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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.