Paper short abstract:

Nuclear power now features as one of the key components of the UK’s energy transition scheme towards a low-carbon economy. To what extent has the crisis narrative used by the Blair governments helped construct and guarantee the revival of such a controversial technology?

Paper long abstract:

Since the end of the 1990s, the UK government has been increasingly concerned with the country's future energy mix. With the anticipated end of the fossil fuel era and the still limited domestic development of renewables, the Blair governments rather quickly determined that nuclear power would be a key component of the Britain's drastic shift towards a more sustainable and low-carbon emission energy production system. However, justifying the revival of such an industry, weakened by a previous decline in state interest and irreducible concerns over its waste policy, was no easy task. To launch a nuclear renaissance, the Blair governments therefore had to engage in a thorough, modernising communication strategy around nuclear power, which entailed redefining it not as a tool of mere technological progress, but as a "necessary evil", a transitional technology into what Rifkin called "the Third Industrial Revolution". So doing, the Blair governments managed to successfully reframe nuclear power as critical for a more ecologically-modern approach to the nation's energy production system. Such reframing strategy managed to greatly defuse anti-nuclear opposition, by borrowing many of their traditional arguments, thus guaranteeing an unproblematic level of support within public opinion.

By analysing parliamentarian and political discourses during the rise in ecological and energy concerns at the turn of the 21st century, this analysis will study how the Blair governments' communication strategies and their rhetoric of crisis were instrumental in fostering political social acceptability and paving the way for today's new nuclear build.