| Summary: | This article proposes to analyze the management of environmental risks from the point of view of the relationship between the national modes of regulation and their declension at the territorial scale. The French uranium mining industry, now gone, is a heuristic example for understanding the tensions that generate a global definition of environmental policy and its local management arrangements. Despite nationwide legal framework defining the end operating procedures, many examples show that in an equivalent technical context, the intensity of conflict differs widely and is not necessarily related to the volume of ore extracted and processed. This situation reflects the legacy of an industry deployed in the context of national strategy but whose impact on territories turned out to be highly dependent on local social relationships between industrialist and local stakeholders. Three sites of equivalent importance have been compared. In the first configuration, the nature of reconversion of the site, locally considered as a continuation its history helps to protect the use of the territory. The controversy about environmental impacts is locally managed on a vigilance mode between environmental associations, the former operator and locally elected. The second configuration is characterized by a local agreement on preserving the dynamic of the industrial conversion. The third situation illustrates the judicialisation and the increase of generalization to assess the environmental damage.
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