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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.