Atomic Heritage goes Critical: Waste, Community and Nuclear Imaginaries
An increasing number of national and international nuclear energy organizations today work explicitly with their "atomic heritage". They have realized that building final repositories for spent nuclear fuel, or decommissioning a nuclear plant, are not exclusively technical challenges but also a question of handling heritage.
In spite of this growing focus, academic investigations have hitherto dealt with nuclear technology and heritage mainly as separate entities. The proposed project responds to this gap with the overarching aim to articulate atomic heritage as a field of academic inquiry and to generate new knowledge about its character, impact and potential.
Our research questions focus on 1) waste - e.g. how responsibility for radioactive left-overs is attributed to nuclear experts and society at large in various ways, 2) community - e.g. how the high-status identity of mono-industrial nuclear communities is negotiated in a decommissioning process, and 3) imaginaries - e.g. how past utopian-dystopian dichotomies attached to nuclear power are reinvented in relation to current issues like climate change.
The project is theoretically based in critical heritage studies, and a view on heritage as an element and expression of intensified cultural negotiation. Case studies will be carried out at selected nuclear power plants and connected communities in Sweden, the UK, Russia and France within an overall ethnographic methodological approach.
In spite of this growing focus, academic investigations have hitherto dealt with nuclear technology and heritage mainly as separate entities. The proposed project responds to this gap with the overarching aim to articulate atomic heritage as a field of academic inquiry and to generate new knowledge about its character, impact and potential.
Our research questions focus on 1) waste - e.g. how responsibility for radioactive left-overs is attributed to nuclear experts and society at large in various ways, 2) community - e.g. how the high-status identity of mono-industrial nuclear communities is negotiated in a decommissioning process, and 3) imaginaries - e.g. how past utopian-dystopian dichotomies attached to nuclear power are reinvented in relation to current issues like climate change.
The project is theoretically based in critical heritage studies, and a view on heritage as an element and expression of intensified cultural negotiation. Case studies will be carried out at selected nuclear power plants and connected communities in Sweden, the UK, Russia and France within an overall ethnographic methodological approach.
Final report
Aim and project rationale
An increasing number of national and international nuclear energy organizations today work explicitly with their “atomic heritage”. They have realized that building final repositories for spent nuclear fuel, or decommissioning a nuclear plant, are not exclusively technical challenges but also a question of handling heritage.
Despite this growing focus, academic investigations had mainly dealt with nuclear technology and heritage as separate entities. The project “Atomic Heritage goes Critical: Waste, Community and Nuclear Imaginaries” addressed this gap with the overarching aim to articulate atomic heritage as a field of academic inquiry and to generate new knowledge about its character, impact, and potential.
The research questions focused on 1) waste – e.g. how responsibility for radioactive left-overs is attributed to nuclear experts and society at large in various ways, 2) community – e.g. how the high-status identity of mono-industrial nuclear communities is negotiated in a decommissioning process, and 3) imaginaries – e.g. how past utopian-dystopian dichotomies attached to nuclear power are reinvented in relation to current issues like climate change.
The project was theoretically based in critical heritage studies, and a view on heritage as an element and expression of intensified cultural negotiation. Case studies were carried out at selected nuclear power plants and connected communities in Sweden, the UK, Russia, and France within an overall ethnographic methodological approach.
Implementation
In accordance with the project plan, the research team has explored nuclear power plants, radioactive waste storage facilities and connected communities in the four countries, employing observations, interviews, and archival sources, which were accessible due to the team members’ extraordinary language skills. Joint fieldwork was also carried out in all four countries which, among other things, resulted in several co-authored articles.
One of the few things pointed out in the project plan as probably not feasible was a visit to the Leningrad nuclear power plant in Russia – which was nevertheless accomplished, after substantial preparations, and perhaps some luck. However, Russian nuclear issues are very sensitive and agreeing to an interview has become even more risky during the last couple of years. A more unexpected empirical challenge concerned the case of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant in France, which was scheduled for shutdown, but continued to operate several years into the project. The research focus for this case was therefore reoriented from processes of community denuclearization to how the plant in fact worked as a tool for local reconciliation in Alsace following the painful legacies of WWII.
To support the focus on nuclear waste, Dr Andrei Stsiapanau became affiliated to the project. As the PI Anna Storm changed affiliations, the project was moved from Stockholm University to Linköping University in 2020. Due to the pandemic, the project’s final conference was postponed twice, and then turned into an online event.
Three critical insights
One insight gained from the project concerns differences in dominant national visions and management strategies of nuclear waste. While some countries’ waste management is generally past-oriented, reminding about glorious military pasts and thereby also constructing legitimacy, other countries’ waste management is more oriented towards the future, in terms of finding long term reliable technologies for containing the dangerous matter. There are also other temporalities at play in the imagined and realized handling of radioactive substances, for example a cyclic view of uranium as something that can be returned to “nature” and more specifically to the deep underground, from where it originally was mined.
A second important insight is how staff-animal relations at nuclear power plants (for example regarding fish, seals, crocodiles, eagle, and wild boar) in various ways perform a domestication of “nuclear natures” which do not only imply control and containment of the sublime and exceptional atom, but also denote normalization on a local community level. In turn, such an imaginative move, articulated in mundane practices in and around the nuclear power plants, becomes an expression of an embodied and overwhelming trust that we were able to detect among nuclear staff and residents living nearby a nuclear site.
A third result concerns an emerging museum curators’ logic at nuclear exhibitions which was based simultaneously on concealing and revealing the drawbacks and disasters connected to nuclear applications. This logic leads to exhibitions where a visitor, for example, can “experience” an atomic bomb detonating, in the same breath as he or she admires the inventors. This insight has deepened and nuanced previous understandings of the intended messages of the nuclear exhibition complex in the countries we have studied.
Taken together, these results show that the material, relational and representational features we sat out to investigate, analytically corresponding to our focus on waste, community, and imaginaries, proved fruitful and productive. This is also demonstrated by our collaboration with several projects and networks dealing with related issues, among them “EDUATOM” (Didactic Technologies for the Development of Nuclear Educational Tourism in the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant Region, hosted by Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), Kaunas, Lithuania), “NUCLEARWATERS” (NuclearWaters: Putting Water at the Center of Nuclear Energy, hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), and “Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Knowledge to Practice” (hosted by Kingston University, London, the UK). Most recently, yet another group of projects have been launched in different countries, where we hold our project to have had an impact on how the research problem and questions have been formulated. Overall, we believe we have contributed decisively to an advancement of atomic heritage as a field of rewarding and increasingly pertinent academic inquiry.
New research questions
A new question relates to our shared bodily experience of entering a nuclear power plant, as this is a special procedure sending very particular messages of safety and risk, hierarchies, and identities in a ritualized way. We are currently working on a co-authored paper based on this experience, which might open new avenues of investigations.
Dissemination and stakeholder interaction
The academic dissemination primarily materialized in the form of scientific articles and conference presentations. In total, the project team members have published 15 scientific articles and book chapters, and have given presentation at 34 conferences held in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US, Russia, China, Canada, and for the last period of the project, online. In addition, the team has given seminar presentations in various academic environments as well as included our ongoing research into our teaching modules. In June 2021, the team organized an international conference on the theme of Atomic Heritage, to conclude the project.
Another form of dissemination and interaction was collaborations with artists. One key expression of this collaboration was the art exhibition “Splitting the Atom” developed in tandem with the project’s final conference and shown at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. Another crucial collaboration was a children’s workshop set up between the project and local artists in Fessenheim in France, among other things resulting in a co-authored article.
Thirdly, stakeholder interaction developed primarily with the professional groups and concerned communities we have worked with. The professional groups included physicists and engineers in the nuclear industry, as well as curators at museums with nuclear exhibitions or nuclear collections. For example, one of the engineers we met at the Leningrad nuclear power plant, later joined us for a study visit to the final repository for short-lived radioactive waste in Forsmark, Sweden. The concerned communities included residents living in the vicinity of any of our case study sites in the four countries, as well as representatives for NGOs, active in the anti-nuclear or environmental movement. To reach out to the stakeholders as well as the general public, the team members have published 12 popular science pieces and reports, as well as participated in numerous public discussions and debates. The overall publication output is mainly in English but comprises 5 different languages (English, French, German, Lithuanian, and Swedish).
For details concerning a wide range of project activities, images, and a specially designed conference report, please visit the project website https://atomicheritage.wordpress.com/.
An increasing number of national and international nuclear energy organizations today work explicitly with their “atomic heritage”. They have realized that building final repositories for spent nuclear fuel, or decommissioning a nuclear plant, are not exclusively technical challenges but also a question of handling heritage.
Despite this growing focus, academic investigations had mainly dealt with nuclear technology and heritage as separate entities. The project “Atomic Heritage goes Critical: Waste, Community and Nuclear Imaginaries” addressed this gap with the overarching aim to articulate atomic heritage as a field of academic inquiry and to generate new knowledge about its character, impact, and potential.
The research questions focused on 1) waste – e.g. how responsibility for radioactive left-overs is attributed to nuclear experts and society at large in various ways, 2) community – e.g. how the high-status identity of mono-industrial nuclear communities is negotiated in a decommissioning process, and 3) imaginaries – e.g. how past utopian-dystopian dichotomies attached to nuclear power are reinvented in relation to current issues like climate change.
The project was theoretically based in critical heritage studies, and a view on heritage as an element and expression of intensified cultural negotiation. Case studies were carried out at selected nuclear power plants and connected communities in Sweden, the UK, Russia, and France within an overall ethnographic methodological approach.
Implementation
In accordance with the project plan, the research team has explored nuclear power plants, radioactive waste storage facilities and connected communities in the four countries, employing observations, interviews, and archival sources, which were accessible due to the team members’ extraordinary language skills. Joint fieldwork was also carried out in all four countries which, among other things, resulted in several co-authored articles.
One of the few things pointed out in the project plan as probably not feasible was a visit to the Leningrad nuclear power plant in Russia – which was nevertheless accomplished, after substantial preparations, and perhaps some luck. However, Russian nuclear issues are very sensitive and agreeing to an interview has become even more risky during the last couple of years. A more unexpected empirical challenge concerned the case of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant in France, which was scheduled for shutdown, but continued to operate several years into the project. The research focus for this case was therefore reoriented from processes of community denuclearization to how the plant in fact worked as a tool for local reconciliation in Alsace following the painful legacies of WWII.
To support the focus on nuclear waste, Dr Andrei Stsiapanau became affiliated to the project. As the PI Anna Storm changed affiliations, the project was moved from Stockholm University to Linköping University in 2020. Due to the pandemic, the project’s final conference was postponed twice, and then turned into an online event.
Three critical insights
One insight gained from the project concerns differences in dominant national visions and management strategies of nuclear waste. While some countries’ waste management is generally past-oriented, reminding about glorious military pasts and thereby also constructing legitimacy, other countries’ waste management is more oriented towards the future, in terms of finding long term reliable technologies for containing the dangerous matter. There are also other temporalities at play in the imagined and realized handling of radioactive substances, for example a cyclic view of uranium as something that can be returned to “nature” and more specifically to the deep underground, from where it originally was mined.
A second important insight is how staff-animal relations at nuclear power plants (for example regarding fish, seals, crocodiles, eagle, and wild boar) in various ways perform a domestication of “nuclear natures” which do not only imply control and containment of the sublime and exceptional atom, but also denote normalization on a local community level. In turn, such an imaginative move, articulated in mundane practices in and around the nuclear power plants, becomes an expression of an embodied and overwhelming trust that we were able to detect among nuclear staff and residents living nearby a nuclear site.
A third result concerns an emerging museum curators’ logic at nuclear exhibitions which was based simultaneously on concealing and revealing the drawbacks and disasters connected to nuclear applications. This logic leads to exhibitions where a visitor, for example, can “experience” an atomic bomb detonating, in the same breath as he or she admires the inventors. This insight has deepened and nuanced previous understandings of the intended messages of the nuclear exhibition complex in the countries we have studied.
Taken together, these results show that the material, relational and representational features we sat out to investigate, analytically corresponding to our focus on waste, community, and imaginaries, proved fruitful and productive. This is also demonstrated by our collaboration with several projects and networks dealing with related issues, among them “EDUATOM” (Didactic Technologies for the Development of Nuclear Educational Tourism in the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant Region, hosted by Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), Kaunas, Lithuania), “NUCLEARWATERS” (NuclearWaters: Putting Water at the Center of Nuclear Energy, hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), and “Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Knowledge to Practice” (hosted by Kingston University, London, the UK). Most recently, yet another group of projects have been launched in different countries, where we hold our project to have had an impact on how the research problem and questions have been formulated. Overall, we believe we have contributed decisively to an advancement of atomic heritage as a field of rewarding and increasingly pertinent academic inquiry.
New research questions
A new question relates to our shared bodily experience of entering a nuclear power plant, as this is a special procedure sending very particular messages of safety and risk, hierarchies, and identities in a ritualized way. We are currently working on a co-authored paper based on this experience, which might open new avenues of investigations.
Dissemination and stakeholder interaction
The academic dissemination primarily materialized in the form of scientific articles and conference presentations. In total, the project team members have published 15 scientific articles and book chapters, and have given presentation at 34 conferences held in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US, Russia, China, Canada, and for the last period of the project, online. In addition, the team has given seminar presentations in various academic environments as well as included our ongoing research into our teaching modules. In June 2021, the team organized an international conference on the theme of Atomic Heritage, to conclude the project.
Another form of dissemination and interaction was collaborations with artists. One key expression of this collaboration was the art exhibition “Splitting the Atom” developed in tandem with the project’s final conference and shown at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. Another crucial collaboration was a children’s workshop set up between the project and local artists in Fessenheim in France, among other things resulting in a co-authored article.
Thirdly, stakeholder interaction developed primarily with the professional groups and concerned communities we have worked with. The professional groups included physicists and engineers in the nuclear industry, as well as curators at museums with nuclear exhibitions or nuclear collections. For example, one of the engineers we met at the Leningrad nuclear power plant, later joined us for a study visit to the final repository for short-lived radioactive waste in Forsmark, Sweden. The concerned communities included residents living in the vicinity of any of our case study sites in the four countries, as well as representatives for NGOs, active in the anti-nuclear or environmental movement. To reach out to the stakeholders as well as the general public, the team members have published 12 popular science pieces and reports, as well as participated in numerous public discussions and debates. The overall publication output is mainly in English but comprises 5 different languages (English, French, German, Lithuanian, and Swedish).
For details concerning a wide range of project activities, images, and a specially designed conference report, please visit the project website https://atomicheritage.wordpress.com/.