Nuclear power resistance in Europe

Nuclear power was originally a by-product of nuclear weapons production and had during the fifties and sixties inherited its status as a technological spearhead, as a kind of compromise between the peace movement and state leaders. In 1973, most industrialized states had large-scale nuclear power programs underway, and with OPEC’s oil price increases this year, these programs were given high priority. The nuclear investments involved the establishment of dubious industrial complexes in new locations with well-organized local communities, and local action groups were formed throughout the industrialized world, in proven environmental ways, to protect the integrity of the local community and resource base.

What distinguished the nuclear power resistance from previous local environmental groups was that it could organize itself nationally and globally, based on a well-established identity and with a developed language. In part it was a question of time and maturity within the environmental movement theme, but in part it was also because the question was so big. The protests no longer concerned individual environmentally damaging factories or projects, they concerned the largest and most central industrial policy project in the entire system center. The actors were no longer just scattered local communities, but it was united by the system-critical youth culture, which had acquired numerous political skills since it failed to provide guidance to the American anti-war movement of the sixties. Their basic attitudes – defense of local spheres of life against the bureaucratic elites, and opposition to the Fordist culture of consumption in the name of the utopian collective – would to a large extent be united within the movement.

The tension between the two categories – local, and counter-culture – and the ability on both sides to handle it, would also to some extent determine the success of the movement.

The trigger for the breadth of the movement was the Swedish Riksdag’s decision in 1973 to postpone the nuclear power program, a decision that has become necessary since several local communities with the support of the specifically Swedish municipal planning monopoly refused to accept nuclear power plants. According to Björn Eriksson, this decision resulted in a general opposition to the entire nuclear power project and not just specific included sub-projects for the first time appeared legitimate, not only in Sweden.

However, the first steps were taken towards national resistance coordination in France, the country with the most far-reaching nuclear power program. There, the trade union center CFDT decided to support the local protests as early as 1974, and the youth movements of the big cities joined them wholeheartedly by organizing mass demonstrations. But the promising resistance was broken in 1977 due to inability to communicate between the participating parties. When the local opposition to a planned reactor in Malville in Val d’Isère was at its height, the national system-critical youth culture organized a mass demonstration against the reactor plans whose dominant message became ”violence or not violence is up to each participant individually”. The local community refused to support this politically meaningless demonstration, which the police could therefore easily put down, by violence. Confidence could then never be rebuilt, and France still has the world’s most far-reaching nuclear program.

The nuclear resistance in Sweden had greater success. There, as mentioned, the local opposition to new establishments had won as early as 1973 and the contentious issue therefore became the entire program’s existence. Without any strong organization and mainly coordinated by annual demonstrations against the nuclear power plant in Barsebäck, the movement could keep the issue alive without bringing it to any decisive level, until in 1978 it began to push for a referendum, a demand that proved so strong that all political parties not only accepted it but also refused to line up for the original program. As is well known, the environmental movement lost the vote, according to its own analysis, because it was too dominated by the tactical considerations of the nuclear-critical parties, but the major expansion was stopped.

The movement had the greatest impact in what was then West Germany. There was no municipal planning monopoly, and opposition to new facilities carried the mobilizations to the end. The German movement did much better than the French movement in bridging cultural differences between local resistance, sometimes consisting of very conservative farmers, and the system-critical youth cultures of the big cities. Not infrequently, they helped each other with violent, illegal actions.
The farmers of Wyhl in southern Baden set the pattern when in February 1975 they occupied the land where the authorities had planned to build a reactor. Eventually, they received help from young people from nearby towns. Around the place, which was evicted and reoccupied several times, a resistance village was built with, among other things, a popular high school where the famers rediscovered their traditions from the fifteenth century peasant uprisings.

The continued dynamics of the movement consisted of demonstrations and occupations of new reactor buildings and other nuclear power plants – Brokdorf near Hamburg from 1976, Gorleben, Grohnde and Kalkar from 1977, Wackersdorf in Bavaria in 1978. Focus on occupations, usually carried out mainly by non-locals, tended to polarize the movement. For some, the confrontations with an increasingly repressive state became an end in themselves. For others, peaceful infiltration into state structures through ”green parties” became an equally important end in itself. What kept the movement together was that locals could sometimes intervene in the process and take over the hegemony of the movement again, most notably when the farmers in the Gorleben area occupied the test wells for the new nuclear waste warehouse there in 1979, poured pig shit over the business and founded the ”Free Republic of Wendland”.

In the shadow of the nuclear resistance, the German environmental movement became the most dynamic in the world during the seventies. Its occupation strategy was also directed at airfield expansions such as in Frankfurt and at the shortage of housing, most prevalent in Berlin. An anti-commercial counterculture spread far beyond the youth generation and found expression in upswing for both cooperative production and home weaving.

The German nuclear resistance was quite successful. Of more than a hundred nuclear power plants, only just under twenty could be built. And the global resistance to nuclear power led to the stagnation of the nuclear industry after 1980.

Reading
Elim Papadakis: The green movement in West Germany, St. Martin’s Croom Helm 1984