Dairy farming on La Cotentin Peninsula

The general debate of nuclear energy use was pursued on worldwide and national scales and, both in France and abroad, nuclear energy and La Hague were often synonyms. The semantic connection is just as much an important issue for the residents as for the traditional activities of the region that found itself associated with 

At the same time, the nuclear industry also showed its capacity to influence the social, economic and political organization. For example, COGEMA, the industrial entity, on April 1 1997, could convene 48 local officials, among them the representative of the canton in the General Council, because they were also employees of the local nuclear industry. At that moment, these political representatives were (in)formed by their employer, and received information that other local representatives did not have. They became the partners of the industry more than the representatives of the French population. 

In this complicated setting, many controversies marred the establishment of industrial nuclear energy. The recent history of the area with its residents and their nuclear energy forms a complex whole like the watch that became known as the Viel affairs . 

4 Nuclear Proximity and the Epidemiological Controversies of Leukemia in La Hague 

The discursive confrontation between all these actors made it difficult to find a clear approach to the situation. The residents of North Cotentin and, in a more sensitive way, those from La Hague were confronted with a situation that combines objective reality and subjective reality that never emerges in autonomous temporalities because they opened in a strong dialectical dynamic. 

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