtaking a hit and its bonds dropping to junk status (Financial Times,10August
2004). Moreover, the massive costs of decommissioning reactors were never
properly included in the cost–benefit analysis of nuclear energy. In short,
cheap nuclear energy proved tobeamyth.
Fourthly, the anti-nuclear movements in the 1970s and 1980s were among
themost popular, persistent and successful new social movements, especially
in Germany (Flam 1994 ); indeed, nuclear power is often defined as a classic
postmaterial issue (see Chapter4). They have played an important part in
turning the public against nuclear power and persuading many mainstream
parties to alter or moderate their former pro-nuclear stances. At the local
level, combined opposition from environmental groups and local citizen
action groups has made it almost impossible for most Western governments
tosecure support for a new nuclear plant. This mobilising potential of the
anti-nuclear movement remains an important factor in the nuclear debate
(Fischer and Boehnke 2004 ).
Lastly, as green parties have entered government, their anti-nuclear roots
have prompted them to lead a direct assault on the nuclear industry. The
German red–green coalition government in 1998 agreed a complete phase-
out of nuclear energy in 2001 (see Box7. 8). The appointment of a Green
environment minister in France, Dominique Voynet, also produced the first
crack – albeit quickly sealed – in the powerful bipartisan French pro-nuclear
consensus when she closed the Creys-Malville Super Phenix nuclear genera-
torin1998. The involvement of the green parties in the 1999–2003 Belgian
coalition government resulted in legislation prohibiting the construction of
new nuclear reactors and limiting the lives of existing ones to forty years.
The Finnish Green League resigned from the government in 2002 over its
opposition to the construction of a new nuclear reactor.
To summarise, exogenous factors have disrupted established patterns of
policymaking, leading many Western countries to call a halt to their nuclear
expansion programmes. Certainly the decline of the nuclear lobby provides
clear evidence that even the strongest of policy communities can be desta-
bilised and broken down, although it took a remarkable combination of
events to produce this transnational decline. For Baumgartner and Jones
(1993:ch.4), the rise and fall of the US nuclear industry is a classic exam-
ple of punctuated equilibrium: popular enthusiasm about the promise of
nuclear technology, followed by years of policy stability and industry growth
under the control of a powerful policy community (or, as they call it, a
‘policy monopoly’), to be replaced by growing questioning of the nuclear
industry which peaked with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the
subsequent disintegration of the policy community.
However, the death certificate of the nuclear industry should not be signed
prematurely, for there seems to be considerable life in it yet. Even whilst it
wasincrisis in North America and Europe, several industrialising nations,
notably South Korea, China and India, were investing heavily in nuclear