ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of The Windscale Public Inquiry (WPI), from the perspective of Brian Wynne’s participation in the public inquiry process. WPI was set up in the late 1970s, against its will by the British government, to publicly work out controversial issues relating to THORP, a proposed spent nuclear fuels reprocessing plant for military and civil spent nuclear fuels. Wynne shows how various elements of an environmental and scientific case against THORP and its intended succeeding developments were reframed and reinterpreted by the judicial rationality of the High Court Judge Inquiry Chair, into a report and recommendations that not only declared in favour of THORP, but promulgated the myth that an intensely controversial development threatening social disorder was decided by scientific-legal discovery, and not by political choice. This analysis draws inter alia upon Ezrahi’s historical idea of necessary (public) fictions as essential instruments of democratic political order, and poses the question: if such public fictions have been essential indefinitely, as with the particular example he both studied, acted in, and published on, then where was the pre-post-Truth era that a supposed post-Truth era necessarily implies? Wynne’s detailed ‘insider’ analysis was informed by anthropology and sociology of scientific knowledge, not only of the inquiry itself, but of its political context. It focuses on questions of how Truth, authority, and social order are achieved and maintained.
