This talk discusses my ongoing research into nuclear visitor centers as arenas for the negotiation of contemporary civil nuclear imaginaries in Sweden and Germany. The exhibits, understood as "scalar vehicles" (Hecht 2018), put the strange concurrency of various nuclear temporalities at display.
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.