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The NIMBY syndrome: its significance in the history of the nuclear debate in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Ian Welsh
Ian Welsh
Affiliation:
Faculty of Economics and Social Science, The University of the West of England, Bristol, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY.
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Extract

The labelling of public opposition to nuclear developments in Britain as a ‘not in my back yard’ (NIMBY) response gained widespread credibility in the 1980s. In particular the term gained wide usage to describe the public's response to the search for suitable nuclear waste disposal sites. This paper will briefly consider the events leading up to the emergence of the term NIMBY assessing key avenues through which it found its way into the realm of public discourse. The significance of various models of the public understanding of science, subsumed within official thinking on NIMBY, will be explored. Within the context of the nuclear debate it will be argued that these existing models do not adequately deal with a number of issues. These include the significance of dominant symbolic representations of nuclear science and also the relationship between opposition and locality.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 15 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1993

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References

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94 The work of the Environment Select Committee directed attention towards immediate and simplistic measures such as generous financial compensation to local residents. The Chairman, Sir Hugh Rossi, even considered that without such payments ‘the NIMBY syndrome will prevail’, transcript of conference ‘Nuclear Power: Restoring Public Confidence?’, University of Lancaster, 9 May 1986. This was one of the key ways in which limited academic conceptions of locality found their way into public discourse.