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- Convenors:
-
Per Högselius
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Markku Lehtonen (Pompeu Fabra University)
Fannie Frederikke Baden (Lund University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This open panel will examine how STS can help us to understand, and potentially influence, the more-than-now of nuclear power. The focus is on three broad sub-themes: technoscientific promises, the weight of history, and the power of culture.
Description
Current debates about nuclear energy are characterised by cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the nuclear industry, along with an increasing number of politicians, businesses and social media influencers, envisages nuclear power as a means of building a green and resilient future. On the other, real-world trends indicate that nuclear power’s share of the global energy mix is declining year on year. This open panel will examine how STS can help us to understand, and potentially influence, this contradictory development. Targeting the more-than-now of nuclear power, we welcome contributions that address one or more of three broad themes:
(1) Technoscientific promises: The promise of yet another nuclear renaissance has gained remarkable traction in recent years, spearheaded by the prospect of small modular reactors, and accompanied by the resurgence of longstanding promises of “advanced” nuclear technologies and, ultimately, nuclear fusion. What material, institutional and discursive means are used by various stakeholders to construct and maintain the promise of an impending nuclear renaissance, or conversely, to undermine its legitimacy and credibility?
(2) The weight of history: How do historical trajectories enable and constrain current nuclear developments – technologically, socially, politically? How do actors mobilise nuclear energy’s ambiguous history for their own purposes – building on its achievements, institutions, successes and failures, seeking to break away from or denounce its troubled past? And is the link between civil and military nuclear technologies, in an age of rising geopolitical tensions, turning from a burden into an asset for the nuclear industry?
(3) The power of culture: Visual art, media, literature and popular culture can exert significant influence on collective understandings on nuclear energy, weaponry, and environmental responsibility. We want to examine the cultural imaginaries surrounding the atom, from utopian expectations to apocalyptic fears, in ways that reflect and construct the ethical, political and/or aesthetic contours of our nuclear age.