Send message to Author

Short abstract:

This paper examines maintenance, repair, and inspection work in nuclear power plants, and demonstrates how this became an important safety issue between the 1960s and 1980s in the US, France, and Sweden, and was related to boundary-work between 'nuclear' and 'non-nuclear' types of knowledge.

Long abstract:

This paper examines maintenance, repair, and inspection work in nuclear power plants. In today’s climate change debate, nuclear power is often presented as a safe, sustainable, and reliable innovation. Yet, this contrasts with the mounting maintenance-related shutdowns in existing reactors in recent years. Scholarship on maintenance and the usage of technology has been growing in recent years, criticizing an overemphasis on innovation and invention, instead highlighting the “dirty work” maintenance workers do (Edgerton 2008; Oldenziel and Hård 2013; Vinsel and Russell 2020). Humanities scholars have also begun using the concept of ‘technique’ to denote more practical, procedural, tacit, and long-lived types of knowledge required to use technology (Carnino, Hilaire-Pérez, and Lamy 2024). At the same time, social scientists and engineers in ‘human factors research’ have highlighted the unique risks of nuclear maintenance – to workers (Reiman and Oedewald 2006) and the public (Perrow 1984) – and the organizational structures to regulate these. However, we still lack a deeper understanding about how the work of inspectors and maintenance workers is related to preventing breakdowns. In this paper, I will present results of my PhD research on how the maintenance, repair, and inspection of water- and steam components in nuclear power plants became an increasingly important safety issue between the 1960s and 1980s in the US, France, and Sweden. I argue that the increased attention for these maintenance issues went hand-in-hand with the boundary-work by different scientific and engineering communities on what is ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ technology, risk, or knowledge.