Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper traces Taiwan’s "energy-semiconductor entanglement" from the Sun Yun-hsuan era (1962-84) to the 2025 AI-driven nuclear policy "U-turn." It unbundles the paradox of semiconductor expansion vs. energy transition, revealing the deep-seated politico-economic networks behind the power grid.

Paper long abstract

Current geopolitical AI races have driven radical energy demands worldwide. In Taiwan, the energy transition roadmap was knocked off by the post-pandemic semiconductor strategy. In May 2025, the ‘Nuclear-free Homeland’ policy announced in 2016 was eventually realised (the final nuclear plant was decommissioned). Nonetheless, TSMC and the semiconductor supply chain continued to announce the biggest capacity expansion that year, and electricity demand from them was a top priority for the government to consider. Proactive and reactive policy tools to revitalise nuclear plants were invented to cover the supply shortage of renewable energy. In the view of the civil society and green parties, this scenario is a ‘U-turn’ in the energy transition roadmap.

This paper aims to unbundle the energy paradox of the semiconductor strategy by visiting the post-war history of Taiwan. By arguing that the development of the electricity infrastructure and the semiconductor industry were inseparable from a key politician, Premier of the Executive Yuan Sun Yun-hsun, this paper offers a historical explanation for the (re)unification of energy and semiconductor policies. Moreover, this paper employs this viewpoint and presents contemporary evidence of the collaborations and entanglement between the semiconductor industry and the electricity infrastructure, including fossil fuels and nuclear energy. These politico-economic networks and consortia always exist behind the scenes of Taiwan's energy transition roadmap. Since global chip acts affect local energy demands and transitions, this paper also proposes interrogating the energy-semiconductor entanglement internationally.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This presentation analyses Norways pro-nuclear movement through an STS-lens, focusing on how nuclear power activates new questions about energy systems' political economy and underpinning societal imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, nuclear power has surged in public debate in Norway, a country historically blessed with access to abundant hydropower resources. Unlike previous Norwegian engagements with nuclear technology, which were tied to Cold War geopolitics, anti-nuclear movements and largely abandoned, today’s revival is framed as a response to skyrocketing electricity prices driven by the European energy crisis, land conflicts over wind power, and the need for vast energy supplies to support industrial transformation away from oil and gas. Remarkably, this new discourse is largely detached from historical experiences with nuclear power elsewhere. Instead, it builds on optimistic visions of limitless CO₂-free energy and economic cost-benefit analyses, sidelining concerns about waste, safety, and governance. The Norwegian pro-nuclear movement now challenges democratic practices and energy policy goals, advocating for a radical shift in the country’s energy transition. Still, public discussions lack reflection on the new political economy that nuclear power could entail. Beyond being a technological solution, the nuclear revival rests on distinct imaginaries in which capital-rich and energy-hungry industries, such as data centres operated by multinational tech giants, gain significant influence over Norway’s energy system. Drawing on interviews with mayors from Norwegian municipalities actively exploring nuclear projects, parliament politicians and nuclear advocates, this presentation employs a critical STS perspective to analyse the visions underpinning the Norwegian nuclear movement and its longing for abundant energy. By doing so, it contributes to discussions on how nuclear energy’s “second life” is shaped by shifting political, economic, and ideological landscapes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper traces the articulation of three grand narratives about the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant, paying close attention to the production of temporal logics as a means of exercising State and corporate power.

Paper long abstract

How are contemporary nuclear infrastructures bound up in stories of and about time? In this paper, I trace how Hinkley Point C (HPC), the first nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over three decades, features centrally in British imaginaries of nuclear renaissance and heritage through the articulation of three grand narratives of time: progress modernity, energy transition, and intergenerational legacy. I draw on archival research, discourse analysis, and an ongoing ethnography with communities living amidst and working at HPC, to trace how elite actors – namely, successive British governments and HPC’s developer, the French energy company Électricité de France – have sought to construct these narratives. Through the production of a range of temporal logics, they weave HPC into the myriad if contradictory fabrics of national progress, world leadership, and regional investment. I argue that these stories must be understood as seeking less to represent than to enact worlds into existence, even if they do not always succeed. They are thus critical sites in the (tactical and technical) exercise of State and corporate power through the production of time, transforming HPC into a place of many faces, a chronotope charged with the force and movement of history (Bakhtin, 1981). I conclude with broad considerations of the relationship between time, power, and placemaking in the study of contemporary nuclear infrastructures as polyrhythmic assemblages.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on Karen Barad's insights on “nuclearity,” this work argues that postwar aesthetic forms, from biomorphic abstraction to the depiction of postnuclear landscapes, offer insights for technoscience to address the unsettling of matter and the plasticity of time at the heart of our nuclear age.

Paper long abstract

This article interrogates the aesthetics of the nuclear age at the intersection between cultural production and technoscience. Departing from the premise that the entanglement between nuclear science and aesthetics extends well beyond the “nuclear technoaesthetics” (Masco 2004) of postwar weapons scientists to shape “wildly divergent cultural moods, from soaring optimism to stomach-churning fear” (Boyer 2001), it decenters the debate from the oft-rehearsed discussion around the looming threat of the bomb and its corresponding “annihilation imaginary” (Lee 2025). Instead, following Barad’s (2023) insights on “nuclearity” as a technoscientific paradigm that “blows up Newtonian conceptions of space and time,” giving rise to “inherently haunted matter,” this article argues for the need to consider how postwar cultural production grappled with the transformed ontological status of matter and the plasticity of time. From biomorphic abstractions registering the unsettling of material integrity to explorations of postnuclear landscapes where catastrophe is simultaneously imminent and ongoing, postwar aesthetics offers crucial insights for technoscience, as the latter is increasingly tasked with representing, and politically articulating, both the infra-sensible and the “hyperobject” (Morton 2013), both imminent disaster and slow violence (Nixon 2011). Taking stock of renewed curatorial interest – as recent exhibitions like L’Âge atomique at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024) demonstrate – this work interrogates the cultural imaginaries of the atom, finding new clues to address what is both imperceptible and omnipresent, both immediate and persistent.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The study investigates how the emergent SMR-technology is imagined by different actors in the field. My research shows how seemingly impossible, dichotomous interpretations of this technology unite diverse actors in efforts to realise it.

Paper long abstract

Amidst the prospective nuclear renaissance, Sweden is currently planning for new nuclear power. This study focuses on how a new technology of small and medium size nuclear reactors (SMRs) is imagined by different actors in the field, prompting them to collectively pursue its realisation. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about imagination in STS, exploring how imagination and technoscientific promises can mobilise different actors around a technology yet-to-exist (e.g., Lehtonen, 2023; Sovacool & Ramana, 2015; Latour, 1993).

The study draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with different actors involved in the planning of new nuclear power. The research also draws on different forms of documentation describing the SMR technology within the context of new nuclear power in Sweden.

The results show that SMRs are often imagined in ways that are contradictory and not easily combined. Perceived as e.g., both revolutionary and evolutionary, the SMR-technology is based on already tested and well-known technology, while at the same time being perceived as completely new and modern. This positions the SMR as safe, both by means of connecting it to Sweden’s long experience with conventional nuclear power, while at the same time disconnecting it from more negative sentiments of nuclear power being an old or outdated technology.

The research highlights how the SMR is a contradictory imagination, which cannot possibly fulfil all its expectations. Nonetheless, this imagination has the harmonising power to mobilise a large collective of actors to work towards its realisation.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This study juxtaposes the European SMR umbrella promise with situated SMR promises in Czechia. It combines document analysis of EU-level promissory discourses with interviews with Czech SMR advocates to explore how these promises are locally (re)articulated, and with what performative effects.

Paper long abstract

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are widely promoted as a paradigm shift, promising lower capital costs, greater flexibility, enhanced safety, and improved public acceptance. Although only a handful are operational, public and private interest has grown rapidly, with more than 90 projects at various stages of development worldwide (NEA, 2025). In Europe, SMRs have received increasing policy support from the European Commission, notably with the launch of the European Industrial Alliance on SMRs in 2024. Yet member states diverge in their engagement with these technologies: while some, such as Finland, have expressed clear ambitions to deploy SMRs, others remain more cautious.

Drawing on the sociology of expectations and the literature on technoscientific promises (Borup et al., 2006; Van Lente, 2012; Joly, 2010), this research examines the SMR “umbrella promise” (Parandian et al., 2019) at the European level and tries to account for its performative impact in a member state with strong commitment to SMRs : the Czech Republic.

We first describe this umbrella promise through a thematic analysis of grey literature produced by actors involved in formulating SMR promissory discourses at the European level (e.g., Euratom, SNETP). The umbrella promise then juxtaposed with a thematic analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews conducted with SMR vendors, nuclear research institutions, and utilities (UJV Řež and ČEZ) in the Czech Republic, complemented by grey literature published by these actors.

Combined with a socio-historical approach, we uncover how the European SMR umbrella promise is locally (re)articulated by promise-makers in Czechia, and with what performative impact.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper presents a socio-historical analysis concerning a nuclear waste storage in France leading to the emergence of a regulatory injunction to preserve the memory of waste storages and to repair the credibility of the foundational promise of the existing geo-legal framework.

Paper long abstract

Certain events have the power to reveal the fragilities of an infrastructure and of the promises on which it rests. Even if they trigger crisis and doubts, they rarely lead to radical transformations but to limited adjustments or additions maintaining the foundations of the system and repairing its credibility (Sims & Henke, 20012) and the promises about public safety. This paper presents a socio-historical analysis concerning a nuclear waste storage in France, starting in 1969 and leading to the emergence of a remarkable regulatory injunction to preserve the memory of waste storages. We will show how memory devices have been designed to repair the credibility of the foundational promise of the existing geo-legal framework and its concentration-confinement management doctrine of radioactive matters (Garcier, 2014). The memory work carried out segment and order the social, spatial and temporal dimensions of the problem posed by radioactive waste. Engineered in discreet institutional spaces, enlist and adapt existing memory practices within the routines and cognitive categories of nuclear safety. Archives and history-memory became the modalities of a long-term promise which is no longer based exclusively on material technical devices with a supposedly predictable functioning, but also on social devices whose reliability over time will remain uncertain and will have to be maintained by social institutions. A new socio-technical barrier emerged and transferred the burden of a troubled past to fragile solidarities and their maintenance over time and resting on a fragile promise of an intergenerational alliance maintained over time.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This study illustrates how CIDS applied the concepts of negotiation theater to design the innovative participatory workshops on Taiwan's pending nuclear waste siting issues. The findings suggest the need for participatory governance that is responsive to stakeholders.

Paper long abstract

Nuclear waste management in Taiwan has long been paralyzed by severe social and political conflicts, indefinitely delaying the siting processes for both low-level and high-level radioactive waste.

Adopting a reflective praxis approach, CIDS (Centre for Innovative Democracy and Sustainability) utilizes Bruno Latour’s Theater of Negotiation as an artistic communicative medium to discuss the deadlock of nuclear waste disposal. By integrating participatory design with social-technical imaginaries in a pedagogical case, we are able to make the proxy for stakeholders to interact and negotiate through the simulated process. Through the deliberative negotiation process, we then further examine how diverse stakeholders—including technical experts, local residents, NGOs, governmental officials etc. perceive nuclear waste siting issues.

This study explains how CIDS applied the concepts of negotiation theater to design the "The Pending Future of Nuclear Waste” for the 2020 Taipei Biennale and three “Tech Waste” youth camps in 2023. By observing how participants interacted and reflected in the above events, we further analyze participants' collaborative strategies and discussions throughout the negotiation process, as well as their reflections on the design of the deliberative process after concluding their roles.

Our preliminary findings suggest that the simulated scenarios effectively led the participants to a better understanding of the dilemma of nuclear waste siting issues. While different stakeholders hold divergent imaginaries of the nuclear waste, most participants are more concerned about procedural justice rather than technical solutions. This paper argues that policy communication can be enhanced through the innovative participatory mechanism and pedagogical practices.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Japan has a well-developed culture of museum, including museums about nuclear energy. Through a comparative and longitudinal study of three of them, before and after the Fukushima accident, I would like to interrogate the evolution of narrative from nuclear success to disaster-management success.

Paper long abstract

Japan has a long tradition of various museums, including disaster museums. But some museums also deploy a narrative of success, such as the museums of nuclear energy built close to nuclear power plants, which present a narrative accompanying Japan's economic miracle. In 2009, I conducted research on one of them, the Rokkasho-mura PR Center built close to the Nuclear Reprocessing Plant of the village.

However, the situation changed drastically after the March 11, 2011 nuclear disaster of Fukushima. Most of the nuclear museums closed temporarily, but some also closed permanently, such as the Denryoku PR Center of TEPCO, a seven-floor building located in the central district of Shibuya, Tokyo. Others that I would like to study here reopened, such as the nuclear energy PR center of Tomioka, located 10 km south of Fukushima Daiichi, reconverted as a Decommissioning Archive center. Finally, a new memorial has emerged: the Fukushima nuclear disaster memorial in Futaba.

What was the change in narratives before and after Fukushima? My hypothesis here is that nothing radically changed, and that a shift from a nuclear success story to a nuclear disaster management success story occurred.

To explain this shift, I will first explore the narrative of the nuclear industry as irreducibly based on a techno-scientific promise; then I will show that it is combined here with a culture of resilience that I call the Japanese “grammar of disasters”; finally, I will suggest that these narratives have a pragmatist efficiency, rendering possible actions through a counterfactual future.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This proposal studies how energy modelling communities are adapting to answer the growing political interest towards nuclear power. It shows that the willingness to be relevant for policy-making leads to negotiations and modification of the parameters, features and assumptions within the models.

Paper long abstract

As nuclear power has been attracting growing attention from policymakers, energy modelling communities are asked to produce long-term scenarios showing what role nuclear power could play. Modellers are striving to reconsider and improve the representation in their models of conventional options and new technologies, such as small modular reactors. But modelling nuclear power can prove to be challenging, as the data is scarce, technologies’ future difficult to assess and nuclear power not always considered an attractive option by models.

How to model a technology that is not always “desirable” (for cost-effectiveness, for instance) according to the models, but which benefits from strong political support? What technical and ethical choices are made to meet the political demand?

My communication will draw on an empirical investigation consisting of field ethnography, interviews with modelers and the analysis of grey literature. It will focus on the case of ETSAP (Energy Technology Systems Analysis Programme), a modelling community affiliated with the International Energy Agency, which organised a workshop dedicated to the role of nuclear power in models. The workshop’s goal was for modelers to share their data, assumptions and questions, and to draft a report on best modelling practices to inform decision-making.

I will show how the representation of nuclear power is subject to negotiations between different teams and external stakeholders (AIEA, national governments…), and how these negotiations lead to the modification of practices and choices of parameters in order for the models to participate to the legitimisation of the nuclear promise.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Images shape and is shaped by cultural imaginations of nuclear disaster. Within visual studies, the term 'nuclear renaissance' is insufficient. Rather than utopian visions of clean energy, we encounter bizarre motifs of ruin and hurt. How does this visuality operate alongside the renaissance ideals?

Paper long abstract

The presentation draws on my recently published dissertation, Nuclear Baroque, which analyzes the visual aftermath of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. Using Chornobyl as its point of reference, it highlights one key finding: the fabulously sublime. This concept is proposed as a subcategory of the classical sublime and the “nuclear sublime.” I argue that encounters with the nuclear sublime most often depend on distance—temporal, spatial, and mediated—rather than proximity. Instead, the fabulously sublime encompasses mediated modes of sublime experience: the imaginative, spectacular, and sometimes bizarre visual forms through which nuclear power and catastrophe are made sensorially graspable. As such, it constitutes a foundational pillar of what the dissertation conceptualises as the nuclear baroque.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores paradoxical relationships of care and harm that plays out in various nuclear ecologies, and introduces temporalities of ongoingness (limbo, forever, cycles) that challenge conventional narratives of progress and decay.

Paper long abstract

Human-produced radioactivity is planetary, through airborne radioactive particles originating from nuclear weapons testing, war bombings, and nuclear power plant accidents that gradually fall back to earth as dust or in rain, haphazard dumping of nuclear residue, and the construction of waste storage sites. It is a reality on the ground and underground, in the air and in seas, lakes, rivers, and ground waters, in vegetation and in animal and human bodies. It is so pervasive that the “golden spike” of distinctive radionuclides after atmospheric atomic testing in the 1950s has been suggested as the global sediment marker for the Anthropocene, the stratigraphic “age of humans”. However, looking beyond radioactive contamination reveals also overlooked sites – buffer zones, spillwater habitats, rescue programs – where nuclear futures are currently quietly negotiated, among other things bringing into view how the current resurgence of pro-nuclear sentiment has been made possible. This paper explores paradoxical relationships of care and harm that plays out in various nuclear ecologies, and introduces temporalities of ongoingness (limbo, forever, cycles) that challenge conventional narratives of progress and decay.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Wylfa is at a crossroads: a celebrated nuclear future of new SMRs or a derided future of renewables—wind and solar farms covering large areas of what was once picturesque farmland. This paper reflects on the landscape's history and the impact of visual culture on this divisive energy transition.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: Technoscientific-Landscape, Magnox, SMRs, Historical Sedimentation.

In the face of a rapidly changing energy future, what role does the Technoscientific-Landscape play in engaging local people?

The Magnox reactors at Wylfa Power Station were the most advanced first-generation UK civil reactors. Their site was among Dame Sylvia Crowe's most accomplished landscapes. This was a public landscape that seemingly extended to the very edge of the reactors, a feat enabled by technical innovation. Crowe, a landscape architect of international standing, had given form and legitimacy to these new cathedrals of power within rural landscapes during the 1960s.

The landscape design success at Wylfa has subtly influenced local understanding of nuclear technology; however, the site has become an infrastructural zombie. Failure to build the second-generation reactor at the site in 1990 and again in 2021 has led to a persistent ‘future-in-the-making’ that never materialises, leaving the local population in limbo while ‘besieged’ by solar and wind farms that offer no tangible local benefits, such as employment or access.

Today, a new technology is seeking form and legitimacy, driven by private rather than public interests. In November 2025, Rolls-Royce announced its intention to build Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) at Wylfa. The Magnox Reactors were not designed for decommissioning and will remain on site long after the yet-to-be-built SMRs are demolished. The landscape, along with its historical sedimentation, holds the largest share of social capital on the small island of Ynys Môn. This paper examines the interface between historical legacy and new energy infrastructure.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how national nuclear imaginaries in France and Switzerland shape the governance of nuclear futures in the transboundary Rhône basin, highlighting how borders, water use, and place-based concerns structure cross-border debates on energy transition and environmental responsibility.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how divergent national nuclear imaginaries take shape and interact within the transboundary geography of the Rhône River basin. Drawing on an STS perspective on sociotechnical imaginaries, it compares France’s state-led framing of nuclear power as a cornerstone of technological progress, energy security, and low-carbon transition with Switzerland’s institutionalised nuclear phase-out, grounded in precaution, public participation, and environmental risk.

These contrasting imaginaries intersect in a shared river basin where the proximity of major nuclear installations to the Swiss border generates political, societal, and environmental tensions. Focusing on the proposed expansion of reactors at the Bugey site, the paper analyses how technoscientific promises of a renewed nuclear future are articulated through regulatory frameworks, infrastructural legacies, and cross-border water use, while simultaneously encountering contestation rooted in environmental risk and place-based concerns.

Approaching the Rhône not merely as a physical resource but as a relational socio-technical space, the analysis highlights how historical infrastructures, national energy trajectories, and attachments to river landscapes shape contemporary debates over nuclear futures and cross-border responsibilities. The paper shows how France’s framing of nuclear energy as a climate solution contrasts with Switzerland’s phase-out imaginary, producing divergent expectations and political positions within the basin.

By situating nuclear imaginaries within a transboundary river context, the paper contributes to STS debates on technoscientific promises, historical legacies, and the spatial politics of nuclear futures beyond the nation-state.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Nuclear fusion presents value-laden promises of energy abundance, security and sustainability. In this paper, the values inherent in these narratives are analysed alongside interviews with developers to assess how values shape the development of the technology.

Paper long abstract

Nuclear fusion; responsible innovation; value-sensitive design; energy ethics

Fusion energy is gaining traction through its promise as an abundant, clean, low-carbon energy source, with some bestowing it with the status as the ‘holy grail’ of energy production and a ‘Promethean spark of hope’ for climate change mitigation efforts. Its promise has increasingly become associated with other technoscientific and 'deep tech' ventures, such as meeting the energy demands of AI.

In creating these future imaginaries, several overarching values emerge, particularly values such as security, wellbeing, environmental sustainability, justice and fairness. Moreover, the prevalence of energy security and energy justice narratives associated with fusion energy, related to values of human wellbeing and fairness, adds a further layer of complexity to considerations of values in fusion. This research aims to identify these values in public discourse and through the perspectives of developers to understand how they are invoked, conceptualised, operationalised and realisedin the development of the technology.

Empirically, the UK fusion sector was taken as a case study. Values invoked implicitly and explicitly within publicly issued documents and semi-structured interviews with developers and engineers were thematically coded, analysed and synthesised to identify areas of alignment and divergence between vision and reality. Subsequent synthesis of both sources identified several areas where values were differently invoked, operationalised and conceptualised, which may present challenges within the development process.