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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.