How does a public problem disappear from political and media agendas? The accident in the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011 was considered as a major catastrophe and immediately became a public problem claimed by political actors and NGOs as questioning the nuclear energy policies across a number of European countries.
However, five years after, the accident has largely disappeared from European political agendas and obtains very little media attention, compared to the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
This Paper contributes to explaining this phenomenon by studying the mechanisms through which transnational nuclear safety regulators, in cooperation with international organizations such as the IAEA, have been able to appropriate the Fukushima accident.
Based on a comparative study of the political and media agendas in France, Germany and the UK, as well as the use of ethnographic data from the transnational organizations of nuclear safety regulation, we will show how these actors have succeeded in defining the catastrophe as a problem for nuclear safety, by displacing the issue into the European-wide procedure of the “stress-tests”, which can be controlled and tested through their regular instruments.
Although this process is translated differently into diverse national settings, it contributes to weaken nuclear safety as a potential vector in the public debate, thereby restraining the range of means of contestation regarding nuclear energy and limiting the pressure to take a political decision in reaction to the accident.
