If a public hearing into a proposed new nuclear power plant were merely a search for information, then the present Inquiry into plans to build Britain's first pressurized water reactor (PWR) would surely be judged a success. The detailed evidence and testimony on the station's safety, economics, and environmental impact already forms a mountain of paper several hundred feet high-according to the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), which plans to build and operate the plant. Moreover, the&Inquiry still has a long way to go-its first year dealt comprehensively only with economics, and presentation of evidence on the safety and local impact of the station will take much of 1984. The conclusions of inquiries of this kind are, of course, only partly based on information. Something as potentially acrimonious as a nuclear power plant proposal typically puts inquiry assessors in the difficult position of having to balance social and technological manifestos, often inspired by powerful political ideologies, with the tedious technical realities presented by emotionless engineers. More by coincidence than design, the Sizewell Inquiry (named for the Suffolk coastal village, deep in Benjamin Britten country, where the plant would be built) may actually achieve that balance. Even though the Inquiry will not
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Richard O. Davies (1984) studied this question.