Aligning subjective and objective ‘truth’ in nuclear waste management: on the new role of emotions in contemporary repository siting policy

Abstract

To site repositories for spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste, nuclear waste management (NWM) actors need public support. In the past, NWM actors have tried to build public support by conveying what they believe are the ‘objective facts’ of repository technologies, hence countering public prejudices and fears on the subject. Thus, while the public has been represented as emotional by implementers, implementers have portrayed themselves as guided by mere unemotional reason, facts and ‘truth’. Faced with continued public opposition, however, implementers have now adopted a different approach that explicitly addresses public emotions. In this article, we explore contemporary siting policy as a case of ‘discursive projection’ of public emotions – that is, not as a ‘true’ account of public emotions but rather as indicative of implementers’ understanding of public emotions, of that which is rational, and that which is not. In the analysis, we understand policy as an ‘emotion regime’ that establishes which feelings are compatible – and which are not – with the ‘truth’ of repositories for spent nuclear fuel. Understanding the relation between emotions and reason from an emotional-sociological perspective, we show how the emotion regime in policy has been transformed from being a clear-cut case of the conventional approach to an at-first-glance radical understanding of the relation between rationality and emotion. The analysis shows which emotions are described as a threat to reason and which are described as aiding implementers’ reason and rationality, hence which emotions are idealised – and which are rejected.