ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the many newly discovered public links to nuclear power will extend to decommissioning, and how the relationships will influence the level and cost of future nuclear contributions to our energy supply. It shows that the actual contribution that nuclear power will make is linked to the people, to what they want, to what they perceive, and to what they fear. The difference with nuclear power is that the level of effort and skill usually presumed sufficient to identify the public implications of new technologies is not enough to understand atomic power’s long public reach. In some places the decommissioning decisions will result in recapturing a site’s non-nuclear past. The special irony is that, in all the papers, discussions, symposia, laws, and policies produced to date on the theme of nuclear decommissioning, little has been said about the social impacts, the social connections, the consequences for the societal environment as a consequence of decommissioning methods and decisions.
