Social sciences and nuclear energy practitioners: Exploring Spanish perceptions and expectations of interdisciplinary work in a transdisciplinary world

Abstract

The challenges of energy transitions, as reflected in current energy-sector research agendas, call for greater multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity, with particular emphasis on greater contribution from the social sciences. While recommendations abound on how to strengthen the role of the social sciences in energy-sector research, there is little empirical evidence on how the attitudes of energy-sector professionals might facilitate or constrain such interaction. This article helps to fill the gap by presenting the results of an exploratory survey into how nuclear-sector professionals in Spain perceive the potential role of the social sciences in this sector. The large majority of the respondents had little experience of collaboration with social scientists, and the tradition of interdisciplinarity remains weak in this sector. For many professionals, enhancing public acceptance of nuclear energy is the main potential function of the social sciences. Although the road towards true interdisciplinarity is still long, the surveyed Spanish professionals showed true interest in greater openness, dialogue, and inclusion of the social sciences, and believed in the possibility of breaking the structural inertia that they saw as one of the obstacles to cross-disciplinary collaboration in the sector. According to the surveyed professionals, social scientists could play a useful role as organisers of deliberative interdisciplinary processes. However, the portrayal by some of the surveyed professionals of social scientists as biased and anti-nuclear calls for self-reflection among social science scholars. Future research should expand the number of countries analysed, and could usefully explore cross-country differences in the opinions of nuclear-sector professionals, by applying representative sampling methods.