ABSTRACT
Chernobyl cast a long shadow over public confidence in nuclear power. Peter Bunyard had concluded after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 that “nuclear power has lost its innocence — no more does the public implicitly believe officials who tell it that nuclear power is cheap, clean and safe”. Britain's House of Commons committee of inquiry on nuclear power concluded in the summer of 1986 that one lesson from Chernobyl is that “public opinion will play a much larger part in deciding the future of nuclear power than is usual with questions of science and technology”. We look in this final chapter at how public opinion over nuclear issues was affected by the accident at Chernobyl, and how Governments responded to these swings in the light of their own commitment to nuclear safety and strategies.
