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- Convenors:
-
Alexis Geisler-Roblin
(Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Siegfried Evens (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The concept of « stewardship », is supposed to bridge the gap between present and future generations by building specific relationships between publics, institutions and anthropogenic objects such as nuclear waste. This panel aims at observing different modes of stewardship and as its criticisms.
Long Abstract:
Making decisions informed by the needs and interests of future generations can easily be considered as a cornerstone in environmental matters. In this vision can also emerge the further idea of making decisions in a way that does not reduce the capacity of publics and institutions from concerned generations to build relationships with the concerned object of the decision : these proposals of future relationships are often presented under the label of « stewardship ».
Applicable to many anthropogenic objects, including nuclear and long term waste, the concept has been used as a long term continuation of maintenance and care but also as a new intergenerational management scheme.
The first observation is that this concepts embraces several key elements of intergenerational engagement such as how to get new generations involved, how to handle the potential tension between flexibility and durability, how to preserve awareness, or how to deal with/allow for different spatial and temporal understandings of care, among other examples. However it also falls under the spotlight of several criticisms, from its consequences in terms of instrumentalisation of engagement to its management inspirations.
The studies of this panel could be following actors and institutions directly working on building new forms of long term relationships labeled or kindred to stewardship, and can also follow the proximities of these relationships with management schemes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sophie Kuppler (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) Melanie Mbah (Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut))
Short abstract:
This presentation addresses the need to consider local contexts in the long-term governance of nuclear waste for long-term safety. It focusses in particular on the role of place attachment.
Long abstract:
A major challenge in building and securing a repository for high-level waste is the long-time spans needed for site selection, construction, storage, and closure. Depending on the type of site selection procedure and the chosen repository concept, this can take decades or even more than a century. This applies to all countries that have or are operating nuclear power plants. During the operation phase this includes facilities for interim or final storage or reprocessing at different places. Over time, other places will also be affected during the site selection procedure and afterwards during construction and disposal. The processes will cause landscape transformations to a greater or lesser extent, to allow for activities including transportation and excavation. While nuclear waste governance is an extremely challenging and contested issue in some countries, in others it seems rather straightforward. In this paper we will argue that seemingly straightforward processes might stand for depoliticized approaches that view stewardship as managerial task and that this could hamper long-term safety. We argue that it needs a long-term governance to suitably address changes in technologies and societies in the long-term, which embraces political debate and conflicts. To achieve this, from our point of view, local context factors need to be integrated into such governance approaches as relationships between residents and the place they live in affect long-term governance. Based on empirical research on the meaning of place and transformations caused by infrastructure projects, we discuss the relevance of those findings for a place-sensitive long-term governance framework.
Alexis Geisler-Roblin (Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Short abstract:
This oral communication aims at confronting different visions of stewardship as applied to nuclear waste, from technical management horizons to alternative roots unifying technical objects and their politics, enlightened by the frameworks of pragmatist social inquiries.
Long abstract:
Nuclear wastes cause long-term socio-technical issues and yet can be sometimes addressed solely by a vision of techno-scientific management. This latter reduced framing of understanding is compatible with the ambition of Earth systems sciences implying that a certain role of planetary stewardship can be attached to the responsibility of humanity, as a characteristic of the Anthropocenic period. This soft perspective of stewardship, applied on such problematic materials raising very challenging questions, can contribute to a depoliticized understanding of anthropocenic systems, and even contribute to an active depoliticization of future generations. Regarding long-term institutions and decision-making processes, several visions of political life coexist, but the simplest one is the absence of anticipation of political life related to these objects later. Such considerations are easily articulated with an Anthropocenic management of histories, materialities and externalities, always open to technical and informational management of issues, and can be reflected in a vision of stewardship. On the other hand, the terms of stewardship are also used by concerned communities, with intentions of long-term care of nuclear waste, opposed to its reduction to techno-scientific management. This oral communication will try to confront depoliticized horizons to deeper roots unifying technical objects and their politics, proposed by the frameworks of pragmatist social inquiry and of capacitation constructions of future civil society populations.
Olivier CHANTON (Nuclear Safety and radioprotection institut)
Short abstract:
We propose to view and analyze regulatory activities concerning nuclear infrastructure carried out in the aftermath of the 2003 heatwave, as a maintenance and repair work. We reflect on the implications of this view, in the context of a nuclear “revival” based on the notion of stewardship.
Long abstract:
In 2003, an unprecedented heatwave disturbed the operations of nuclear power plants reactor , on the French territory. This event revealed the vulnerability of the whole nuclear infrastructure of electricity production facing this type of events and the fragility of important materials and technical systems supporting the operations and many safety requirements of NPP. Our analysis reveals that the organizational routines implemented during the “crisis management period”, enacted the existence of two distinct communities and a social division of the maintenance and repair labor. The heatwave opened a window where a first community (micro-local level) had to and could explore various courses of actions, bricolages, improvisations. A second community (macro-central level) assess, select and produce calibrated new regulations based on the work done at the micro-local level. Our analyze of the latter part of the maintenance work reveal the existence of “residual” problems : local fragilities that will claim a continuous care in the long run and the maintenance of specific technical knowledge and organizational routines. They explain the vulnerability of the whole infrastructure : objects of an invisible work parts of a fragile socio-material order. We would like to discuss the possible implications of our work in terms of governance and institutional organization of the nuclear infrastructures in the long run. Stewardship appears to be a possible horizon and an interesting one to explore/ Our work can illuminate what type of organizations, skills and knowledge may be required to implement stewardship as a new hybrid form of socio-technical control.
Ange Pottin (University of Vienna)
Short abstract:
How does one turn a degrading reactor into waste? This case illustrates that nuclear waste is not a clear-cut entity, but the product of ever-changing standards and practices of care, and points to the need for closer scrutiny of the multiple temporalities coexisting in the decommissioning process.
Long abstract:
Looking at decommissioning processes, our goal is to analyze how we care for the left-behinds of innovation.
The French graphite-moderated reactors (GMR) were stopped in the early 1990s and are now confronted with questions of decommissioning. Inherited from a time with lower standards of care for the afterlife of installations, they contain important quantities of irradiated graphite that has become unstable.
How does one turn a degrading reactor into waste? In this presentation based on interviews, document analysis and archival work, I will analyze GMR decommissioning as a practice of both caring and waiting.
While first following a “deferred decommissioning” strategy – an activity that turns an operating machine into a residue through technical, regulatory, and organizational processes –, by now the plan is to have the reactors fully decommissioned around 2100. This de facto long-term waiting strategy is controversial: the regulators defend the norm of “immediate decommissioning” enshrined in the Environmental Law; the operator points to the absence of a final disposal site for graphite impeding the full transformation of GMR into waste.
This case (i) illustrates that nuclear waste is not a clear-cut entity, but the product of ever-changing standards and practices of care, and (ii) points to the need for closer scrutiny of the multiple temporalities coexisting in the decommissioning processes.
This research is conducted with Ulrike Felt as part of her ERC Advanced Grant Innovation Residues – Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée futures (GA 10105480) at the University of Vienna.
Siegfried Evens (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Short abstract:
This paper examines maintenance, repair, and inspection work in nuclear power plants, and demonstrates how this became an important safety issue between the 1960s and 1980s in the US, France, and Sweden, and was related to boundary-work between 'nuclear' and 'non-nuclear' types of knowledge.
Long abstract:
This paper examines maintenance, repair, and inspection work in nuclear power plants. In today’s climate change debate, nuclear power is often presented as a safe, sustainable, and reliable innovation. Yet, this contrasts with the mounting maintenance-related shutdowns in existing reactors in recent years. Scholarship on maintenance and the usage of technology has been growing in recent years, criticizing an overemphasis on innovation and invention, instead highlighting the “dirty work” maintenance workers do (Edgerton 2008; Oldenziel and Hård 2013; Vinsel and Russell 2020). Humanities scholars have also begun using the concept of ‘technique’ to denote more practical, procedural, tacit, and long-lived types of knowledge required to use technology (Carnino, Hilaire-Pérez, and Lamy 2024). At the same time, social scientists and engineers in ‘human factors research’ have highlighted the unique risks of nuclear maintenance – to workers (Reiman and Oedewald 2006) and the public (Perrow 1984) – and the organizational structures to regulate these. However, we still lack a deeper understanding about how the work of inspectors and maintenance workers is related to preventing breakdowns. In this paper, I will present results of my PhD research on how the maintenance, repair, and inspection of water- and steam components in nuclear power plants became an increasingly important safety issue between the 1960s and 1980s in the US, France, and Sweden. I argue that the increased attention for these maintenance issues went hand-in-hand with the boundary-work by different scientific and engineering communities on what is ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ technology, risk, or knowledge.