Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

92 Chapter 4
– The government and the electricity sector, in ‘tacit’ co-operation had a
strong belief in nuclear energy, but both actor groups could not
understand that society at large did not share that belief. More
importantly they did not acknowledge that these beliefs were based on
certain mental models, in their case framing the risk issue in rational
models of calculation.
Several moments are crucial in the story of nuclear energy:
– Although government efforts were focussed on developing a national
industry the electricity sector decides to buy foreign technology, this
accelerated the political discussion regarding the grip of the national
government on the electricity sector;
– Due to increasing societal resistance the government was more or less
forced to initiate a broad societal discussion. Although the outcomes
made clear that there was no basis for further nuclear power plants,
Dutch government still felt that nuclear energy was inevitable;
– The disaster at Chernobyl is more or less decisive in ending the future of
nuclear energy in the Netherlands.
Some overall observations can be made:
– The government R&D strategy was largely top-down oriented, and did
structure some of the R&D efforts through RCN and Neratoom, but
government policy was not able to align various actors in a shared course
for nuclear energy research and development;
– The government expectations regarding nuclear energy were far too
optimistic, first of all regarding the potential for building a national
industry, secondly the belief that competencies could be built up, and
thirdly the idea that government could decide what the market needed;
the Dutch government in that period sees technology as controllable and
malleable;
– A technocratic process not well embedded in society, with some
fundamental new features (here the issue of risk), is in this case not
endorsed by society;
– Society in the fifties was fundamentally different from society in the
seventies: environmental concerns were spreading, and societal groups
were voicing their beliefs. These changes were not translated into the
decision-making processes on nuclear energy;
– Despite a changing perspective towards energy saving and renewable
energy dominant actors within the electricity system still had high
expectations of nuclear energy until after Chernobyl;
– In the fifties through eighties an influential social network was formed
around nuclear energy, and was rather dominant in various councils
related to electricity. Verbong (2005: 174) argues that this network was
still influential throughout the nineties and is part of the explanation for