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When the Fukushima accident occurred in March 2011, Finland was at the height of a nuclear renaissance, with the Government's decision-in-principle in 2010 to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors. This article examines the nuclear power debate in Finland after Fukushima. We deploy the concepts of (de)politicisation and hyperpoliticisation in the analysis of articles in the country's main newspaper. Our analysis indicates that Finnish nuclear exceptionalism manifested in the safety-related depoliticising and the nation's prosperity-related hyperpoliticisation arguments of the pro-nuclear camp. The anti-nuclear camp used politicisation strategies, such as economic arguments, to show the unprofitability of nuclear power. The Fukushima accident had a clear effect on Finnish nuclear policy: the government programme of 2011 excluded the nuclear new build. However, in 2014 the majority of Parliament again supported nuclear power. Hence, the period after Fukushima until 2014 could be described as continued but undermined loyalty to nuclear power.

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Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the related social positions and responsibilities. The way uncertainty and its role in the policy process are understood is crucial. For some precaution is a flawed concept, to be accommodated to the current expert-based cooperative scheme. For others it is a major innovation requiring a rearrangement of the latter. Precautionary policies may evolve in different directions. They may either strengthen the role of means-ends rationality, increasing people's dependence on expert knowledge and shrinking the opportunity and scope of public debate or, on the contrary, enhance the role of value-commitments, leading to a decline in the legitimacy of established hierarchies and an intensification of intractable controversies. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.