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- Convenors:
-
Sergiu Novac
(Linköping University)
Hannah Klaubert (Linköping University, Sweden)
Sarah Glück (Federal Ministry for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management)
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- Chair:
-
Sarah Glück
(Federal Ministry for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
During the whole lifecycle of nuclear power, cultures and natures are transformed by and with it. Involved are heterogenous temporalities that permeate both natural and social orders and their convergences. We invite papers interrogating interwoven past, current, and future nuclear energy cultures.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we aim to investigate the diverse and often divergent temporalities of nuclear energy cultures. By nuclear energy cultures, we mean the socially shared meanings associated with nuclear energy, located in space and time. The term draws attention to how these collectively shared meanings emerge, are challenged, and change, and how they structure the knowledge and practice of actors, which in turn are formed around norms and values as well as materialities, technologies, and identities.
By bringing together the notions of time and culture, we want to draw attention to the processes of meaning making surrounding nuclear energy and the various actors, human and non-human, involved in them. In addition to the rough division of time into past, present, and future, which are often interwoven, other temporal elements play a role in nuclear energy cultures – such as rhythms, processes, synchronization, duration, circularity, sequences, symphonies of timings, to name only a few.
We invite both theoretical and empirical work on uranium mining, nuclear power plant construction and decommissioning processes as well as projects surrounding nuclear waste disposal and its long-term safety aspects. Following the conference theme, we are particularly interested in self-reflexive engagements addressing contributing scholars’ positionality in and to time and within a contemporary nuclear energy culture.
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
● Temporalities or timescapes during all stages of nuclear power production.
● The role of different materials (concrete, steel, rock, water, soil…) in producing nuclear temporalities.
● Non-linear, circular, disrupted temporalities in nuclear energy cultures.
● Temporalities of the “Nuclear Anthropocene”.
● Deep time in nuclear waste storage.
● Nuclear future imaginaries.
● The interrelations of time and nuclear safety narratives.
● Constructions of safety regarding its technological, social and natural perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Hannah Klaubert (Linköping University, Sweden)
Long abstract:
With the emergence of nuclear technologies, and more specifically the spread of nuclear power plants, another new institution spread across the globe – the nuclear visitor or information center. It is part industry museum and marketing tool, part educational destination for school kids and technophiles, and it informs visitors about radiation, radiation safety, power production, and nuclear waste storage. In this talk, I present my ongoing research into these exhibition spaces as arenas for the negotiation of contemporary civil nuclear imaginaries in Sweden and Germany. I make use of the exhibition artifacts as “scalar vehicles” (Hecht 2018) for traversing civil nuclear discourses of the last decades. The exhibitions, I suggest, put the strange concurrency of various nuclear temporalities at display, often unconsciously complicating the linear narratives which superficially structure the exhibitions.
Melanie Mbah (Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut)) Viktoria Noka (Oeko-Institut) Alexandra Lampke (Oeko-Institut e.V. (Institute for Applied Ecology))
Long abstract:
High-level radioactive waste is hazardous to the living environment for very long periods of time. In the German case, the Site Selection Act therefore stipulates its safe storage for one million years. Such long periods of time are hardly comprehensible and graspable. Past and present experiences influence today’s handling of nuclear waste and expectations for the future. The question arises as to how nuclear waste can be safely governed over time. This paper considers the role that a nuclear cultural heritage (NCH) can play in producing and maintaining institutionalized remembrance and monitoring structures.
Nuclear cultural heritage is a relatively new approach and further clarification of what it entails is therefore necessary. While it has been studied internationally, it has not been widely referred or transferred to the German context. The specifics of Germany’s controversial history of nuclear energy policy require a closer look at its NCH.
In this paper, we first present preliminary findings on conceptualizing NCH in the German context and link it to the current site selection procedure as well as the question of long-term governance of nuclear waste. We have analyzed international literature on NCH and related approaches in order to further conceptualize the approach. With the literature review we identified four key elements of NCH: temporality, spatiality, (im)materiality, and institutionalization. Second, we explore what documents and places can be considered as part of Germany’s nuclear cultural heritage. During this process we identified the various actors engaged. Furthermore, we present first results of the mapping of NCH.
Masafumi Nishi (AIT, Austrian Institute of Technology)
Short abstract:
Nuclear fusion R&D inevitably embraces a long-term future vision up to the next century. Based on empirical research on the ITER project, this paper explores how imaginaries and promises formulate a pathway and interact with materialities so that the uncertain future acts as “real”.
Long abstract:
Nuclear fusion energy has (re)gained huge attention in recent years due to the urgent necessity to tackle climate change and the energy crisis. While its potential as “ultimate energy” with virtually limitless resources and low-carbon emissions attracts both private and public investment in research and development of the technology, the realisation of a commercial fusion reactor in the upcoming decades remains uncertain due to technical feasibility. By focusing on ITER, the largest international nuclear fusion experimental reactor project, this paper explores the formulation of promissory narratives for the future-oriented technological development. It employs perspectives and concepts in science and technology studies (STS) and assesses how sociotechnical imaginaries are embedded in technology development and how promissory discourse enacts as justification against uncertainties in the discourses and practices. The empirical study with expert interviews, critical document analysis, and online and onsite ethnographies shows that visions are materialised through experts’ proactive practices in the form of documents (i.e. roadmap, policy and legal documents) that play performatively and reflectively as a reference point. The study unveils how languages, representations, and materialities collectively and complementarily (and sometimes contradictorily) shape the legitimacy of future technology. This paper contributes to the scholarship on the critical assessment of techno-futuristic visions and reflects on their impact on future-making practices for sustainability and energy transition.
Davide Orsini (LMU)
Long abstract:
What happens to a nuclear power plant when it becomes obsolete? Nuclear decommissioning is the ensemble of those complex and lengthy operations that allow the safe management and disposal of shut down nuclear facilities. Contrary to the myth of containment, nuclear facilities are porous because they establish osmotic relations and exchanges with the surrounding environment. Land occupation, water sources for reactor cooling and controlled effluent discharges, waste management on site and transportation off site, roads, river dams, cooling towers: these are just a few examples of how nuclear site operations transform spaces through time. In addition, the installation of nuclear sites brings deep socioeconomic transformations associated with the development of new services, different cultural and professional identities, and new sensorial experiences of the natural and the built environment. In one word, we can say that nuclear siting is a form of place making, and therefore of meaning making. This is clearly visible at the decommissioning stages, when the status of nuclear power plants shifts from “being the place” to “being out of place.” Drawing on anthropological, historical, and geographical approaches, this paper uses the complementary concepts of "emplacement" and "displacement" to advance a more holistic understanding of the socioecological entanglements of siting and decommissioning projects. In doing so, the analysis sheds light on the necessity to consider the whole costs of nuclear power and to escape the "containment" trap (focusing only on reactor safety) when discussing the future of nuclear energy as a possible solution to carbon emissions.
Sergiu Novac (Linköping University)
Long abstract:
Very low-level nuclear waste represents over 95% of all the waste resulting from nuclear decommissioning. The industry often uses this as an argument for cost-efficiency, or even profitability, since this type of waste can be sold back into the recycling circuit as conventional waste. However, in order to get to the point of free release, the material has to go through the process of free measurement. This is a legally strictly regulated, as well as practically dangerous and very labor intensive process meant to assure that the waste material is not above a certain level of radioactivity. However, evidence from Germany, which is currently engaged in a nation-wide nuclear decommissioning project, shows that very low-level nuclear waste is not actually free even after free measurement and release, since both public and private landfills refuse to take up any waste coming from nuclear power plants.
Analytically, I explore the performative production of the scientific category ‘non-nuclear’ through an intricate set of actors, ranging from legal authorities, private engineering consulting firms, energy utilities, up to workers that actually clean the contaminated materials in preparation for free release. This I contrast to administrators of landfills, who simply refuse to take up the resulting waste, arguing that nobody will want to re-use it, and their sites will become outsourced nuclear waste repositories. Consequently, the free measured waste can’t actually be released, and it stays on the site of the former power plants.