Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- PART II Case studies
- 6 Patterns of resistance to new technologies in Scandinavia: an historical perspective
- 7 Henry Ford's relationship to ‘Fordism’: ambiguity as a modality of technological resistance
- 8 Resistance to nuclear technology: optimists, opportunists and opposition in Australian nuclear history
- 9 New technology in Fleet Street, 1975–80
- 10 The impact of resistance to biotechnology in Switzerland: a sociological view of the recent referendum
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
8 - Resistance to nuclear technology: optimists, opportunists and opposition in Australian nuclear history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- PART II Case studies
- 6 Patterns of resistance to new technologies in Scandinavia: an historical perspective
- 7 Henry Ford's relationship to ‘Fordism’: ambiguity as a modality of technological resistance
- 8 Resistance to nuclear technology: optimists, opportunists and opposition in Australian nuclear history
- 9 New technology in Fleet Street, 1975–80
- 10 The impact of resistance to biotechnology in Switzerland: a sociological view of the recent referendum
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Alain Touraine (Chapter 2) situates the history of social resistance to new technologies in the ‘ambiguous project of modernity, and in the long history of ideas associated with democratic control of instruments of power’. In this context, the nuclear history of Australia presents both a paradox and a possibility. Today, Australia has no civil nuclear power and no nuclear weapons. Its government participates actively in the programme of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has protested against French tests in the South Pacific, and is a keen advocate of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the last 40 years have seen a long history of nuclear optimism and opportunism, played out among conflicting political and economic interests, domestic and overseas. Has, then, ‘resistance’ to nuclear technology been successful? If so, what has made it so?
To answer this question requires a grasp of the salient features of Australia's affair with the atom. That relationship, which once embraced nuclear energy as a quintessential element in Australia's post-war development, also embraced characteristic features of resistance, operating upon a landscape well known for its contours of intellectual conservatism and radical dissent. Australia's nuclear destiny has depended, in part, upon the prospect of achieving economic nuclear power for domestic use, and advantageous terms for the sale of uranium in overseas markets. But its nuclear history has also come to reflect changing perceptions of the role that Australians wish to see their country play in the nuclear arena.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Resistance to New TechnologyNuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology, pp. 165 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995