On the basis of interviews with different actors involved in nuclear politics, and the collection of documents and publications produced by state institutions, nuclear industry organizations and NGOs, the research project identified several areas in which political change affected the most the nuclear enterprise: reforms of institutions, public engagement and public communication, national nuclear imaginaries and international openness.
From the point of view of institutional reform, the process of creating, restructuring, re-naming different bureaucracies responsible for promotion and regulation of nuclear power has continued for almost three decades. These changes paradoxically indicated the persistence of Soviet institutional legacies. The persistence manifested itself in Russia through recentralization and consolidation of nuclear institutions in late 2000s and weakened regulation. In Ukraine, Soviet legacy made it hard for the state to develop a coherent national institutional and legal framework for nuclear development and to manage its energy and technological dependence on Russia.
Public involvement has added another crucial component to nuclear governance. The political liberalization starting from the late 1980s increased the opportunities for social mobilization. Another innovation is the introduction of such formal public participatory procedures as hearings on environmental impact assessments of reactor or waste storage construction, decommissioning and operating license extension. Granted, in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine citizens’ trust in the NGOs is low and there are several obstacles that prevent the them from influencing efficiently policy-making through accepted participation procedures. However the changes mentioned above might be a game-changing element in the long run: they allow accumulation of independent activist expertise and more extensive information about industry problems, and create pressures for the industry to show somewhat greater accountability.
The potentially critical influence of the public also changed the way the nuclear industry engineers and scientists communicated with the citizens as the creation of local information centers and, more generally, new instruments and forms of communication testify. This communication became more local, more active, more consumer-oriented and aimed at separating nuclear energy from Chernobyl. Current nuclear energy promotion strategies are different from Soviet heroic-utopian depictions of the nuclear energy and its significance for the Motherland. But the patriotic and nationalistic discourse has also developed in parallel as part of the promotion of the nuclear energy. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine embarked on nation-building policies and tried to define nuclear energy development as essential to ensure the independence and grandeur of the respective nations.
But perhaps the most important aspect of political change with an impact on the governance of nuclear power is the change with regard to the international context. Nuclear industries in Russia and Ukraine became much more open to international scrutiny, regimes, and cooperation after the fall of the USSR. At the same time the international and Western regulatory and safety regimes were greatly redefined in the post-Chernobyl/post-Soviet era.
To summarize the findings of TechPolChange one can say that the persistence of Soviet legacy makes it impossible to describe the change in terms of "transition" to democratic governance of nuclear energy. However, one can observe accumulations of small changes that over time and in some circumstances these can suddenly result in a bigger shift.
