Dislocation and repair after nuclear accidents: The discursive struggle over nuclear power in Belgium in the wake of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Since the early 1970s, the use of nuclear power to generate electricity has been the subject of ongoing public controversy. These debates about energy provision are rooted in a deeper clash between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic worldviews regarding an energy-intensive society and, ultimately, humanity’s relationship with the natural environment. This clash becomes especially pronounced after nuclear accidents. Large-scale accidents are interesting case studies because they put the technology’s advocates on the defensive while providing its opponents with opportunities to challenge the status quo. This article presents a discourse-theoretical
analysis of the public debate in Belgium following three such accidents: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). The analysis identifies three discursive strategies for handling the accidents discursively, each with its own implications with regard to maintaining the status quo or pursuing social change. The first strategy protects the technology by focusing narrowly on the affected reactors and suggesting that the accidents are exceptional misfortunes without deeper implications. The second strategy allows discussion of the technology’s societal desirability, but avoids scrutiny of the underlying worldview. The third strategy most radically challenges the status quo by representing nuclear accidents as emblematic of humans’ problematic relationship with their natural environment. This shows
that the debate on nuclear power is ultimately a deeper conflict between competing worldviews regarding humans’ relationship with their socio-ecological environment. The article concludes that the mechanisms of discursive struggle identified in this nuclear power case study are relevant to debates on energy and complex technologies more broadly.