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Short abstract:

Nuclear wastes need to be stored safely for centuries, to guarantee safety even if conditions (e.g. socio-political) will have changed. This paper focuses on the role of nuclear cultural heritage for remembrance and monitoring

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.