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Short abstract:

This paper aims to unfold the nuclear material politics through the stress corrosion case occurring in the French nuclear fleet over the past two years.

Long abstract:

This paper aims to unfold the nuclear “material politics” (Barry, 2013) through the stress corrosion case occurring in the French nuclear fleet over the past two years. In August 2021, a microcrack measuring just a few millimeters was discovered on a pipe in the backup circuit of a nuclear reactor in France. This type of crack was not expected and therefore not monitored by the national operator EDF. Shortly after this discovery, other microcracks of this type were found on each of these backup circuits on 18 nuclear reactors (the most recent ones), causing shutdowns that cost EDF tens of billions of euros, threatening the French electricity system with blackouts and put pressure on the whole fleet and the reactors under construction. This micro-phenomenon has thus produced gigantic effects.

The paper aims to show how a large sociotechnical system can be profoundly weakened by phenomena such as microcracks. These microcracks have made visible a series of elements: the fragile mediations that enable safety operators to know how materials are evolving; the non-causal relationship between ageing and degradation; the short memory that operators have of the infrastructure they manage.

Based on semi-directive interviews, in-depth documents analysis and archives, this paper relies on a triple hypothesis: first, that this stress corrosion case provides a very specific insight into nuclear material politics; second that material politics is a neglected aspect of nuclear politics; third that this case shows that if nuclear wastes entered into politics (Barthe, 2006), nuclear materials failed to do so.