| 1. |
- Evens, Siegfried
(författare)
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Streams, Steams, and Steels : A Transnational History of Risk Regulation in Nuclear Power Plants (1850–1985)
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Water is essential to produce nuclear energy and prevent nuclear disasters. As light water reactors are increasingly seen as a solution to achieving a sustainable energy transition and battling the climate crisis, it is more important than ever to investigate the risks of using water for nuclear power production. However, the reactor technologies that manage all that water and steam – pressure vessels, steam generators, pipes, valves, and pumps – have not received much attention from historians, STS scholars, and risk sociologists. Therefore, this dissertation aims to study the risk regulation of these crucial reactor components and materials by national and international actors from a historical perspective.Relying on archival sources from the US, France, Sweden, and multiple international organisations, as well as on interviews, this dissertation aims to write a new, longue durée history of nuclear safety, going back to the origins of water and steam risk management in the nineteenth century. Such a historical perspective on nuclear risk regulation reveals two important insights. Firstly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the usage of water and steam technologies in nuclear reactors revealed new types of risks. These ‘ambi-nuclear risks’ are a hybrid of older steam risks, such as leaks, breaks, and explosions, and new risks of radiation and contamination. Secondly, between the 1950s and 1980s, new regimes were created in the US, France, and Sweden to regulate these risks. Initially, during the 1950s, non-nuclear steam regulations were applied directly to the first nuclear power plants. Yet, as power plants increased in size, accidents occurred, and nuclear technologies became increasingly controversial, ‘ambi-nuclear risk regimes’ were created to adapt or ‘nuclearise’ the older regulations. They included new safety measures and methodologies that were directed toward preventing radiation releases, but at the same time they mobilised older technologies, institutions, knowledges, and ideas related to thermal hydraulics and metallurgy. Ambi-nuclear risk regimes were shaped by a wide variety of historical actors through negotiating boundaries between ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ knowledges, components, risks, and regulations. Private or semi-private engineering associations played a particularly vital role in this.This thesis thus shows how nuclear safety as we know it today became nuclear as the result of a transnational long-term process that was greatly determined by much older non-nuclear water and steam risks. The results of this dissertation contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on risk, nuclear technologies, and water in fields like History of Technology, Environmental3History, STS, and Risk Sociology. Most importantly, the thesis expands the time frame in which nuclear risk has traditionally been studied. It challenges dominant conceptions of nuclear power as innovative or exceptional, instead connecting questions of nuclear risk to longer historical developments in water management and industrialisation. This demonstrates the importance of historical contingency for understanding risk and preventing (nuclear) disasters.
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| 2. |
- Klüppelberg, Achim, 1990-
(författare)
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The Nuclear Waters of the Soviet Union : Hydro-Engineering and Technocratic Culture in the Nuclear Industry
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- After the development of nuclear weapons, civil applications were seen as a way through which protagonists of Soviet modernity could embrace a new future, which Josephson called atomic-powered communism. Where hydro-powered communism had reached its boundaries, nuclear energy was to take over. Crucial parts of the Soviet nuclear industry were based on the use of water. The mantle of progressiveness, innovation, and status previously embodied by the hydropower industry was taken up by emerging nuclear technocrats. While scholars have readily engaged nuclear power as a topic, they have neglected its hydraulic roots and hydro-nuclear entanglements, especially for cooling and other technological purposes. An important but yet overlooked influence came from the creation of Soviet hydraulic-hydropower technological systems.This doctoral thesis fills a twofold gap in the existing literature. First, water is placed at the centre of an analysis of the Soviet nuclear programme. Pipes, valves, tanks, pumps, pressure mechanics and gravity approaches all use much older inventions and engineering mindsets, which are generally not considered in the existing historiography concerning nuclear energy. Aquatic systems, riverbeds, industrial improvements, watersheds, and fluid pathways of potential contamination have not sufficiently been linked to the rapid development of the nuclear industry, even though toxic radioisotopes were spread across the globe.Second, it analyses how technocratic culture influenced nuclear decision-making processes. Therefore, discourses of siting Soviet nuclear power plants in the period between 1954 and 1991 are analysed under a water and technocratic culture perspective to tap more accurately into the links between the nuclear industry, hydraulic engineering, economic imperatives, power and hierarchy, as well as state-communist ideology. The dominant culture present at the construction site of a nuclear power plant determines the circumstances, within which regimes of nuclear safety are defined and operated. If we want to understand the underlying reasons for why nuclear safety was mismanaged in the USSR, we need to investigate the details and everyday decision-making process made by people on the ground, also in order to see which mistakes should not be repeated in the future. Therefore, this work proposes an original technocratic culture analysis to explain these issues within a Soviet context, based on three subcategories designated as political, nuclear inner circle, and safety culture.Consequently, insights from these investigations shall serve to broaden our understanding of the phenomenon of the Soviet nuclear industry’s fast development, by answering the main research question of how technocratic culture influenced hydraulic engineering practices in the Soviet nuclear industry and how this affected safety. The two foci, water and technocratic culture, are interlinked and thus investigated together. By highlighting hydro-nuclear entanglements at crucial nuclear installations throughout the USSR, this thesis contributes to a more sophisticated understanding of the environmental consequences such a technological system entails, stressing the necessity for nuclear safety under the long shadow of the state-communist legacy that continues to influence how we live in Europe today.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Arzyutov, Dmitry V.
(författare)
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Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold War : Perspectives from the Russian North
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- To what extent the environmental history of the Arctic can move beyond thedivide between Indigenous peoples and newcomers or vernacular and academicways of knowing? The present dissertation answers this question by developing thenotion of an environmental archive. Such an archive does not have particular referenceto a given place but rather it refers to the complex network that marks the relationsbetween paper documents and human and non-human agencies as they are able towork together and stabilise the conceptualisation of a variety of environmentalobjects. The author thus argues that the environment does not only containinformation about the past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive isable to produce it through the relational nature of human-environment interactions.Through the analysis of five case studies from the Russian North, the reader isinvited to go through various forms of environmental archives which in turnembrace histories of a number of disciplines such as palaeontology, biology,anthropology, and medicine. Every case or a “layer” is presented here as a contactzone where Indigenous and academic forms of knowledge are not opposed to eachother but, on the contrary, are able to interact and consequently affect the globaldiscussions about the Russian Arctic. This transnational context is pivotal for all thecases discussed in the dissertation. Moreover, by putting the Cold War with itstensions between two superpowers at the chronological center of the present work,the author aims to reveal the multidimensionality of in situ interactions with, forinstance, the paleontological remains or the traces of all-terrain vehicles and theirinvolvement into broader science transnational cooperations and competitions. As aresult, the heterogeneous archives allow us to reconsider the environmental historyof the Russian North and the wider Arctic and open a new avenue for future researchtranscending the geopolitical and epistemic borders of knowledge production.
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| 5. |
- Avango, Dag, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Colonizing the poles
- 2015
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Ingår i: Seminar : the monthly symposium. - New Delhi : Seminar Publications. - 0037-1947.
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 6. |
- Avango, Dag, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Swedish Explorers, In-Situ Knowledge, and Resource-Based Business in the Age of Empire
- 2018
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of History. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0346-8755 .- 1502-7716. ; 43, s. 324-347
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The period from 1870 to 1914 plays a unique role in the history of natural resource exploration and extraction. This article analyses, from a Swedish viewpoint, the connections between two actor categories of special importance in this context: scientific-geographical explorers and industrial actors. The article examines their activities in three broadly defined regions: the Arctic, Russia, and Africa. We show that the Swedes generally had far-reaching ambitions, on par with those of the large imperial powers. In some cases, notably in Africa, Sweden was not able to compete with the larger imperial powers; but in other cases, such as the exploration of the Arctic – from Spitsbergen to Siberia – and the industrial exploitation of coal at Spitsbergen and petroleum in Russia’s colonial periphery, Swedish actors played a leading role, in competition with players from the larger European nations. Our paper shows that scientific exploration and industry were closely linked, and that foreign policy also influenced the shaping of these links. We distinguish different types of knowledge produced by the Swedish actors, pointing to local, situated knowledge as the most important type for many resource-based businesses, although modern, scientific knowledge was on the increase during this period.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Balmaceda, Margarita, et al.
(författare)
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Energy materiality : A conceptual review of multi-disciplinary approaches
- 2019
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Ingår i: Energy Research & Social Science. - : Elsevier BV. - 2214-6296 .- 2214-6326. ; 56
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This jointly authored essay reviews recent scholarship in the social sciences, broadly understood, that focuses on the materiality of energy. Although this work is extraordinarily diverse in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary influences and its theoretical and methodological commitments, we discern four areas of convergence and divergence that we term the locations, uses, relationalities, and analytical roles of energy materiality. We trace these convergences and divergences through five recent scholarly conversations: materiality as a constraint on actors' behavior; historical energy systems; mobility, space and scale; discourse and power via energy materialities; and energy becoming material.
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| 9. |
- Duwig, Christophe
(creator_code:cre_t)
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Exhibition : Towards the energy of the future – the invisible revolution behind the electrical socket
- 2023
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Konstnärligt arbeteabstract
- Energy Crisis! Electricity Price drama! The threat of global energy poverty! Media are generous with spectacular titles. Yes, energy is important, and yes, nearly all societal challenges are connected to how we convert, distribute and use energy. Therefore, the KTH Energy Platform and KTH Library presented an exhibition with the theme Towards the energy of the future – the invisible revolution behind the electrical socket.The exhibition displayed showcase illustrations from the book made by Lotta Waesterberg Tomasson, as well as books related to energy and electricity from the KTH Library's collections. In parallell with the exhibition, a series of live popular science lunch seminars with presentations of selected chapters of the book took place. As part of the exhibition, students from KTH's Electrical Engineering program also showcased exciting projects that connect to the anthology’s contents, made with materials and equipment from the student-driven ELAB and “Studentverkstan”. Visitors were also invited to share their reflections and ideas on energy.
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| 10. |
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