“Remember There’s Nothing Secret About a Nuclear Power Station”: Institutional Communication on Invisible Environmental Risks in British TV Footage (1956-1982).

At the start of the British nuclear programmes, most technological choices were made away from public scrutiny and behind closed doors. Early nuclear decision making was backed by the rationale that British citizens lacked technical and specialised knowledge to make informed decisions on nuclear questions. The emergence of public debates on nuclear risks was thus greatly hindered by limited public communication. However, this technocratic decision-making model came under fire in the wake of the 1957 Windscale accident and the rise of environmental opposition throughout the 1960s. The environmental risks of contamination, pollution, and radiation became a source of heightened tension between industry and anti-nuclear activists. This paper aims at exploring the impact of the rise in public environmental anxiety on state-sponsored television footage released between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Analysing television footage helps identify the institutional communication strategies used to negotiate the British public’s understanding and acceptance of nuclear-induced environmental risks between 1956 and 1982. This analysis suggests that the industry’s communication approach was only cosmetically altered by this changing context. It contends that, if these cultural productions participated in constructing a more nuanced depiction of nuclear risks, they nonetheless remained based on the idea that citizen opposition mostly reflected deficiencies in scientific literacy.