Storia ambientale dell’energia nucleare. Gli anni della contestazione.

For more than half a century, nuclear energy, both for military and civil uses, has outlined one of the most controversial and debated political, scientific as well as cultural issues: A long-lasting and often violent dispute, tragically opened by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has weighed heavily upon all the different phases of the Cold War, up to the dawn of the new century and beyond. Making use of a wide variety of archive sources, the book aims at offering one of the first accounts about nuclear energy from the perspective of the environmental history studies. It focuses mainly on that particular historical period which began with the social protests of 1968 and was followed by the oil crisis (1973) and economic turmoil of the Seventies. However, it should not be ignored this “age” was also distinguished by the spread of ecological sciences as well as the emergence of massive environmental public pressures. Laying emphasis on the Italian background, the monograph considers those geological and environmental concerns which involved debates about industrial applications of nuclear technology in the post-oil-crisis backdrop. The work focuses on a period during which the public controversy on nuclear energy was not yet affected by the catastrophic accidents of Černobyl’ and Fukushima, nevertheless it reveals how conflicts, contradictions and divisions were already subverting both science and society