ABSTRACT
The Croatian small municipality of Dvor is located in south central Croatia. The war circumstances during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia heavily affected this part of the country which was populated mostly by a Serbian population. The whole territory around Dvor was occupied by a Serb minority for almost five years until Croatian forces conducted a military operation after which majority of Serbian residents left. Some of them decided to return till the end of the 1990s. Since the mid-1990s, the municipality of Dvor as well as its surrounding area started their socio-economic recovery which is progressing very slowly. Nowadays the municipality has 5570 inhabitants that are distributed through 64 small settlements (villages). Croatia built the first and only nuclear power plant in the former Yugoslavia as a joint venture with the Republic of Slovenia. The nuclear power station began working in 1983. According to the agreement between Republic of Slovenia and Republic of Croatia, the nuclear waste was to be jointly considered once the containers surrounding the nuclear power plant became full. This meant that initially, the Republic of Croatia would have to find the way of how and where to store the nuclear waste. The first information about the possible location for disposing of the nuclear waste around the municipality of Dvor began to appear during the 1990s. But it was a bit later that the first studies on environmental impact were conducted. However, all the processes regarding the disposal of nuclear waste in this area were conducted far from the eyes of local citizens with only sporadic and partial information being given to the interested public. With the aim of finding out hidden and visible processes that occurred around this development in the municipality of Dvor, research was carried out among key stakeholders. The special interest in conducting this research was to consider the actual and potential interest and influence that social work as profession could have on the whole situation and what lessons could be learned for the future development of nuclear waste disposal processes.
