ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Palomares in Transition: The Role of the Accident in the New Democratic State public sphere

• In Event: The Palomares Nuclear Accident (Spain 1966) and Its International Impact

English Abstract

Following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in November 1975, Spain entered a period of political transformation from a forty-year dictatorship to a new democratic state. During the 1980s, up to seven new nuclear power plants were launched. As other scholars have shown, together with countercultural movements and other forms of ecological activism, this period witnessed the rise of a powerful anti-nuclear movement in Spain. Likewise, with the arrival of democracy, the demands of the people of Palomares for compensation and safety were reactivated. During this period, organizations such as Ecologistas en Acción and Greenpeace supported the legal, public, and political claims of the residents of Palomares.
This paper analyses the role of the Palomares accident in shaping nuclear risk perception in the Spanish public sphere and in the raise of the anti-nuclear movement. It aims to understand how Palomares influenced the dissemination and perception of nuclear risks among general audiences and how it was presented in activist forums. It will explore how Palomares appeared in the discourses related to the construction of Spanish nuclear power plants, and to the opposition to them, and how it resurfaced in public discourses when other major nuclear accidents happened, particularly Chernobyl (1986) and the Vandellòs I nuclear power plant accident in 1989.

Author

• Miquel Carandell Baruzzi, Institut d'Història de la Ciència - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona