Dismantling Superphenix

In 1996, after only eleven years of operation, the Superphenix fast breeder reactor was shut down. The following year, the socialist government of Lionel Jospin decided in favour of a permanent shutdown and immediate decommissioning. A fierce controversy ensued, where various actors questioned the technical rationale and local implications of such a decision. The local press has given accounts of the controversy. This paper is based on a corpus of 337 articles published between 1997 and 2013 and presents the results of a text-metric analysis performed with two freewares, Iramuteq and TXM. Quantitative and qualitative analyses substantiate three dimensions of the public debate around the plant - the debate as conflict, the debate as polemic and the debate as controversy. After the decommissioning was announced, the number of articles devoted to the plant increased dramatically. They illustrate the collective but variegated definitions of the 'problem' put forward by social actors. By 2000, however, the controversy ran out of steam: the local press changed its focus from the political and socio-economic dimensions of plant closure to the more technical dimension of decommissioning, casting aside the territorial aspects of the disappearance of a large energy infrastructure. (authors)