ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a comparative general accounting of distinctive societies and polities in their social journeys towards and, since the Fukushima emergency and at least in Germany's case, away from support for nuclear power generation today and into the future. Individuals, civil organisations of myriad character and agendas, as well as national governments, mass communications media, international organisations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear industry representative bodies combine in complex ways to influence and guide the future direction of the world's national nuclear energy industries. On its widest scale, the socio-political significance of nuclear power is most easily understood in the context of public recognition and acceptance of new and innovative technologies. In the case of energy derived from nuclear fission in particular, public acceptance has been mediated through several sets of discourses, many of them controversial and the subject of social and political conflict and disputation.
