For the last two decades, studies of controversial technologies have mostly adopted a normative approach to promote the democratization of science, expertise and decision-making, with the assumption that a new, “positive” era of transformations of power relations between technoscience and society has been inaugurated. This contribution challenges the validity of such a positive assumption, arguing rather that the forms of power in key technoscientific domains have a dynamics too complex to be understood solely through an analytical grill of “good governance” or of “technical democracy”. The governmentality perspective seems more apt to tackle such complexity, as discussed in the first section. The study then focuses on a particular technoscientific domain which has been subject to almost continuous protest since the 1970s: the nuclear energy sector. I show that the institutions have quickly taken in charge the criticisms (and even rapidly transformed some of its components into a governmental tool, for a “better” management of nuclear energy), in order to renew their strategies, adjust their discourses, and reinforce the legitimacy of the overall policies, still mostly elaborated on a technocratic basis – which proves that a reflection only in terms of shift from “technocracy” (or nucleocracy) to “technical democracy” is not sufficient. The governmentality approach provides a more sophisticated analytical frame, dissecting a broad range of tools, strategies and devices destined to govern the social body and its relation to “atomic progress”. The paper suggests finally that these tools may be operational, in diverse forms, in the management of more recent contested innovations as well.