Abstract

This article explores how nuclear disaster narratives have both been informed by and articulated collective images of risk and uncertainty since the 1980s. Drawing on ideas from classical and affective narratology that are framed by a perspective informed by the sociology of knowledge, we examine three variations of narrating nuclear disasters in different media: (1) sociologist Charles Perrow’s detailed analysis of the Three Mile Island accident in his popular science book _Normal Accidents_ (1984), (2) Svetlana Alexievich’s _Chernobyl Prayer_ (1997), a literary/journalistic account of the Chernobyl disaster that chronicles individuals’ experiences through eyewitness accounts, and (3) the television series _Chernobyl_ (2019), which, in a docufictional style, combines what is staged as an objective reconstruction of the unfolding of the disaster with subjective memories of those affected while reflecting on the incident’s larger political, scientific, and environmental contexts. We suggest that these three stories of nuclear incidents not only produce specific knowledges about the disaster in question but also address the fragility of knowledge systems and social structures as well as assessments of agency. As such, these narratives function as sites of mitigation that offer their readers/viewers certainty in times of crisis.