Siting Nuclear Installations at the Border

Journal for the History of Environment and Society

Historical Social Research, 2024

»Kernkraft und die Geographie europäischer Grenzen. Wie die Europäischen Gemeinschaften daran scheiterten, gemeinsame Regeln für die Standortwahl für Kernkraftwerke festzulegen«. Nuclear power plants require cooling water. When numerous nuclear plants were built in the 1970s, they were thus placed at major rivers. This caused cross-border problems, since in Europe, many rivers crossed or constituted borders. As awareness for thermal and radioactive pollution grew, border areas became hotbeds of European anti-nuclear protest. Advocates of European integration suggested that the European Communities (EC) were best positioned to resolve this issue. This article analyses the EC rulemaking attempts regarding the siting of nuclear power plants and explains why they failed. It argues that while the cross-border nature of the problem of nuclear installations at borders justified EC-level legal solutions, the geography of nuclear plants militated against supranational solutions-at a time of national vetoes and when energy security was considered a national sovereignty concern. The article is based on the analysis of primary sources from European Union and national archives. By taking the physical and political geography of nuclear energy into account, this article offers new perspectives on the role of borders and border studies, on the history of nuclear energy and society, and on the history of European integration.

A versión of this paper has been published in International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2012 This paper analyzes the evolution of public policies on nuclear energy from an international perspective highlighting an interesting sociological paradox: the opposition to the nuclear power contributed to the development of the environmental movement; and at present, the promoters of this kind of energy are including environmental arguments in their discourses: the fear of climate change and the reduction of CO2. Despite Kyoto Protocol does not accept this kind of energy as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), its promotion is carried out on the basis of environment objectives, so that the nuclear lobby is obtaining more social acceptation thanks to the environmental discourse in the last four decades. For the carrying out this research, the nuclear policies from an international level are analyzed inside a wider research about the Nuclear Debate financed by Encuentro Foundation (Spain). Resumen El artículo analiza la evolución de las políticas, a nivel planetario, sobre la energía nuclear, a partir de una interesante paradoja sociológica: siendo uno de los componentes de la Sociedad Industrial madura que más ha contribuido al crecimiento del ecologismo y el ambientalismo, por oposición, hoy las corporaciones que la promueven vienen incorporando como base argumental fundamental los propios logros del movimiento ambientalista: el miedo al cambio climático y el objetivo de reducción del CO2. Aunque el protocolo de Kyoto no acepta esa energía como Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), paradójicamente se asiste su promoción a nivel planetario en base a los principios de sostenibilidad. Lo que se define como lobby nuclear consigue pues, paradójicamente, más aceptación que nunca en las últimos cuatro décadas, gracias al discurso ambientalista. Para la realización del estudio se analizaron las políticas nucleares a nivel planetario, dentro de una investigación más amplia sobre el Debate Nuclear financiada por la Fundación Encuentro (España).

Patrick Kupper/Anna-Katharina Wöbse (Hg.), Protecting the Environment, Contemporary European History Series, (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter), 2021

The campaigns against the Czech Nuclear Power Station Temelin are perceived differently by local activists living close to the power station and by members of Austrian environmental associations. Based on interviews with villagers and with Czech and Austrian activists on the local, regional and national level and using materials compiled by local historians in village chronicles, this article retraces the Czech experience with nuclear and state power before and after the Velvet Revolution and their assessment of the foreign element of protesting Austrians. It analyses the perceptions of the nuclear problem by Czech and Austrian movements through the visual material they are using in their campaigns and the reception that certain foreign symbols, colours and slogans received in the Czech Republic. It looks at interactions and interdependences between Czech and Austrian anti-nuclear activists and analyses their different forms of political action, focussing on the transmission and re-interpretation of forms of political action across borders, on the perception of risk and political responsibility and the expectancies linked to the idea and practice of a (European) democracy. What is the impact of mental borders on the cooperation of European citizens once political borders become untied in a Unified Europe? What is the interrelation between proximity and asymmetry of activist groups from different countries who focus on the same campaign issues but come from different political cultures, have different historical experiences of dealing with conflict and of experiencing the dangers of nuclear radiation? For Keck and Sikkink ‘a transnational advocacy network includes those actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, and a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 2). The difficulties that Austrian and Czech cross-border anti-nuclear activism encounters in finding a common discourse and symbolism of action throws light on the difficulties of these networks in action.

Dissertation, University of Glasgow , 2016

Critical Policy Studies, 2015

Culture Unbound, 2021

This paper explores the construction of a nuclear power facility at Fessenheim, Alsace, and its role in the remaking of French-German post-war relations and the consolidation of the post-war peacebuilding process. The siting and materiality of nuclear energy technology, I argue, was a key component of the top-down peace-building strategy that guided reconciliation processes at the national and regional levels. This study analyses archival documents, newspapers articles, interviews with Alsatian antinuclear activists and amateur films in order to reconstruct how the site for a joint nuclear power plant at Fessenheim was chosen and how it affected cross-border interactions. Although the planning of a French-German nuclear facility at Fessenheim embodied the appeasement that characterised post-war relations at a governmental level between the two nations, its construction had limited impact on the regional reconciliation processes. However, the site of the nuclear plant became central ...

Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces: Practices, Institutions and Networks

This chapter explores the everyday experience of living in the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Through long-term ethnographic research, the chapter reveals the informal methods and understandings of nuclear space that allow people to inhabit a landscape of extreme social, economic and environmental marginalization. The chapter finds that informal activity can be used as a means to circumvent the stealthy violence of state abandonment: a tactical method of asserting agency over spaces from which you have been excluded. By framing Chernobyl as a ‘space of exception’ (Agamben, 2005), we can begin to unravel the way that informal activities are used to circumvent and challenge people’s vulnerable status of post-atomic ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998). In doing so, the Exclusion Zone’s porous nuclear borders become contested and subverted, as people and materials informally pass in and out of this official nuclear geography. Though radiation is an ever-present and unseen reality in this post-atomic landscape, so too are the intricate and embedded uses of informal activities that challenge the official narratives of nuclear space.