The Bavarian model?: modernization, environment, and landscape planning in the Bavarian nuclear power industry, 1950-1980

Abstract

Perhaps no state in the Federal Republic of Germany witnessed a more pronounced state sponsored modernization effort than Bavaria, 1950-1980. This vast transformation, particularly in the field of nuclear energy, required a continuous negotiation of landscape planning between state officials, scientists, and ordinary citizens. While ordinary Bavarians had little input in the technical or scientific aspects of the nuclear industry, they could shape the landscape policy, by offering environmental and cultural criticism on specific locations for reactors. Using material from the Bavarian State Archives (some, from the 1970s, only recently declassified), this dissertation compares the Bavarian landscape disputes over nuclear facilities in the nineteen-fifties with those featured in the widespread anti-nuclear demonstrations of the nineteen-seventies. As one of the few English language studies on the topic, this dissertation suggests considerably more continuity in landscape disputes than previous scholarship and offers a fresh look into the migration of skepticism towards the landscape use of nuclear power from political right to left over the course of thirty years.