Short abstract:

We highlight the influence of the nuclear sector over national climate, industrial and energy strategies. Studying the case of France characterized by a 50 years old support to nuclear energy, we show how this hegemony played against other low carbon solutions such as carbon capture and storage.

Long abstract:

The communication highlights the influence of the nuclear sector over national climate, industrial and energy strategies. Studying the case of France characterized by a 50 years old transpartisan support to nuclear energy (providing today 60% of the French power), we show how this hegemony played against other low carbon solutions. Analyzing the development of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), we show the competition between the oil and gas sector and the nuclear sector over decarbonation strategies. Through the analysis of discourses and practices about CCUS in France since the 1970s, we develop 3 arguments. Firstly, many members of the French elite demonstrate a certain self-satisfaction over the level of decarbonisation and energy independence related to nuclear power. We argue that the choice of nuclear power disincentivized further action toward decarbonation until the late 2010s. Secondly, decarbonation strategy is mostly addressed rather disconnected from other issues such as reindustrialization and energy independence. We argue that decisions are still often made in a classic State-centred technocratic problem-management style. Third, the promoters of CCUS are marginal actors because the French energy transition is mostly steered toward electrification using large part of nuclear energy making it less relevant to support “bridging” technology such as CCUS but also weakening industrial sectors with carbon emissions unrelated to energy consumption. We conclude on how post carbon transformations are an occasion for the French government to double-down on nuclear energy and to forget the attempt made in 2015 to move away from nuclear energy.

Short abstract:

Relying on a grey literature review and interviews with experts involved the design of a novel SMR concept, the present paper tries to unwrap the key promise narratives upheld by SMR proponents and the extent to which these narratives are actually endorsed by experts who design SMRs.

Long abstract:

In the ongoing quest for flexible, cheap, and decarbonized solutions for future energy networks, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are increasingly publicized as a compelling option for future nuclear energy generation. While promoters, such as SMR vendors or international nuclear organizations, do publicly advertise the techno-scientific promises of SMRs, there is still scant evidence that such promises are actually shared among the scientists and engineers who actively develop such novel reactor designs. As such, which are the main promise narratives upheld by SMR proponents? And to what extent are these narratives endorsed by experts involved in the design of SMRs?

A literature review including white papers, commercial factsheets, and technical reports published by SMR proponents was conducted to identify the main categories of promise narratives mobilized by these actors. We then confronted these narratives with the expectations of 25 European experts actively involved the design of a sodium-fast SMR concept.

Far from the solutionism (Pfotenhauer, 2022) displayed in SMR proponent’s promise narratives, preliminary results indicate that interviewees do entertain some degree of skepticism regarding the publicly projected benefits of SMRs in terms of costs, safety, or public acceptance. Yet, according to interviewees, SMRs do embody the promise of a future nuclear revival. In their perspective, going small would allow to attract investors and scale-up the production of small, cheap, yet less efficient nuclear systems. This would allow to gradually build back lost nuclear competences that are required to build large reactors, which are considered the preferred option for nuclear energy generation.

Short abstract:

This digital ethnography examines the online work of an African government’s nuclear energy regulatory agency. It investigates how the agency engages with its digital ‘publics’ and, in doing so, builds trust in nuclear science and safety in anticipation of expanding connections to nuclear power.

Long abstract:

Across sub-Saharan Africa, numerous countries are showing increasing interest in nuclear power as a response to rapidly increasing energy demands and the compounding impacts of the climate emergency. While nuclear power plants often appear as (post-carbon?) prestige projects, nuclear medicine brings radionuclides to more everyday scales. As cancer emerges as a significant African public health problem and health care facilities work to expand their nuclear diagnostic and treatment capabilities, nuclear medicine brings radiation – and its possibilities of health and harm – to ordinary Africans. With nuclear technology expanding across the continent, African regulators translate science and policy into action, and mediate the evidence of nuclear science for ordinary citizens. Through digital ethnography, this paper examines the online work of an East African government’s nuclear energy regulatory agency. On social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, these nuclear energy regulators communicate scientific knowledge and agency activities. Translating scientific knowledge is a regulatory requirement, one that attempts to build trust in science and also government regulatory capacity. This paper considers what new types of civic engagement/participation/politics are made possible as African nuclear energy regulators and ordinary citizens interact online. It asks what modalities, strategies, and relationship management techniques do African nuclear energy regulators use in online spaces? In anticipation of nuclear power, how are African nuclear energy regulators building and engaging with digital ‘publics’ and how does this work translate into real world trust in nuclear science and regulatory capacity?

Short abstract:

Contradicting truths about post-fossil futures are often at the root of political conflict over the energy transition. This paper contrasts present hegemonic pro nuclear truths to truths from which resistance emerges at both the local, personal and the national environmentalist level.

Long abstract:

In the Netherlands, a combination of right wing politics, political turmoil around wind parks on land and the hope for a seemingly painless solution for the uknowns of the climate crisis, have opened up new avenues for nuclear power. The Dutch government is now planning to build two new nuclear power stations next to the only one still running in the Netherlands. This has led to a revival of the anti-nuclear movement, both locally by inhabitants who fear the nuclearization of their surroundings and nationally by environmentalists.

Contested truths play a very important role in the present political fight over this project in the form of contradictory imaginaries of a fossil-free future. This paper analyses how the anti-nuclear resistance frames future imaginaries in contrast to hegemonic state led future imaginaries that see nuclear power stations as something we cannot do without in a future without fossil fuels and with growing energy needs.

Doing so, it juxtaposes two scales of resistance: the personal and intimate level of local inhabitants and the national level of the anti-nuclear movement. Local inhabitants fear the everyday realities of their rural land being industrialized and their tiny village being overrun by workmen and trucks. The national anti-nuclear movement has their old worries about nuclear waste, safety, and proliferation to which they now add how building new nuclear power stations make for bad climate policy, while the environmental social movement largely tries to avoid discussion of nuclear energy.

Short abstract:

Narratives on Chernobyl tend to hinge on either 'fear' or 'longing.' While the former are cosmopolitan and 'pop,' the latter are place-specific and subaltern. This paper argues that considered vis-à-vis each other, both of these cast a revealing light on life in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss two narrative and emotional repertoires about the Chornobyl disaster. The first repertoire is characterised by motifs of fear and horror, while the second, much less known, is replete with expressions of longing and nostalgia. Both narratives try to make sense of a catastrophe the wider implications of which remain staggering even after more than three decades. Only the horror narrative, however, has gained currency in global consciousness, entering the domain of popular culture. The nostalgia story, by contrast, remains confined to the villages dotting the countryside near the power plant and the Chornobyl evacuee diaspora, i.e., the communities most severely affected by the accident's direct local ramifications. The discrepancy between the two repertoires unveils a gap between what might be termed ‘metropolitan’ and ‘subaltern’ construals of the 1986 disaster.

This contribution investigates the "place" of existential dread and sensationalised horror in pop-culture appropriations of Chornobyl, while the of emotional dimensions of longing and loss will be explored by engaging with the affective, representational, and performative repertoires of Chornobyl-stricken communities and their diasporic offshoots. Much of the ethnographic data discussed in this paper hails from the ‘Third Zone,’ the still-inhabited, impoverished rural territory at the border of the near-deserted ‘Exclusion Zone’ in northern Ukraine.

Although the two repertoires palpably differ in their articulations the post-Chornobyl condition, it is worth considering them conjointly as both of them reveal something illuminating about life in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.

Short abstract:

This ethnographic paper explores contrasting landscapes dynamics around the nuclear fuel reprocessing site in La Hague, France. It will also discuss experimental workshops designed to imagine the future, as part of a research project focused on landscapes, nuclear realities and the future.

Long abstract:

With the French President Emmanual Macron declaring his commitment for an enduring and expanded nuclear industry in 2022, the nuclear fuel reprocessing site in La Hague, a French region in Normandy, is faced with decisive and critical next steps to match this ambition. With the industry and the state emphasising the sustainability of the nuclear sector and its virtuous “closed” fuel cycle, critical campaigners activists denounce this cycle as a “myth”, an irreversible faith in technological promises professed in an era of aging infrastructures.

In this context, I discuss preliminary findings of a comparative research project focusing on landscapes, nuclear realities, and the future, and which takes as one of its sites of interest La Hague. I draw on six months of fieldwork (August 2023 to February 2024) in the area to interrogate the (im)possibilities of transforming a region fashioned in lockstep with a dominant nuclear industry for the past sixty years. What ecological, political and social concerns intertwine in this nuclear landscape? What are the contrasting visions for the future of La Hague? What temporal and ethical do these visions take root in? I will review data from the first part of my fieldwork, preparing for a further six months in which I will conduct experimental workshops with interlocutors. These workshops will serve to untangle contrasting landscape dynamics and experiment with projecting ourselves into the future together – and identify (im)possibilities for a nuclearized peninsula.

Short abstract:

This paper explores how people conceptualise desirable energy futures as opposed to likely ones and how we can can consciously move towards these futures via deliberative methods.

Long abstract:

The climate and ecological crises (CEC) demands solutions now but these solutions will have a long tail and effect into the future. Thus, the CEC is an issue of both intra and intergenerational justice. In this context, nuclear power is offered as a ‘green’ solution. Yet the vast majority of nuclear power enabled states have not dealt with their accumulated nuclear waste, which itself will have 200,000 to one-million year radiotoxicity. At the same time, nuclear power and wastes sites are specifically located often in economically and geographically peripheral places, thus loading the socioenvironmental costs onto minorities. Thus, nuclear power and waste are also aspects of intra and intergenerational justice. This paper explores these issues using the backcasting approach, which in contrast to much work done on projections or scenarios of the future that use predictable or likely assumptions, instead focuses on normatively desirable futures. The overall aim is to explore democratically and deliberatively how people think about and represent desirable futures. In these workshops participants will firstly explore likely futures usings a range of support questions, narrative tools and computer simulations. Next they will imagine and outline desirable futures with again support questions and narrative tools, while also filling in an infographic. Finally, using the narratice tools and support questions participants will consider what would need to change moving backward to achieve this future.