Indispensable, safe and sustainable? How the European parliament debated nuclear energy megaprojects in the 1970s energy transition

Abstract

Present-day energy systems are shaped by past decisions, which were informed by contemporary considerations about different energy sources and visions of the future. Hence, today, at a time when a new energy transition is on the agenda, it is important to understand those past rationales that account for previous energy transitions, notably the introduction of large-scale nuclear power in the 1970s. This article argues that in the debates in the European Parliament, representatives of West European mainstream parties specialising in energy and environmental policy used arguments that reflect the key components of what we today call sustainability. The analysis of the debate on nuclear energy megaprojects in the European Parliament in the mid-1970s examines the arguments used, reflecting expectations about the future that shaped long-term energy planning. Transnational protests at the building sites of nuclear power plants of the mid-1970s were viewed as a threat to what most European policymakers at the time considered an indispensable energy transition. The debate thus offers unique insights into the arguments that underpinned the planned transition to nuclear energy and nuclear megaprojects and attempts to improve popular acceptability, including via better information and participation. The article highlights that those advocating a transition to nuclear power used arguments surprisingly similar to those mobilised in current debates about energy transitions and megaprojects, including the search for nuclear waste disposal sites.

Keywords:

• Nuclear energy
• energy transition
• future
• history
• discourses
• sustainability

1. Introduction

‘For many years there has been no area of modern technology, no technological development on which opinions have been so controversial […] views are put forward with such reluctance to compromise and such missionary zeal, that one sometimes doubts whether the decisions needed in this sector for the future can in fact be taken’ (European Parliament 1976a, 36).

When on 16 January 1976 the European Parliament’s (EP) rapporteur, the West German Christian democrat Hanna Walz, introduced her report on a ‘Community policy on the siting of nuclear power stations taking into account their acceptability for the population’ to the EP plenary in Strasbourg, she was clearly exasperated with the level of controversy around nuclear power. She viewed the critique of nuclear energy as a threat to an energy transition she deemed necessary, and criticised the apparent irrationality of the debate: to her it seemed to be a clash of ‘convictions’, rather than an exchange of rational arguments (European Parliament 1976a, 36).

However, controversy was largely absent from the debate in the EP itself, at a time when most political parties in Europe (Mez and Ollrogge 1979) and almost all MEPs supported the expansion of nuclear power. Only the Scottish Labour MEP Willie Hamilton objected (European Parliament 1976a, 63–4), and a Liberal Danish MEP abstained.¹

The 1970s were the heyday of nuclear megaprojects. Expecting continuously rising energy demand, as experienced during the post-war boom, utilities ordered ever-bigger nuclear reactors. Numerous new plants were built in Western Europe, as well as in Communist Eastern Europe (Josephson, Meyer, and Kaijser 2021). The 1973 oil shock accelerated this trend (Bösch and Graf 2014). Nuclear power – which had been promoted by governments, international organisations, including the European Communities (EC), industry and science since the 1950s (Curli 2017, 103; Reitbauer 2015; Josephson and Lehtonen 2021; Kirchhof and Meyer 2021; Hamblin 2021) – seemed the only readily available alternative energy source for an energy transition away from imported oil.

However, by the mid-1970s, public opposition to nuclear power was growing (Presas I Puig and Meyer 2021), in particular in Western Europe’s border regions, where many nuclear power plants were constructed along Europe’s major rivers that provided ample cooling water (Kaijser and Meyer 2021), and where European power lines intersected (Lagendijk 2015; Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten 2016). People on the other side of national borders resented that they were potentially affected, but rarely consulted. This aggravated grievances and fuelled ‘transboundary’ European protest (Kaijser and Meyer 2018), such as on the upper Rhine (Kirchhof and Meyer 2021).

Cross-border problems called for supranational solutions, or so it seemed to the institutions of the EC, the predecessor of today’s European Union (EU). Already the original Euratom Treaty of 1957 had not only committed the EC to promoting nuclear energy, but also to protecting citizens against radiation (Euratom 1957, art. 2), in particular, where nuclear activities had potential cross-border impacts (Euratom 1957, art. 31 and 37). Thus, at its January 1976 plenary, the European Parliament (EP) demanded using relevant EC competences to improve the spatial planning of nuclear megaprojects across Western Europe. By taking the initiative on this issue, MEPs pursued three objectives: first, responding to and defusing anti-nuclear protest and transboundary conflicts, secondly, defending the - planned or ongoing - energy transition towards nuclear power, and thirdly, strengthening EC institutions and EC energy policy.

Before the direct elections of 1979, with a view to EC law-making, the EP was a largely powerless assembly. EP members (MEPs) held dual mandates (Hähnel 2020). Most MEPs who joined the Strasbourg assembly, were committed to the project of European integration, and familiar with national (energy) debates (Oberloskamp 2020; Shaev 2021). At the same time, they were active agenda-setters at the European level (Meyer 2021, 77; Roos 2021), using instruments such as the ‘own initiative report’, like Walz’ report discussed in January 1976. Such activities impacted on EC policy making (Patel and Salm 2021), as also in this case: by the end of 1976, the European Commission (1977) responded to the EP demands by proposing binding European legislation.

Parliamentary debates have been analysed by researchers in order to gain insights into discourses on energy policy, energy transitions, and megaprojects (Edberg and Tarasova 2016; Oberloskamp 2020). The EP debate can be read as a proxy of the broader discussion among political parties and political elites in the EC. Remarkably, the EP not only provided a public forum for discussion, but also initiated this debate through its report. The January 1976 plenary debate was the first extensive public engagement with the growing conflicts around nuclear megaprojects in an EC context. Previous EP debates on nuclear issues were largely limited to technical and research aspects. Only recently had the EP started to address safety and public concerns in a more critical manner in the context of parliamentary questions (e.g., European Parliament 1975).

This article argues that this EP debate was not only about the cross-border impacts of nuclear megaprojects, but effectively a discourse on the ongoing transition to nuclear energy more generally. Remarkably, MEPs justified the need for this transition using arguments that cover all relevant aspects of what we now call sustainability. By examining this debate, we can obtain critical insights for present-day debates defending energy infrastructures for current ‘sustainability’ transitions (Hasenöhrl and Meyer 2020). Of course, the debates of the mid-1970s took place under very different political and economic conditions – against the backdrop of an economic - and energy - crisis after almost thirty years of unprecedented growth, under the geopolitical conditions of Cold War competition. At the time, references to nuclear developments in the Communist East were frequently used as (pro-nuclear) arguments. Unlike in Sweden in the 1970s (Ekberg and Hultman 2021), climate change had not become an issue in European energy policy (Geyer 2016; Sarasin 2021, 17–31). Nevertheless, with the rise of environmentalism and the debate about the ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972), the ecological implications of energy decisions gained greater relevance. Indeed, the longstanding critic of nuclear power Amory Lovins already used the term ‘sustainable sources’ referring to sun and wind (Lovins 1976, 75). In this text, ‘sustainability’ and ‘transition’, will be used as analytical concepts – rather than as normative or source terms.

The article is organised as follows. In the subsequent section, I will discuss the role of European institutions in the energy transitions of the 1970s, and provide some background on the speakers during the plenary debate analysed in this article. Thereafter, I will discuss and operationalise the concepts of transitions and sustainability. The third and main part analyses the debate about the siting of nuclear megaprojects with an emphasis on what I call sustainability arguments. The conclusions will highlight some insights for present energy debates.

2. European institutions and the siting of nuclear megaprojects

The EC institutions had long promoted nuclear power in line with a European vision of modernity and peaceful cooperation through public relations (Spiering 2011; Leslie and Mercelis 2019) and funded nuclear research cooperation since the 1950s (Curli 2017; Josephson and Lehtonen 2021). Hence, key representatives of the EC institutions viewed the growing transnational and transboundary protests against nuclear power culminating in the spectacular site occupation at Wyhl (West Germany) in February 1975 (Tompkins 2016; Milder 2017; Häni 2018; Pohl 2019) as a threat to energy security (Rucht 1980, 27–31; European Commission 1974a). Given the European dimension of the cross-border impacts of nuclear plants, different EC actors presented ideas for how to resolve the issue at the European level, through regulation.

2.1. Tindemans report

The first response could be found in a document commissioned by the member states to offer new visions for future European integration. In the spirit of European federalism, Belgian Premier Leo Tindemans’ ‘Report on European Union’ of December 1975 (Nielsen-Sikora 2007) called for

‘a common body responsible for regulating and controlling nuclear power stations, with similar responsibilities and powers to those of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States. Control should be exerted over the siting, construction and operation of the power stations, the fuel cycle and the disposal of radioactive and thermal waste (Tindemans 1976, 27).

Established at the European level, independent of direct member state pressures, Tindemans reasoned, such a body would enjoy more trust among citizens, and thus help to defuse the conflicts over nuclear sites. Tindemans’ proposals were mentioned in the EP debate January 1976, but were never turned into concrete policy.

2.2. European Parliament

Already in the summer of 1974, the members of EP Committee on Energy, Research and Technology had started to discuss how best to react to growing anti-nuclear protest (Walz 1975, 3). They opted for an own initiative report (Walz 1975). A formal parliamentary resolution (European Parliament 1976b) proposed concrete measures for the Commission and the member states to take. Like Tindemans, the EP Committee assumed that more transparency and cross-border consultation would increase public acceptance of nuclear megaprojects it considered indispensable for energy security. The resolution advocated five kinds of measures:

First, a Community siting policy ‘based on a Community map’ and the ‘harmonization of authorization procedures and regulations’ to ensure fair procedures and equal distribution of plants (art. 8–10), also with regard to borders to non-member states (art. 18). Secondly, research and regulatory efforts were to improve and build trust in nuclear safety (art. 12), and to speed up ‘the procedure for authorising the construction of nuclear power stations’ (art. 19). Thirdly, the resolution advocated what Science and Technology Studies (STS) have described as ‘technological fixes’ (Oelschlaeger 1979). ‘Nuclear parks’, for instance, would reduce risks of transporting nuclear materials, and ‘platforms at sea or underground nuclear power plants’ (art. 14) would enable locating plants away from the population. Technologies of dry cooling would allow for wider options for siting nuclear plants away from water courses (art. 23), a problem on which Euratom already funded research (European Commission 1974b, 2). Fourthly, the resolution demanded informing the public. The goal of such information was to convince citizens of the indispensability of nuclear energy: people ‘must in all cases be given a clear understanding of the alternatives, which entail an impoverishment of the quality of life’ (art. 16). Finally, the resolution advocated improving the legal bases for citizen participation: member states were encouraged to ‘draft legislation, in so far as it does not already exist, that will enable citizens’ associations and environmental organizations to use constitutional means in pressing their claims’ (art. 20). This was a very ambitious demand, as the rules of ‘standing’ were rather restrictive in many EC/EU member states (Krämer 2018), unlike in the United States, where some NGOs strongly relied on litigation (Sandbach 1978, 108). This resolution induced the European Commission to propose legislation regarding consultation between member states about nuclear sites at intra-European borders (European Commission 1977), which however eventually failed to win the necessary unanimous member state support.

On 13 January 1976, the resolution was debated and voted upon in the EP plenary. In line with constructivist assumptions in the literature on the EP, we can interpret the debate as performative action (Roos 2020; Krumrey 2018). The parliamentary debate primarily served to explain, justify and promote the initiative taken by the EP, and addressed the Commission, who were represented by the Commissioner responsible for Energy and Taxation, the Belgian Socialist Henri Simonet. Within the EC, the EP plenary was an important forum for the exchange between institutions, and served as an (albeit very limited) proxy for a European public sphere (Meyer 2020, 2011, 2010).

2.3. The speakers

The eighteen MEPs − 16 men and two women – speaking in the plenary debate on 13 January 1976 represented different party groups – Conservatives, Liberals and Socialists – and the two committees involved in the making of the report, the Research and Energy one – in the lead – and that for Public Health and the Environment contributing. Only one of the speakers (Derek Walter-Smith) was not from one of these two committees, but from the EP’s Legal Committee (Meyer forthcoming 2022). West German MEPs were most numerous in the debate, accounting for six speakers. Five came from the UK, three from Italy, two from France, and one each from Belgium and Denmark. In terms of party politics, centre-left and centre-right parties held roughly equal weight. From right to left, there were two British conservatives, six Christian democrats, one French Progressive Democrat, three liberals and five social democrats. Various members of the Energy Committee were closely attached to different energy sectors. For instance, Social Democrat Gerhard Flämig held a leading position in the West German Nuclear Forum (Deutsches Atomforum) (NN 2002; Spiegel 1993), the main nuclear industry lobby. The following table (Figure 1) provides an overview of the speakers and their various attachments.

Figure 1. Participants in the debate on “Community policy on the siting of nuclear power stations”, Sitting of Tuesday, 13 January 1976, Strasbourg (in the order of appearance).

3. Visions of (European) futures: conceptualising transitions and sustainability

Energy transition and sustainability are highly normative and elusive ‘sponge words’ (Hempel 2012, 68), and they both involve references to the future. For analytical purposes, they require some conceptual clarification.

3.1. Transition

Very basically, the ‘idea of transition assumes a movement from one state to another, from a place of departure to one of arrival’, where the place of arrival is often part of a vision of a ‘desirable future’ (Sarrica et al. 2016, 1). Energy researchers have emphasised various aspects, such as stages, speed, and also factors conducive – or not – to such transitions, as well as its – often unintended – consequences (Geels et al. 2017; Hirsh and Jones 2014; Sovacool 2016; Smil 2016; Sovacool, Hess, and Cantoni 2021; Sovacool et al. 2021; Araújo 2014). Researchers have analysed how political actors, policy communities, scientists and social movements have sought to influence energy transitions, by manufacturing visions of desirable futures, through projections, models, forecasts and scenarios (Aykut 2019; Shaev 2021). In all of these definitions, the core criterion is the change, and the outright replacement of the main source of energy by another (Sovacool 2016, 203). At the political level, this assumption makes the argument for the indispensability of a transition all the more powerful. Historically, however, energy sources have usually complemented rather than supplanted each other (Hasenöhrl and Meyer 2020), and some energy researchers have used this observation to attenuate optimistic hopes of a speedy sustainability transition (Smil 2016). Already in the 1970s, hopes for a rapid replacement of imported oil by nuclear power proved unrealistic, while ideas for a transition to sources beyond oil and nuclear gave rise to controversy (Lovins 1976, 75; Aykut 2019; Krause, Bossel, and Müller-Reißmann 1980). Nevertheless, most European policymakers in the mid-1970s shared the view that a transition towards new energy sources for the future was necessary. Their ideas about the future involved notions of inevitable progress, the obligation to plan for the future, or anticipation of future characterised by risks – acceptable or not (Graf and Herzog 2016, 512). In this sense, the situation was not dissimilar to current energy transitions.

3.2. Sustainability

Sustainability is an old concept from enlightenment forestry, stipulating that no more wood should be used than is growing back in a given period (Warde 2011). The term has had a second, more important career as a political concept from the late 20th century onwards (Seefried 2021). In 1987, the World Commission on Sustainable Development, the so-called Brundtland Commission, famously defined that making ‘development sustainable’ meant ‘to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Brundtland Commission 1987, 16). In this political document, such future orientation went hand in hand with more ‘Promethean’ hopes or ‘Cornucopian’ technological optimism (Sturup and Low 2019, 15; Dryzek 2005, 51–71), global justice concerns and a call for ‘effective citizen participation in decision making’ (European Commission 1977, 16), reflecting normative principles discussed in Europe already in the 1970s (Nelkin and Pollak 1977).

Seeking to make sustainability fruitful as an analytical concept (Sturup and Low 2019, 11), researchers have emphasised three components. First, sustainability focuses on three ‘pillars’ relevant for human welfare, namely ‘ecological integrity, social equity and economic vitality’ (Hempel 2012, 67; Sarrica et al. 2016, 1). Secondly, sustainability involves ideas about justice – not only presently in terms of social justice within societies, and global justice between developed and developing countries in particular, but also intergenerational justice. Sustainability requires – and this is its main innovative aspect – considering the interests of future generations in current decision-making (Hempel 2012, 67). Thirdly, as instruments to achieve all this, sustainability requires providing citizens with adequate information and opportunities for participation in policy and law making. The notion of sustainability has effectively served as an appeal to policymakers to make appropriate rules. The following table (Figure 2) provides an overview of the operationalisation of the concept of sustainability.

Figure 2. Operationalising sustainability.

In the analysis below, these aspects of sustainability will be applied to the EP debate, accessed in its published English translation (European Parliament 1976a). From a social constructivist perspective, the debate will be examined as a discourse, i.e., a ‘specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorizations that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices’, and which are important because they give ‘meaning’ to ‘physical and social realities’, and thus influence the politics of energy transitions (Hajer 1997, 44). These ‘ensembles of ideas’ are examined through a qualitative contents analysis (Mayring 2014) focusing on patterns of arguments in an inductive manner, in a procedure that is sensitive to political and historical context (Dimitriou and Field 2019).

4. Debating nuclear megaproject siting in the European Parliament

Sustainability arguments will be examined in the following regarding what are the three main themes of the debate on the ‘Community policy on the siting of nuclear power stations taking into account their acceptability for the population’. The first part analyses the justification of an energy transition towards nuclear more generally. The second part addresses MEP’s pleas for political and legal solutions to improve the ‘acceptability for the population’, via a European siting policy – in order to facilitate this transition. These arguments are informed by older visions of ensuring prosperity and peace for the future through nuclear technology and European integration (Curli 2017). The third section discusses demands for information and participation that had become more prominent in the course of the 1970s (Nelkin and Pollak 1977). The call for information and participation reflects key normative assumptions implicit in sustainability arguments: justice and equity in sustainability transitions can hardly be achieved without democracy and participation (Sovacool, Hess, and Cantoni 2021).

4.1. Justifying the transition to nuclear power: indispensable, safe and sustainable?

Economic and social benefits of a transition to nuclear energy in the face of ever-growing energy consumption reigned supreme in MEPs’ statements in the January 1976 debate. Growth and prosperity were key goals; hence most MEPs considered the expansion of nuclear power indispensable to ensure energy security for a growing economy. Visions of the future involved the expectation of continuous growth of energy consumption. Consequently, for instance the Liberal Italian MEP Augusto Premoli anticipated the ‘inevitability of the growth’ of nuclear energy use (European Parliament 1976a, 42). This, he presented as an unquestionable fact. Rapporteur Waltz underscored emphatically that ‘in the foreseeable future’, nuclear power would need to constitute part of ‘a vital global energy policy – necessary almost to our survival’ (European Parliament 1976a, 36).

In the wake of the oil crisis and the Club of Rome report on the ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972) nuclear power’s contribution to reducing the dependence on imported oil was an important socio-economic argument, with an ecological tinge. In the face of dwindling ‘fossil energy resources’, and growing energy consumption, only nuclear promised sufficient energy ‘in the long term’, ‘in adequate quantities and under reliable and more favourable price conditions’, Walz argued (European Parliament 1976a, 36). As Walz and many of her fellow MEPs assumed a fixed ratio between energy consumption and growth, she warned that not building nuclear power plants would mean ‘unemployment […] on an unprecedented scale’ (European Parliament 1976a, 36). The spectre of socio-economic hardship was thus mobilised to defend the transition to nuclear energy.

The British conservative MEP Tom Normanton argued that policymakers had a ‘responsibility’ to prepare and plan for the future, in order not ‘to stand indicted by future generations for failing to make provisions for their future energy needs’ (European Parliament 1976a, 59). Unlike most environmental arguments, this socio-economic intergenerational justice argument referred to a short-to-medium-term future. When planning for the future, non-nuclear alternative solutions, such as energy savings or the return to ‘more traditional forms of energy utilisation’ seemed inadequate to Normanton, as well as to many of his fellow MEPs. This reflects widely held contemporary assumptions about progress that led to the rejection of e.g., wind power, which was routinely viewed as belonging to the past (Presas I Puig and Meyer 2021, 93). At the same time, ‘new substitute energy sources’ appeared to offer solutions only in a more distant future, if ever. These sources, ‘such as solar, wind energy, or geothermal heat’, ‘wave power’ or ‘thermo-nuclear fusion’, still required much development work, various MEPs argued (European Parliament 1976a, 37, 44, 54). Hence, for at least the coming 25 years, nuclear power would be the only option to close the ‘energy gap’, Walz maintained, rejecting alternative energy sources as ‘illusions’ (European Parliament 1976a, 37). Other MEPs, such as Premoli, at least mentioned ‘Dutch natural gas’ and North Sea oil as alternatives to imported oil, sources Denmark for instance relied on after giving up nuclear plans (Meyer 2019).

For a long time, the promoters of nuclear power have represented nuclear fission as an environmentally friendly source of energy (Espluga et al. 2021, 156). Hence, it is not surprising that environmental arguments were mobilised in favour of nuclear energy. Rapporteur Walz described nuclear as the ‘least harmful to the environment’, and emphasised its role for the protection of scarce and precious natural resources (European Parliament 1976a, 36). Similarly, the Italian Christian Democrat Ferruccio Pisoni presented nuclear as the ‘cleanest available’ energy source (European Parliament 1976a, 60). He and others favourably compared nuclear energy’s apparent cleanliness to the ‘environmental’ and social costs and risks involved in other forms of energy production and use, such as dam building or coal mining, as well as air pollution from coal and petrol combustion (European Parliament 1976a, 54, 8, 60)

Finally, Walz defended the transition to nuclear power by reference to social and global justice: ‘Without an energy source of this kind, […] jobs will not be secure, while the developing countries will not be able to count on greater assistance’ (European Parliament 1976a, 36). Similarly, Pisoni emphatically argued that ‘sufficient low cost energy’ from nuclear was a necessity to combat ‘hunger and thirst’ and ‘poverty’ ‘throughout the world’ (European Parliament 1976a, 60), reflecting an argument made by pronuclear campaigns and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since the 1950s (Hamblin 2021).

Such claims did not go unchallenged. British Labour MEP Hamilton – a miner’s son, maverick in British politics, critic of the monarchy, but a pro-European (Roth 2000) – questioned the promises of nuclear energy for global justice in the fight against poverty in ‘underdeveloped countries’. He criticised the capitalist drive of ‘big companies’ that were highly interested in exporting nuclear technology. Such exports would accelerate the spread of plutonium and aggravate proliferation risks (European Parliament 1976a, 63–4). Hamilton thus highlighted an issue that was increasingly problematised by contemporary antinuclear movements, while many national governments supported their respective industries’ export efforts (Romberg 2020; Bandarra 2021).

Nuclear risks hardly featured in most MEPs’ statements, or they were downplayed: ‘We cannot all go back to riding about on bicycles, nor can we live in an environment devoid of risk’. Like Pisoni (European Parliament 1976a, 60), almost all MEPs considered nuclear energy sufficiently safe and only posing the usual, accepted risks of the modern world. Many MEPs highlighted the apparently impeccable safety standards and procedures of nuclear industry – as opposed to the traditionally weak safety record of coal-mining, for instance (European Parliament 1976a, 45, 54, 7–8, 60). Pisoni explicitly refuted concerns about the risks of radioactivity. Even after a massive expansion of nuclear power, radiation was to remain far below the permissible levels (European Parliament 1976a, 61).

Again, Hamilton challenged such views. Nuclear risks were ‘in no way comparable’ to other industry risks. Without using the term, Hamilton questioned the sustainability of nuclear energy on the grounds of nuclear waste, and its long-term impact on future generations. He thus raised the issue of intergenerational justice, while most MEPs like the German Christian Democrat Gerd Springorum expressed Promethean ‘hope’ of future technological fixes: ‘many possible methods will be found’ (European Parliament 1976a, 61).

In their advocacy of the transition to nuclear energy, MEPs mobilised various sustainability arguments, most of them relating to socio-economic but at times also to environmental concerns. Intergenerational justice arguments also mattered, on both sides of the debate, interestingly enough.

In the face of the critique of nuclear power, MEPs advocated European policy and law-making – and improved participation and information as instruments to defuse the conflict.

4.2. Europe as a solution: a European siting policy to improve acceptance

As good Europeans, almost all MEPs – with the exception of Hamilton, who from a British perspective did not believe that European legislation would make a difference – agreed with the rapporteur that European Community policy and regulatory measures would help to improve public acceptance of the transition to nuclear energy. The harmonisation of safety standards, of standards for public information and consultation, and a coordinated siting policy for a better distribution of nuclear plants in Europe would help defuse the conflict. Facing national plans for ever larger numbers of nuclear plants, MEPs considered it important to coordinate siting on a European scale, thus limiting the accumulation of certain environmental and socio-economic impacts. Transnational consultation was to become obligatory for plants near international borders. The Belgian Christian democrat Marcel Albert Vandewiele provided an example: ‘two power stations are to be built on either side of the frontier between Luxembourg and Germany at a distance of a few kilometres from each other on the Moselle’ (European Parliament 1976a, 41).²

For all their European ambition, most of the MEPs considered the independent European agency proposed by Tindemans impossible to achieve, considering the differences in local conditions, planning rules and procedures between countries (European Parliament 1976a, 51).

MEPs controversially discussed somewhat futuristic technological fixes to deal with risks and popular opposition. Building nuclear parks promised to be useful to minimize the risks relating to the transport of nuclear fuel and waste. However, some MEPs warned that concentrating large-scale energy production in one place would create new risks: it could compromise the resilience of electricity networks and would accumulate risks in cases of failure or military attack. Similarly, views on the feasibility and costs of placing nuclear plants underground or on artificial islands at sea differed. While some MEPs somewhat idealistically argued that the expected benefits in terms of safety and acceptability would be worth the effort and additional investment (European Parliament 1976a, 56, 8), an MEP more familiar with the issue, nuclear lobbyist and Social Democratic West German MEP Gerhard Flämig, underlined that such plants would be prohibitively expensive. Their locations would be uneconomically far away from centres of consumption. Moreover such plants would create all kinds of new technical problems and technical and environmental risks regarding ground- and seawater (European Parliament 1976a, 39).

4.3. Acceptance in democracy: the ambiguous role of information and participation

The debate about the role of participation and information as instruments to obtain public acceptance for the transition to nuclear power was characterised by ambiguity. On the one hand, the norms of democracy – constitutive of the self-understanding of the MEPs and the project of European integration (Rittberger 2007) – required participation in decisions about nuclear megaprojects and their siting. As Liberal Italian MEP Augusto Premoli argued: ‘In the pluralist democratic systems which we enjoy in the Community countries, it is unthinkable to impose on a particular population group the need to live near nuclear power stations’ (European Parliament 1976a, 42).

At the same time, in line with the what STS researchers have described as the ‘knowledge deficit model’ (Simis et al. 2016), many MEPs claimed that the critique of nuclear energy was based on a lack of knowledge and reason. Thus, they felt they did not have to take the critics of nuclear power and their critique seriously. ‘A well-informed public will not wish to oppose objectively justified needs’ the German Social democratic MEP Willi Müller aptly summarised this assumption that prevented any attempts at serious engagement with the critics right from the start. Similarly, the Italian MEP Luigi Noè argued that ‘participation is desirable’ but maintained that ‘an adequate level of knowledge’ was a precondition for ‘participation’. According to him, those working in nuclear establishments ‘familiar with its problems’ (European Parliament 1976a, 57), were the most reliable in providing information. That insider views might be one-sided and shaped by interests, as nuclear critics tended to argue, Noè did not problematise.

Based on such views about a lack of public knowledge, most MEPs stressed the need for more public information, advocating a ‘a rational and complete information policy’ (European Parliament 1976a, 55), as MEP Müller argued. A number of national governments in Europe already pursued information campaigns along these lines (Nelkin and Pollak 1977; Meyer 2019, 94–9; Popp and Lang 1977), to debate with but ultimately to convince citizens of the benefits of nuclear power. Rapporteur Walz demanded ‘information campaigns, at national and Community levels’, in order ‘to bring the importance of this technology home to the general public’ (European Parliament 1976a, 37). Similar to Tindemans, Walz stressed the role the EC should have in such an information campaign, and MEP Premoli explained the underlying rationale, based on federalist idealism: citizens would consider the European Commission a much more credible and independent source of information than national governments (European Parliament 1976a, 42).

British but also non-British MEPs – such as the Danish Liberal Edele Kruchow – presented the British authorities’ information and public participation techniques³ as a model to follow. British practice was associated with the absence of protest and general support of nuclear energy (European Parliament 1976a, 44, 51). Again, only MEP Hamilton questioned this assessment. Unlike the other MEPs who suggested that more information would convince them of the benefits of nuclear power, Hamilton argued that there was a dearth of information on nuclear risks among common people in the UK (European Parliament 1976a, 63). He thus turned the conventional argument on its head, claiming instead that at least in the UK, ignorance contributed to tacit acceptance.

Many MEPs emphasised the need for ‘rational’ information, suggesting that critics were simply driven by emotions: ‘the less knowledge they have on the subject, the more their passions are aroused’, as for instance, MEP John Evans put it (European Parliament 1976a, 53). Such dismissive claims about the ‘emotional irrationality’ (European Parliament 1976a, 64) of nuclear critics, attributing their opposition to a psychological condition, were a recurrent pattern of argument not only in the EP. As a strategy to medicalise and delegitimise the critique of nuclear power, it has been part of pro-nuclear arguments internationally since the 1950s (Rucht 1980, 79; Hamblin 2006, 736). In the EP plenary, only nuclear critic Hamilton rejected such insinuations, holding that concerns regarding nuclear power were in fact shared by ‘highly qualified scientists, highly qualified technologists’ (European Parliament 1976a, 64).

In many ways, most MEPs apparently viewed information and participation merely as instruments to achieve acceptance, rather than a serious commitment to the norms of democracy or ‘sustainability’.

5. Conclusions

What can we learn from these conflicts and debates for the ongoing ‘sustainability transition’ and the megaprojects it involves? First, since energy planning is a long-term activity, planning decisions on energy megaprojects taken in the 1970s have lasting impacts on the structure of European energy systems. Path dependencies and sunk costs make change difficult (van der Vleuten and Raven 2006; van der Vleuten and Högselius 2012). Thus, past visions and expectations about future energy needs (Ehrhardt 2012), and past narratives and controversies about different energy sources, their risks and promises, continue to influence our present energy infrastructure (Häfner 2019), and attempts to deal with the lasting legacy of nuclear waste (Brunnengräber and Di Nucci 2019; Kasperski and Storm 2020) – another important heritage of those past decisions.

Secondly, some 45 years after the debates analysed above, nuclear power and other energy megaprojects still involve problems of public acceptance. Strikingly, the arguments have hardly changed: The massive growth of nuclear energy megaprojects in the 1970s’ transition to nuclear power was justified by what I analysed as ‘sustainability’ arguments avant la lettre, namely safeguarding the environment, social and economic needs, with a view to the future and global justice. In the face of the oil crisis, perceived as a crisis of energy security, policymakers’ time horizons narrowed. As in many of the crises thereafter, short-term socio-economic concerns outweighed environmental ones. Existing development paths and technologies – ideas of progress and modernity, rather than ‘return to riding bicycles’ as the epitome of a yesterday’s world (Limmer and Zumbrägel 2020) – informed expectations about the future and thus the rationale of action. And the Promethean belief in future technological fixes for the externalities of current technologies, such as nuclear waste, remains an attractive political argument in energy debates, lately revived by the advocates of Small Modular Reactors (Kaijser et al. 2021, 292–5).

The European federalist idealism displayed by the MEPs advocating European solutions to the acceptance problem of a transition considered indispensable feels a bit outdated. However, given the level of integration today, European (Union) solutions have become standard instruments in responding to European crises (Anderson 2021). The public controversy in early 2022 on the European Commission’s taxonomy (European Union 2020) of gas and nuclear as ‘sustainable’ sources of energy further illustrates the continued relevance of the European Union in energy policy (Economist 2022).

With regard to public information and participation, most MEPs speaking in 1976 found it difficult to accept the legitimacy and seriousness of opposing views. In the EP, this majority view changed over time as the critique of nuclear power became more of a mainstream position in the 1980s. However, building trust through open-ended and honest public engagement (Lehtonen, Cotton, and Kasperski 2021), without representing the other side as purely emotional, remains a problem in particular of the nuclear sector, as an expert study commissioned by Euratom after Fukushima highlighted (European Commission 2014). This is a lesson that many proponents of nuclear, but also those of other megaprojects, convinced of the benefits of their projects, find difficult to learn.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Edele Kruchow refused to vote in favour of the resolution’s articles that considered nuclear energy necessary (European Parliament 1976a, 43–4); this echoed the debate in Denmark where eventually in September 1976 government decided not to authorise nuclear plants until the waste issue was resolved (Meyer 2019, 84).

2 Ironically, neither of these two plants was built, but a third plant, Cattenom, with four reactors, upstream in France (Tauer 2012).

3 Two of the major public debates on the expansion of the Windscale reprocessing plant took place in December 1975 and January 1976. These events probably raised MEPs’ attention for British activities (Bolter 1979), too.