Abstract

At an event at the Protestant Academy in Loccum at the beginning of March 1980, historian Joachim Radkau gave a lecture on the "actual and non-actual controversy over nuclear power". He emphasised that the debate about nuclear energy was not only about the "real" problems of nuclear technology, but that nuclear power was in fact used to discuss a variety of other, more fundamental, i.e. "non-real" issues.1 The Bielefeld professor had been studying the development of the nuclear industry in the Federal Republic of Germany since the early 1970s and had also completed his habilitation on the subject.2 With his playful distinction, he put one of his nuclear observations in a nutshell. Nuclear power - as only its critics said from the 1970s onwards, or nuclear power, as its proponents called it - was a "public technology", a controversial form of energy supply that was used to discuss a number of central political and social conflicts.To resolve the footnote[3]

But is that actually true? Was nuclear power really controversial from the outset? Who were the supporters, where did the critics come from and what arguments did they put forward? What lines of conflict emerged? When did the issue of the disposal of spent nuclear fuel, which still concerns us today, become important? What role did the anti-nuclear protests play? And finally: What can we learn from this for possible future public protests in places where German nuclear waste is to rest forever? These questions are explored in this article in the form of a brief history of the German nuclear power controversy, which cannot be adequately understood without the international context.

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