NUCLEARDECOM

Thirty years ago, in a pioneering book addressing the “social links to nuclear decommissioning,” cultural geographer Martin Pasqualetti wrote: “Little information on decommissioning exists which may be applied in a social science context. This fact is reflected in the narrowness and inaccessibility of the literature.”[1] Pasqualetti revealed a problematic divide between expert knowledge production and social analyses of nuclear decommissioning, which remains unresolved today. A cursory exploration of the technical literature suffices to realize that the decommissioning field has grown considerably since the early 1980s[2], yet social scientists and historians have only sporadically engaged with it.

Evidence from recent case-studies shows that nuclear decommissioning is not just the removal of a nuclear plant from a site (a space), but a transformative process in itself, with deep socio-ecological implications, which so far have remained largely unexplored.[1] How do the different characteristics of reactor’s technologies, ecological conditions, and local communities influence site-specific decommissioning strategies?[2] Experts and regulators have grown aware of the importance of attending to the cultural and organizational aspects of decommissioning projects, but in their assessments they tend to reproduce top-down approaches like the “social acceptability of risk” paradigm and reductionist formulas like “stakeholder interests” and “labor motivational training.”[3]

NUCLEARDECOM addresses these critical issues through a novel interdisciplinary approach that attends to the technical, environmental, and social aspects of nuclear decommissioning in tandem. In particular, it explores the following dimensions: 1) Identity, role, and processes of knowledge production of decommissioning experts; 2) Emergence and characteristics of the global decommissioning industry; 3) Interconnections between technological and socio-ecological problems of specific decommissioning projects, including common practices of labor organization and safety.[4]

[1] Martin J. Pasqualetti and K. David Pijawka, “Unsiting Nuclear Power Plants: Decommissioning Risks and their Land Use Context,” Professional Geographer 48 (1), 1996, pp. 57-69; Angelica Greco and Daisaku Yamamoto, “Geographical political economy and nuclear power plant closures,” Geoforum 106, Nov. 2019, pp. 234-243; Melissa Haller, Michael Haines, and Daisaku Yamamoto, “ The End of the Nuclear Era: Nuclear Decommissioning and Its Economic Impacts on U.S. Counties,” Growth and Change 48 (4), 2017: 640-660; Andrew Blowers and Pieter Leroy, Power, politics and environmental inequality: A theoretical and empirical analysis of the process of ‘peripheralisation’,” Environmental Politics 3 (2), 1994, pp. 197-228. See also Andrew Blowers, The Legacy of Nuclear Power, cit.; Martin J. Pasqualetti, “Introducing the Geosocial Context of Nuclear Decommissioning: Policy Implications in the U.S. and Great Britain,” Geoforum 20 (4), 1989, pp. 381-396.

[2] Young A Suh, Carol Hornibrook, and Man-Sung Yim, “Decisions on nuclear decommissioning strategies: Historical review,” Progress in Nuclear Energy 106, 2018, pp. 34-43. Michele Laraia (Ed.), Advances and Innovations in Nuclear Decommissioning, cit.

[3] See, for example, Michele Laraia, “The cultural aspects of decommissioning,” in Michele Laraia (Ed.), Advances and Innovations in Nuclear Decommissioning, London: Woodhead Publishing, 2017, pp. 54-72.

[4] From this point of view this research will complement the existing literature on occupational risk, safety regulations, and subcontracting in the nuclear maintenance sector: Yuki Tanaka, “Nuclear Power Plant Gypsies in High-Tech Society,” in Joe Moore (Ed.), The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise and Resistance since 1945, M.E. Sharpe for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1997, pp. 251-271; Constance Perrin, Shouldering Risk: The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Gabrielle Hecht, “Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51 (4) (October 2009), pp. 896-926; Annie Thébaud-Mony, Nuclear Servitude: Subcontracting and Health in the French Civil Nuclear Industry, Baywood Publishing Company, 2011; Paul Jobin, “Dying for TEPCO? Fukushima’s Nuclear Contract Workers,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9, Issue 18 No 3, May 2, 2011; Gabrielle Hecht, “Nuclear Janitors: Contract Workers at the Fukushima Reactors and Beyond,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 11, Issue 1, No 2, Jan. 7, 2013.

A new approach