| 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. |
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| 3. |
- Gutting, Alicia, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Atomic Rivers : The (Un)Sustainability of Nuclear Energy from a Water Perspective
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to partly or fully shut down their nuclear plants because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm. Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature. The resulting shutd0wns of nuclear power plants – and the attempts by nuclear operators to prevent such undesired measures – raise questions about the sustainability of nuclear energy in a rapidly warming world, whereby the meaning of sustainability differs from how this concept is usually discussed in the context of nuclear energy. On this basis, this paper explores the (un)sustainability of riverine nuclear energy in past, present, and future, tracing its evolution over time from the early days of nuclear planning and construction to today’s – as of yet unfulfilled – dreams of a “nuclear renaissance”. We look at several European rivers that underwent nuclearization from the 1950s onwards, reconstructing the often harsh struggles among a diverse group of actors for access to sufficient volumes of cooling water, the fight against “thermal pollution”, the negotiations about allowed temperature limits, and the emergence of technical fixes such as cooling towers and artificial lakes as – partly successful, partly failed – solutions to such problems.
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| 4. |
- Heymann, Matthias, et al.
(författare)
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Challenging Europe: Technology, Environment, and the Quest for Resource Security
- 2020
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Ingår i: Technology and Culture. - : Project Muse. - 0040-165X .- 1097-3729. ; 61:1, s. 282-294
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new modes of transnational cooperation.
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| 5. |
- Yao, Dazhi, et al.
(författare)
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Transforming the Narrative of the History of Chinese Technology : East and West in Bertrand Gille’s Histoire des Techniques
- 2015
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Ingår i: Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientarum. - : Baltic Association of the History and Philosophy of Science. - 2228-2009 .- 2228-2017. ; 3:1, s. 9-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In his magisterial The History of Techniques, the French historian of technology Bertrand Gille (1920–1980) constructs a Western-centric world history of technology based on a technical systems approach. in doing so, he is forced to deal with the tension between Western-centric approaches and the conventional narrative of the history of chinese technology. in order to avoid internal contradictions within his world history framework, Gille reconfigures the historical narrative about ancient China’s great inventions, arguing against unidirectional technology transfer and introducing the alternative notions of technological concomitant evolution and technological exchange. While Gille integrates ancient china into the general technological development of the world, he treats china as a blocked technical system and as “the other” in the West’s technological self-perception.
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| 6. |
- Högselius, Per, 1973-, et al.
(författare)
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The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago : A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism
- 2024
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Bok (refereegranskat)abstract
- The history of nuclear energy in the former Soviet Union and its successor states has attracted growing scholarly attention in recent years. Building on the earlier work of Paul Josephson and others, STS-inspired scholars like Sonja Schmid have analysed the cultural and political genesis of the Soviet nuclear boom during the 1970s and 80s, seeking to come to terms with the “technological pride” and the belief in progress that inspired Soviet nuclear engineers. Klaus Gestwa, Stefan Guth and Roman Khandozhko elaborated on what they call Soviet nuclear technopolitics and technoscience. Per Högselius explored the history of spent nuclear fuel and fuel cycle activities in the USSR. Kate Brown’s influential book Plutopia also targets fuel cycle activities rather than nuclear energy as such, while adding to Schmid’s work in scrutinizing the culture of the Soviet nuclear inner circle. In her most recent work, Brown turns to the effects of Soviet nuclear disasters and, in particular, those of Chernobyl as an acceleration in the spread of radionuclides across the globe. That tragedy has also been the focus of a rapidly growing body of research by other scholars from different countries. Another interesting strand of nuclear-historical research focusses on specific nuclear power plant sites such as Shevchenko (Aktau) in Kazakhstan and the unfinished Crimean NPP. Authors such as Tatiana Kasperski, Andrei Stsiapanau, Egle Rindzevičiūtė and Anna Storm have further examined the USSR’s nuclear programme from a cultural heritage perspective.The proposed book will add to this growing literature, while also challenging some of the dominant narratives. Addressing the Soviet nuclear complex in its diversity, we suggest that its history can be fruitfully narrated by approaching it from a spatial perspective. At a macro-level, we propose to theorize the history of nuclear energy in the USSR as a Large Technical System (LTS), consisting of a variety of components in the form of nuclear power plants and various fuel cycle facilities (uranium mines, enrichment plants, reprocessing plants, nuclear waste storage facilities, etc.). These interact with and are dependent upon each other, often over vast distances, through what we will call “macro-entanglements”, in which transport routes come to the fore as an additional key theme in nuclear energy history. Individual nuclear facilities, for their parts, often take the form of sub-systems in their own right. When zooming in on these, we find a range of “micro-“ or “meso-entanglements” in the form of the nuclear facility’s dependence on – and its shaping of – local and regional geographies, landscapes and environments. For this reason, we propose to theorize these sub-systems as “envirotechnical” systems. The envirotechnical analytical lens has earlier been found useful for historical analysis of nuclear energy, as demonstrated by Sara Pritchard in the case of France and Japan, while our “entanglement” perspective takes inspiration from Gabrielle Hecht.Seen through this spatial lens, the history of nuclear energy in the Soviet Union can be thought of as an evolving “archipelago” of envirotechnical systems that interact with each other across – and beyond – the USSR. We borrow this Solzhenitsyn-inspired metaphor from the Russian anti-nuclear-weapons activist Alexander Yemelyanenkov, who used it to analyse the history of Soviet nuclear weapons. However, we propose to extend the “archipelago” analysis so that it covers not only the military, but also and above all the civilian nuclear history of the USSR, while mobilizing the metaphor as part of our LTS and envirotechnical analysis. This is in line with Robert Jacobs’ argument that both spheres, the civil and the military aspects of nuclear energy, should be thought of together as the technology is the same but the applications differ. It may also be observed that forced labour and military detachments were used to build large parts of the Soviet nuclear LTS, thus further justifying the implicit link to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Apart from Solzhenitsyn using the archipelago metaphor describing forced labour camps, members of the Soviet and Russian nuclear community also described the network of closed “atomic towns” as an archipelago.Our main argument will be that by putting the entanglements mentioned above at the centre of analysis, we are able to discern and understand key events and trends as they unfold at several interconnected geographical levels. This allows us to grasp the most important aspects of the long-term evolution of the Soviet nuclear archipelago, and what the historian of Soviet technology Paul Josephson has called “atomic-powered communism”.We make ample use, in a synthesizing way, of the existing literature on Soviet nuclear history, as referred to above, while also adding substantial new primary sources. We have already collected the archival documents of relevance, comprising materials from the Soviet Ministry of Energetics and Electrification (Minenergo), the Gidroproekt hydraulic (and later on nuclear) planning and design institute, Gosplan, and several Soviet Ukrainian and Soviet Lithuanian institutions. This was possible through visits to archives in Moscow, Samara, Vilnius and Kiev before the onset of Russia’s war on Ukraine. We also make use of the private archive of Dima Litvinov, campaigner from Greenpeace Russia during the 1990s. Contemporary literature, published in the form of specific monographs and scientific articles, comprise another important corpus of sources. Publications by leading nuclear actors like Dollezhal, Vorobiev, Sidorenko, Alexandrov, Koryakin, Margulis and Medvedev are to be named here. The specialized journal Atomnaya Energiya and the publisher Energoatomizdat have also been useful. Furthermore, publications on specific nuclear power plants for the occasion of anniversaries provide valuable insight into the internal discourses among scientific-technical personnel. This material is accompanied by materials from digitally available Soviet newspaper archives.
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| 7. |
- 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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| 8. |
- Gutting, Alicia, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Geographies of Nuclear Energy : An Introduction
- 2024
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Ingår i: Historical Social Research. - 0172-6404. ; 49:1, s. 7-31
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- »Geographien der Kernenergie. Eine Einführung«. Nuclear energy has long attracted the attention of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. With this HSR Special Issue, we would like to push the scholarly frontier by highlighting the geographies of nuclear energy in the past and present. Nuclear energy is inherently interwoven with geography. We argue that to fully appreciate and grasp nuclear energy’s geographical and spatial dimensions, approaches from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields are needed. This special issue thus includes contributions from history, geography, political science, technology assessment, science and technology studies (STS), and other fields. This article introduces this topic by outlining the state of the art of the geographies of nuclear energy and discusses different conceptual frameworks of how to understand nuclear-space interactions. In addition, the individual articles in this issue are briefly presented here and discussed within the research context. The articles themselves cover the geography of nuclear energy from beginning to end: from the mining of uranium, the planning and construction of nuclear power plants, the formation of public resistance, and the cooling of nuclear energy sites as well as the evolution of research centres and, last but not least, the political control and storage of nuclear waste. The collection of articles published here were part of the double session “Geographies of Nuclear Energy,” presented at the RGSIBG Annual International Conference 2021, and of the session “Atomic Rivers,” presented at the ESEH Conference 2023.
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| 9. |
- 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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| 10. |
- Gutting, Alicia, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Atomic Rivers : The (Un)sustainability of Nuclear Power in an Age of Climate Change
- 2023
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The increasingly noticeable effects of climate change are leading to increased advocacy of nuclear energy. Even though the so-called nuclear renaissance has come to an abrupt halt, especially due to the Fukushima disaster, proponents of nuclear energy are promoting it as an inevitable solution to decarbonise electricity production. Yet it has been known since the 1960s that waste heat from nuclear power plants has devastating effects on river ecosystems. Even though countries like Germany and Switzerland have taken measures to limit the thermal load of the Rhine and Aare, the Rhine is still the most thermally polluted river in the world in relation to its water resources. This raises the question of whether the socio-technical promise of sustainability of the current nuclear power plants is at all tenable from a river perspective.On this basis, this paper explores the (un)sustainability of riverine nuclear energy in past, present, and future, tracing its evolution over time from the early days of nuclear planning and construction to today’s – as of yet unfulfilled – dreams of a “nuclear renaissance”. We look at several European rivers that underwent nuclearization from the 1950s onwards, reconstructing the often-harsh struggles among a diverse group of actors for access to sufficient volumes of cooling water, the fight against “thermal pollution”, the negotiations about allowed temperature limits, and the emergence of technical fixes such as cooling towers and artificial lakes as – partly successful, partly failed – solutions to such problems.
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