Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the socio-environmental impact of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is currently being built in Cadarache (France), through archival sources and the literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Nuclear Geography and Environmental History.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the territorial impact of the ITER, the world’s largest nuclear plant, promoted as a cleaner and safer source of electricity than fission. Through this case study, it asks: how do the territories of nuclear experiments change from a socio-environmental point of view? Do they themselves become experiments? I will focus on the local governance of ITER, closely intertwined at the national and global level; the masculinization and professionalization of work; the strategies for building the social acceptability of energy projects in the «Vallée des énergies nouvelles», from the practice of public debates, to the mechanisms of ecological compensation.

In the global energy landscape, fusion research has also embodied a clear idea of the future, as an integral part of an ever-widening project of energy diversification. Moving from the urgency of the present moment (global warming, environmental crisis and geopolitical instability), the ITER story becomes a key for a reinterpretation of some issues, such as the processes of «greening the atom» and the historical roots of the energy diversification paths on a local and global scale.

The interdisciplinary approach is particularly effective in weaving the complex links between the global history of energy and its territorial ramifications: from Science and Technology Studies, to Nuclear Geography and Environmental History, by tracking fuels, technologies and informal energy empires across multiple spatial and political scales (transnational, imperial, post-colonial, national, regional), and opening new spatial perspectives in the history of nuclearized territories, in which the boundaries of the installations become extremely permeable and integrate them into dilated "enviro-technical systems" that can go from the territories crossed by the nuclear water sources, to the places where raw materials are extracted.