Short abstract:

Contradicting truths about post-fossil futures are often at the root of political conflict over the energy transition. This paper contrasts present hegemonic pro nuclear truths to truths from which resistance emerges at both the local, personal and the national environmentalist level.

Long abstract:

In the Netherlands, a combination of right wing politics, political turmoil around wind parks on land and the hope for a seemingly painless solution for the uknowns of the climate crisis, have opened up new avenues for nuclear power. The Dutch government is now planning to build two new nuclear power stations next to the only one still running in the Netherlands. This has led to a revival of the anti-nuclear movement, both locally by inhabitants who fear the nuclearization of their surroundings and nationally by environmentalists.

Contested truths play a very important role in the present political fight over this project in the form of contradictory imaginaries of a fossil-free future. This paper analyses how the anti-nuclear resistance frames future imaginaries in contrast to hegemonic state led future imaginaries that see nuclear power stations as something we cannot do without in a future without fossil fuels and with growing energy needs.

Doing so, it juxtaposes two scales of resistance: the personal and intimate level of local inhabitants and the national level of the anti-nuclear movement. Local inhabitants fear the everyday realities of their rural land being industrialized and their tiny village being overrun by workmen and trucks. The national anti-nuclear movement has their old worries about nuclear waste, safety, and proliferation to which they now add how building new nuclear power stations make for bad climate policy, while the environmental social movement largely tries to avoid discussion of nuclear energy.