TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bösch, Frank
T1  - Taming Nuclear Power
BT  - the Accident near Harrisburg and the Change in West German and International Nuclear Policy in the 1970s and early 1980s
JF  - German history : the journal of the German History Societ
N2  - In 2011 a broad majority in the German Federal Parliament voted to abandon nuclear energy. This article explores the origins of the change in attitude towards nuclear energy and argues that seven years before the Chernobyl disaster, the accident at the U.S. power plant Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, had a profound impact which nowadays seems to be largely forgotten in Europe. The article identifies the structural causes underlying the transnational reception of the Three Mile Island accident and explores international reactions, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany. The accident near Harrisburg led to a loss of public confidence and created unease about nuclear expansion in many industrialized nations. Reactions to the accident can be understood as an attempt to tame nuclear energy both technically, by increasing safety measures and abandoning plans for new nuclear power stations, and politically, with a more critical appraisal of nuclear energy and with semantics that encouraged a long-term withdrawal from nuclear power. Critics were now also accepted as experts. Nuclear policy in all countries became closely dependent on public opinion, indicating a high level of political responsiveness. Various factors, however, including the contemporaneous oil crisis put the brakes on this critical approach to nuclear power, while safety improvements and the limited expansion of nuclear power created new confidence in the early 1980s.
KW  - Nuclear energy
KW  - experts
KW  - social movements
KW  - media
KW  - 1970s
KW  - Germany
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghw143
SN  - 0266-3554
SN  - 1477-089X
VL  - 35
IS  - 1
SP  - 71
EP  - 95
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -