NUCLEARDECOM

A multi-media Research Project by The Rachel Carson Centre at LMU Munich, Nuclear Decommissioning Collaborative and Büchner Filmproduktion 2025-2029

What happens to nuclear power plants and facilities when their productive life comes to an end Addressing this issue is urgent at a time when nuclear energy is presented as a “green” solution to the climate crisis. (Dis)Empowered Communities tackles this complex question by advancing the first comparative, multisited transdisciplinary study of nuclear decommissioning. Treated as a marginal problem until the mid-1970s, nuclear decommissioning is now an established subfield of the nuclear industry and a fast-growing global market opportunity for dismantling, decontamination, smelting, recycling, and redevelopment companies. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that around the world two hundred nuclear power plants (NPPs) have been retired and two hundred more reactors will be shut down globally by 2050, but so far only twenty-one reactors have been fully decommissioned (IAEA, 2023). Despite the magnitude of the problem, debates on the green energy transition include nuclear energy as a climate-friendly alternative to carbon-emitting technologies. Nuclear technology’s ‘green’ potential, however, is challenged when considering the back end of its productive life.

Decommissioning involves deeply transformative processes. Not only these activities cause visible spatial and ecological alterations through the production, transportation, and treatment of waste, and the discharge of decontamination byproducts into the environment, but also cause dramatic uncertainties about the future of host communities for whom nuclear power production is the major source of revenues, jobs, and social identity. Decommissioning projects take several decades (sometimes more than one hundred years), during which multiple generations of managers, workers, and host communities interact, while responding to unforeseen problems. While experts, industry, and regulators continue to assess and invest in technological systems, financial schemes, and guidelines for safely retiring obsolete NPPs, they have only marginally addressed the problems faced by host communities and the future economic and ecological redevelopment of decommissioned sites. (Dis)Empower Communities challenges this top-down, expert-only approach to nuclear decommissioning by advancing an unprecedented comparative study of decommissioning sites and by implementing a set of transformative initiatives that aim at:
1) providing local communities with evidence-based advice on how to organize and prepare for post-decommissioning redevelopment
2) changing regulatory standards for nuclear decommissioning processes by inviting policy-makers to include socioecological and cultural factors into decommissioning plan requirements;
3) giving visibility to nuclear decommissioning as an integral part of NPPs life-cycle, including costs and socioecological impacts, to stimulate informed public debates on the opportunity of future investments in nuclear power production.