Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic paper explores contrasting landscapes dynamics around the nuclear fuel reprocessing site in La Hague, France. It will also discuss experimental workshops designed to imagine the future, as part of a research project focused on landscapes, nuclear realities and the future.

Paper long abstract:

With the French President Emmanual Macron declaring his commitment for an enduring and expanded nuclear industry in 2022, the nuclear fuel reprocessing site in La Hague, a French region in Normandy, is faced with decisive and critical next steps to match this ambition. With the industry and the state emphasising the sustainability of the nuclear sector and its virtuous “closed” fuel cycle, critical campaigners activists denounce this cycle as a “myth”, an irreversible faith in technological promises professed in an era of aging infrastructures.

In this context, I discuss preliminary findings of a comparative research project focusing on landscapes, nuclear realities, and the future, and which takes as one of its sites of interest La Hague. I draw on six months of fieldwork (August 2023 to February 2024) in the area to interrogate the (im)possibilities of transforming a region fashioned in lockstep with a dominant nuclear industry for the past sixty years. What ecological, political and social concerns intertwine in this nuclear landscape? What are the contrasting visions for the future of La Hague? What temporal and ethical do these visions take root in? I will review data from the first part of my fieldwork, preparing for a further six months in which I will conduct experimental workshops with interlocutors. These workshops will serve to untangle contrasting landscape dynamics and experiment with projecting ourselves into the future together – and identify (im)possibilities for a nuclearized peninsula.