Erik Isberg: Why was it so difficult for utopian technologies to become realised?

Achim Klüppelberg , 2023-02-20

The Division’s PhD-Candidate Erik Isberg wrote an essay for Sveriges Radio P1 (Radio Sweden), about the question why throughout history, it was so difficult to realise potential technologies that fostered utopian promises – at least in theory. Below you find an English translation of his text that was originally published here on Sverigesradio’s website today on 20 February 2023 at 6am. You can also download the text as .mp3 under the same link!

Erik Isberg, historian

A misconception continues throughout the history of online doctors

Technology has utopian potential, but why is it so difficult to realise it? Erik Isberg is looking for an answer in the history of technological remote care.

One afternoon in Boston in 1876, physician Clarence John Blake saw a telephone for the first time. I imagine him gently picking up the phone and holding it to his heart, whereupon his friend Alexander Graham Bell, who had been showing his new invention, looked at him questioningly. Why didn’t he hold the phone to his ear, as was intended? They began to discuss what kind of device they had in front of them. Their notions of the phone differed. Where Graham Bell saw a means of communication, Blake saw a kind of electronic distance stethoscope. The possibilities, Blake said, were enormous. Around Boston, people would hold the phone to their chests and let their heartbeats travel through the newly drawn-out telephone lines, finally landing in a liaison center where Blake and his colleagues sat ready to listen and diagnose.

A couple of years later, Blake was forced to state that despite diligent attempts, he was “nowhere near” to get a good enough sound quality. There would never be a liaison centre. The patients pressed their phones to their chests, but Blake only heard noise.

The dreams of practicing care remotely, despite Blake’s failure, have hardly disappeared. Today, the collection of health data constitutes a billion-dollar industry, app companies offer doctor’s visits via video calls, where crackly telephone lines have been replaced with high-resolution front cameras. In 2016, the then government and Sweden’s municipalities and regions decided that Sweden will be the world’s best country when it comes to digital care. Communication technology has never, the agreement wrote, offered such great opportunities.

On TikTok, a large amount of followers can take part in KaisTheSurgeon’s attempts to perform surgeries remotely. With the expansion of the 5G network, the idea is that remotely controlled scalpels will be able to carry out operations with the patient in one country, and the surgeon in another. While waiting for human patients, KaisTheSurgeon is allowed to hold on to fruit. In his almost hypnotic clips, he elegantly dissects grapes, bananas and oranges without being in the room himself.

When KaisTheSurgeon fillets an orange that is in the room next door, the future seems for a while both bright and high-tech. But while utopian promises of technological revolutions are succeeding each other, many of healthcare’s central problems don’t seem to be going away at all; It concerns accessibility, equality, staff density. Why is it so difficult to realize the utopian potential of technology?

The physician and medical historian Jeremy A. Greene argues in his book The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth that one reason why those who have made grand promises of technological innovations often found it difficult to realize them is a one-eyed focus on technology itself. Just because a technology exists and works, it is not obvious that you know how it will be used, or who will benefit from it.

In the late 1800’s, it wasn’t just Blake who experimented with the telephone. Exactly what one would use it for was unclear. It was used for live broadcasts of concerts as well as for private conversations. Gradually, it became clear that the phone had created a new kind of room: where you could be physically apart but still close. The voice could be disconnected from the body. But the telephone also became a symbol of modernity’s anonymous and lonely existence, where thin telephone lines were the only thing that bound the isolated individuals together. In Franz Kafka’s The Castle, the telephone is the tool of faceless bureaucracy. Protagonist K watches in despair as the bureaucrats make their calls, but what is actually being said and who it is that says it, remains unclear.

In healthcare, during the first decades of the 1900s, the telephone came to have an opposite symbolism. Rather than marking distance, it became an expression of a modern and alert medical profession that was constantly present. A doctor who didn’t answer the phone was not only archaic, but also bad at his job. In the United States, the new doctor role was summed up with a slogan: The doctor is on call.

Over time, other communication technologies came into the picture. But while they often worked excellently, Greene shows how this still wasn’t enough for them to be long-term successful. He finds one such example in a pilot project in Harlem, New York, in the early 1970s. In poor areas of America’s major cities, it was not uncommon at this time for an area to share a television antenna, which was then connected by telephone cables to the households around it. A group of doctors in Harlem realized that these local cable networks could be used to organize video meetings, thus reaching a group of patients who were used to a racist care system and were reluctant to seek care.

A local telemedicine system began to take shape: film cameras were rigged up in assembly halls around Harlem and nurses who themselves lived in the area were on hand to assist. The cable network was owned by the residents themselves. Although the project was not perfect, it showed a way forward for a democratically anchored remote care, which put the needs of the most vulnerable at the center. But this was not enough. In 1977, the project was discontinued. State money was running out and local cable networks had begun to be bought up by major telecom companies, with the aim of creating a national television market. Economics, not technology, decided the outcome.

If everything had instead been just about the performance of the technology, the story would have been different. Then all it took was for Blake’s liaison center to work is a good enough sound quality and the video calls in Harlem had continued as long as there were patients. Our delight in spectacular technical solutions obscures the view, all that other stuff – money, people, knowledge – crowds into the background.

The path from Clarence John Blake’s heartbeat liaison center to KaisTheSurgeon’s viral fruit surgeries may not be as long as it might seem. They both represent a utopian view of technology, which captures the potential of new technology but at the same time misses everything that is around and that is necessary for the technology to work. After all, it doesn’t really matter if the phone can perceive one’s heartbeat if there is no doctor to call. The opposite of presence, recalls technology historian Hannah Zeavin, is not distance, but absence. In KaisTheSurgeon’s comments section, one of his followers writes laconically: “That orange probably gets better health care than me”.

—

Literature:

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Jeremy A. Greene, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure. A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).

Nuclear Power in Times of Climate Change and the Water Risks Around It – Environmental History Now

Sofia Jonsson , 2022-11-14

Alicia Gutting is one of three doctoral students, active in the ERC-project Nuclearwaters at the Division and supervised by prof. Per Högselius. In the thesis „The Nuclear Rhine“ she is researching transnational nuclear risk perception in Austria, Switzerland, France and Germany from the 1960s to 2018. In November the Environmental History Now blog published a text by Alicia on nuclear power, climate change and water risks focusing geographically on the Rhine river. Read an extract below, and get the link to the full text.

Low water levels at sunset, Upper Rhine in Karlsruhe Maxau (2018, next to the Rhine bridge between Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate). Photo by Alicia Gutting.

When I decided to write my PhD thesis on the history of the nuclear Rhine in the summer of 2018, the front pages of the newspapers were dominated by news of the record summer and that several nuclear power plants on the Rhine had to be shut down. Headlines focused on the topics of the low water level of the Rhine and to what extent the use of cooling water can affect flora and fauna, but also the danger posed by a lack of cooling water for the operation of nuclear power plants. By then, I had already planned to take a closer look at the effects of heat waves on the operation of nuclear power plants. In the course of my research, I found out that while heat waves are a problem, the thermal load on water bodies caused by the recirculation of cooling water is an equally pressing issue.

The Rhine River basin is, in relation to its flow per watershed, the most thermally polluted river basin globally mainly due to nuclear power plants. Thermoelectric power plants such as coal and nuclear power plants are major drivers of thermal pollution. Even though the European Union has set a limit of three degrees Celsius, the limit is exceeded by five degrees Celsius every year. The majority of thermal excess heat comes from nuclear and coal power plants that were built in the 1970s and 1980s.[1]

At the end of the 1960s, a planning boom began in the countries along the Rhine. Switzerland was one of the countries that wanted to roll out nuclear power in a big way and even slowly turned away from its role as the pioneer of hydropower. In addition, Germany and France also wanted to use the water resources of the Rhine for cooling purposes, which quickly led to conflicts on the fair distribution of cooling water. Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands planned to build roughly around twenty-five nuclear power plants in the Rhine River basin (including the Aare and the Moselle), which would have made the Rhine one of the most nuclearized river basins in the world.[2] Especially problematic was that energy companies were tempted to build nuclear power plants without external cooling systems as experts deemed the water resources of the Rhine to be sufficient.

In Germany, nuclear accidents hardly played a role in the early risk perception of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This is because the broad public knowledge about the extreme effects of a nuclear accident was almost non-existent. Instead, the focus was on the immediate effects of nuclear power plants that were unavoidable during operation, such as thermal pollution of water bodies. It was also in these early years that water management authorities were the most vocal administrative opponents of nuclear energy. Political supporters of nuclear energy tried to counteract the opposition by handing over water competences to the Federal Ministry of Atomic Energy. However, this decision did not lead to the desired decrease in criticism. In the 1970s, criticism regarding water became even louder when it came to the thermal pollution of the Rhine and the Weser.[3]

Source: Nuclear Power in Times of Climate Change and the Water Risks Around It – Environmental History Now.

The rise and fall of the Nord Stream pipeline: a brief history (part 2: the fall)

Sofia Jonsson , 2022-10-24

The rise and fall of the Nord Stream pipeline: a brief history (part 2: the fall)

In summer 2011 laying of the first Nord Stream 1 pipe was completed. Italian pipe-laying vessels did the job. The second of the two Nord Stream 1 pipes followed a year later.

After Nord Stream 1’s inauguration the debate about it lost momentum for some time. The pipeline apparently operated smoothly.

The debate resurfaced in June 2015, when Gazprom and five European energy companies announced their agreement to build Nord Stream 2. The deal was very controversial due to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support to separatist military forces in Donetsk and Luhansk.

A bad omen for the future came in early November 2015, when an unmanned underwater vehicle was found on the Baltic Sea floor, off the Swedish island of Öland, just next to one of the two Nord Stream I pipes. It was loaded with explosives.

The Swedish Armed Forces later confirmed that it was a Swedish military vehicle. It had gone astray during a military exercise held elsewhere in the Baltic Sea several months earlier. This was in the midst of the European refugee crisis and the event didn’t make many headlines.

There was a fierce debate about whether Nord Stream 2 was actually needed. Critics noted EU gas demand, after half a century of rapid growth, had reached a plateau level and even seemed to be set for decline. No future growth in demand was expected. So why build a new pipeline?

Proponents of Nord Stream countered by pointing out that natural gas had a key role to play in the European energy transition: Russian or not, natural gas was a flexible source of electricity that could compensate for irregularities in wind and solar electricity production.

Proponents of Nord Stream 2 also pointed to another critical trend: internal West European gas production was declining helplessly, especially in the Netherlands. Internal EU production collapsed during the 2010s, falling by nearly two-thirds (!). Who would cover the deficit?

The EU Commission’s answer was: “Let the market decide!” Since Russia offered the cheapest gas, its exports increased massively in the increasingly liberalized EU gas market. Russia’s share of EU imports climbed from 31% in 2010 to 40% in 2016 and then stayed on that level.

Over time, this growing Russian dominance made EU agencies and national governments increasingly suspicious (while gas companies remained happy). The EU commission changed its mind about Nord Stream 2.

There were also critics on the other side of the Atlantic. Already the Obama administration lobbied against Nord Stream 2. This served two purposes: preventing Russian geopolitical influence in NATO member states and boosting US shale gas exports to Europe.

In the meantime preparations for laying Nord Stream 2 started. Several Swedish coastal municipalities wished to become involved in the project logistics. The Swedish Foreign Ministry sought to prevent them, but in vain.

Starting in October 2017, 52,000 Nord Stream 2 pipes were brought to the port of Karlshamn in southern Sweden, for temporary storage. This meant a welcome additional source of income for the Swedes. In 2018 the pipes started to be lowered into the Baltic Sea.

Then, Donald Trump stepped up the drama by imposing sanctions on companies that were involved in planning and constructing Nord Stream 2.

in December 2019 Allseas, a pipelaying company contracted by Nord Stream 2, gave in to US pressure. It abandoned the project, pulled out its vessel and moved it to Kristiansand in southern Norway.

This could not stop the project. It merely delayed it. Nord Stream 2 contracted a Russian pipelaying vessel and completed construction in September 2021. An intense struggle followed: should the pipeline be allowed to become operational or not?

Completion of Nord Stream 2 coincided with federal elections in Germany, which brought to power not only the Social Democrats, but also the Liberals and the Greens, which were much more critical to Russian gas than Angela Merkel’s resigning government.

The decisive blow to the project came with Germany’s decision to suspend certification of the pipeline on 22 February 2022, as a punishment on Russia for recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics.

Two days later, Russia launched a full-scale military assault on the rest of Ukraine, including Kiev. Nord Stream 2 filed for bankruptcy already on 1 March 2022.

In June the gas flows along Nord Stream 1 were reduced by 60% “due to renovation work” and in July it was totally shut down for maintenance. EU governments started to prepare for a winter without Russian gas.

A turbine from one of the compressor stations was sent to Canada for technical overhaul, enabled by an exception from the sanctions. After 10 days this turbine was back in operation and the gas flow resumed, though only at the previous 40% level.

A week later the flow was reduced again to a mere 20% due to “technical problems” with one of the turbines. Shortly afterwards, on 31 August, the pipeline was fully closed due to “repair works” and more “technical problems” (Gazprom cited an oil leak in one of the turbines).

Then, on 26 September, several leaks in all four subsea pipelines were found in the Danish and Swedish economic zones. It quickly became clear that it was a result of violent sabotage. It remains to be seen whether Nord Stream 1 and 2 will ever go into operation again.

• • •

The rise and fall of the Nord Stream pipeline: a brief history (part 1: the rise)

Sofia Jonsson , 2022-10-17

The Division has a tradition of being active in social media, and especially on Twitter. Several from our faculty and researchers tweets opinions, about research, publications and other news of interest. Just recently Per Högselius, professor of history of technology, contributed to the general level of knowledge at Twitter with two threads on the rise and fall of the Nord Stream piplien. The first is published below as a full text. Enjoy!

The rise and fall of the Nord Stream pipeline: a brief history (part 1: the rise)

Tweeted by Per Högselius on October 3, 2022.

During the Cold War all Soviet gas exports to continental Western Europe took the route through a narrow corridor in Ukraine and Czechoslovakia. Of the capitalist countries, only Finland received Soviet gas through a separate pipeline.

However, both Europe and Moscow early on eyed the need for diversification of the routes. There were plans to build a pipeline through Poland and East Germany, which made perfect geographical sense. But politically, Poland was regarded as unreliable after the 1981 events there.

In the 1970s and 1980s Swedish gas visionaries negotiated with Moscow about extending the Finnish pipeline to eastern Sweden. But Sweden’s low electricity prices made gas unattractive. Today, Stockholm remains the only EU capital that is not connected to the European gas grid.

After the collapse of communism emerging Russia-Ukraine conflicts led to renewed interest in alternative supply routes. From October 1992 Gazprom disrupted flows to Ukraine. Ukraine, facing a debt crisis, was accused of stealing gas reserved for West European customers.

Major new pipeline capacities were taken into operation through Belarus and Poland, with EU support, in the late 1990s. But Russia viewed Belarus as a troublesome partner. In February 2004 Gazprom cut deliveries to Belarus, which had proven unable to pay for its gas.

Then came Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in winter 2004-2005. Gazprom and the Kremlin, along with the Germans, concluded that the time had now finally come to build the Baltic Sea pipeline, which would once and for all serve to make the gas trade independent of Belarus and Ukraine.

A Baltic Sea pipeline was of interest to Britain, too, which from the early 1990s became interested in Russian gas imports. Eastern Sweden, though, continued to be less fascinated by the prospects of Russian gas. Hence the Baltic Sea pipeline would have to circumvent Sweden.

In the 1990s and early 2000s there were different possible route under discussions, notably

1. From Kaliningrad to Denmark and Britain (found feasible in a 1992 study)
2. From Finland to Germany (found feasible in a 1997 study)
3. Directly from the St. Petersburg area to Germany

Gazprom and Finland’s Neste set up a joint venture called North Transgas to explore option #2. But eventually option #3 won out, because why bother to include Finland when you could do without such a small, insignificant, but potentially problematic transit country?

Greifswald/Lubmin in northeastern Germany was eyed as a perfect landing point. A huge old nuclear power complex was being shut down there following Germany’s reunification, and investors hoped to use the infrastructure at the site by replacing nuclear with gas power plants.

Britain hoped to become part of that system, through an extension of the pipelines through Germany and the Netherlands and onwards across the North Sea. In 2003 the UK and Russia signed a “bilateral energy pact”, part of which was devoted to this plan.

In September 2005 Gazprom (51%), Ruhrgas (24.5%) and BASF/Wintershall (24.5%) set up the North European Gas Pipeline Co. (NEGP). It was renamed Nord Stream AG in 2007. Subsequently further shareholders joined cheerfully joined the effort.

The Central Europeans didn’t like the project. Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski acidly dubbed the project “the Molotov-Ribbentrip Pipeline”. The Scandinavians pointed to the environmental risks.

The other European leaders gathered in Lubmin on 8 November 2011 to ceremoniously and very happily inaugurate the system.

• • •

Stay tuned for the second thread, published as a full text next Monday (October 24)!

New article: Out of steam? A social science and humanities research agenda for geothermal energy

Sofia Jonsson , 2022-09-12

Andreas Roos, researcher at the Division and the EHL, active in the Harnessing the heat below our feets project, newly published an open access article together with Rozanne C. Spijkerboera, Ethemcan Turhana, Marco Billi, SofiaVargas-Payera, Jose Opazo and Marco Armiero in the paper Energy Research & Social Science. Read the abstarct below and follow the link for full text.

Photo by Punyashree Venkatram on Unsplash

Abstract

The potential of geothermal energy for energy transition is increasingly recognized by governments around the world. Whether geothermal energy is a sustainable source of heat and/or electricity depends on how it is deployed in specific contexts. Therefore, it is striking that there is only limited attention to geothermal energy from a social science and humanities (SSH) perspective. Geothermal energy is largely conceptualized as a technological and/or geological issue in both science and practice. This perspective article aims to go beyond such conceptualizations by positioning social science research as an important lens to explore the promises and pitfalls of geothermal energy. We first provide an overview of the current state of geothermal energy as a decarbonization strategy. Second, we move on to review the existing literature. This review shows that studies that do address geothermal energy from an SSH perspective tend to be of a descriptive nature and lack analytical diversity. Third, we discuss three complementary theoretical approaches that are used in the social sciences to observe and address other forms of energy and energy transition. We believe that socio-technical assemblages, systems, and imaginaries can provide fruitful analytical lenses to study the promises, pitfalls and spatialization of geothermal energy. We conclude the paper with a research agenda and call for further engagement with this topic in SSH research, with attention to specificities of global South and North contexts.

Keywords

Assemblage

Socio-technical systems

Imaginaries

Infrastructures

Narratives

Geothermal

Read the full article, open access: Out of steam? A social science and humanities research agenda for geothermal energy

NUCLEARWATERS Seminar: Ecological entanglements, nuclear ruptures, and the affective intimacies of Bishnoi resistance

Sofia Jonsson , 2022-04-04

The Nuclearwaters project is hosting the third seminar in its Nuclearwaters Seminar Series this term. This time we have the pleasure of welcoming Sonali Huria, who is going to be speaking about the relationship of the Bishnoi community with water in nuclear India.

Time: Fri 2022-04-08 13.15 – 15.00

Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/67164895000

Language: English

Lecturer: Sonali Huria, associated scholar, Science, Technology and Gender Studies, FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg

Ecological entanglements, nuclear ruptures, and the affective intimacies of Bishnoi resistance

For the Bishnoi, among the earliest eco-conservationist communities in the Indian subcontinent, encounters with the atom have been encounters of colossal ruptures. Their histories, geographies, religious intimacies, and more-than-human worlds have collided with India’s nuclear trajectories at two distinct sites – first, in the arid deserts of Pokharan, Rajasthan where India conducted its atomic tests, forcing the Bishnoi into the ranks of the Global Hibakusha (Jacobs 2022), and, more recently, in Fatehabad, Haryana where the Indian government is setting up a massive 2,800MWe nuclear plant comprising four ‘indigenous’ CANDU-type Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors of 700 MWe each.

While to the Bishnoi, water represents a vital element in the multispecies assemblage in which the human, nonhuman, and the divine all come together in an entangled relational ecology of reverence, kinship, nurturing, ethics, and reciprocity, the proposed nuclear plant, to be set up over the Fatehabad branch of the Bhakra Canal, the lifeline of this predominantly agricultural region, threatens to usurp and drain away its dense material embeddedness within the Bishnoi ecology.

This presentation will seek to tease out such multiple layers of material embeddedness of water within Bishnoi lifeworlds, in the contestation between the Indian state, besotted with the nuclear age, and the intimacies of ecological subjects committed to protecting their sacred material worlds, and, to bring these entangled flows from the nuclearized Bishnoi heartland to the Nuclear Waters seminar. (Visit the Nuclear Waters project page)

Reference

Jacobs, Robert A. (2022). Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha. Yale University Press

Dr Sonali Huria is the 2020-21 Fellow, Takagi Fund for Citizen Science, Japan and an associated scholar, Science, Technology and Gender Studies, FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg. She has worked for over a decade in the field of human rights research, teaching, advocacy, and investigation at India’s National Human Rights Commission, and completed her PhD in 2020 from Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. Her doctoral research involved an exploration of the encounters of grassroots movements in India with the technopolitical trajectories of and imaginaries surrounding India’s nuclear modernity, and the brutalities unleashed by the postcolonial nuclear obsessions of the world’s largest democracy. She has written extensively on the political, social, environmental, and human rights concerns surrounding India’s nuclear sector for news portals, magazines, and newspapers in South Asia and beyond. She also co-edits DiaNuke.org, a popular resource space on nuclear disarmament and nuclear energy issues.

Exploring nuclear Germany

Achim Klüppelberg , 2021-12-06

This text was first published by Per Högselius on the Nuclearwaters-Blog on 3 December 2021.

Exploring nuclear Germany

As the most recent wave of the corona pandemic rolls in over Europe, it seems that much of the past summer and autumn was a narrow window of opportunity for international travel. I now feel happy that I managed to make use of that window.

In late September I went to Regensburg to participate in a conference on infrastructures in East and Southeast Europe (see my separate blogpost on that). After the conference, I stayed on in Bavaria for a couple of days. I rented a car and a bike and went to take a close look at the water supply arrangements for three German nuclear power plants and the nuclearized landscapes that have emerged as a result of nuclear construction there from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Gundremmingen is the only German nuclear power plant situated directly on the Danube. It started to be built already in 1962 and was one of Germany’s first nuclear power plants. There was a fierce debate during construction about possible contamination of the region’s drinking water. Less known is that plant construction demanded a complex reengineering of the Danube, which was dammed upstreams and also a few kilometres downstream to create a reliable and regular water flow for cooling the reactors. This generated an artificial water reservoir, the shores of which, as I was able to experience directly, are nowadays still very popular places for various leisure activities. Nuclear hydraulic engineers also built a canal to divert Danube water to the nuclear plant. The early pioneering reactor at Gundremmingen was shut down long ago. However, the plant was expanded through the addition of two much more powerful reactors: one boiling water reactor (seen to the left in one of the pictures below) and one pressurized water reactor (seen to the right), which today makes the plant area look very diverse. The pressurized water reactor was closed in 2017. The boiling water reactor, supported by one cooling tower, is still in operation, but like all remaining German NPPs, its days are numbered.

The Isar nuclear power plant is named after the Danube tributary on which it was built. Here, too, nuclear construction was intimately linked to other hydraulic projects aimed at “taming” the river. The Isar was dammed and equipped with hydroelectric turbines (see the image to the upper left), which now still contribute to the safety of the nuclear station, because they ensure that electricity will always be available locally even in the case of a regional power failure. This made it unnecessary for the nuclear operators to invest in emergency diesel generators. The Isar plant was originally designed for one boiling water reactor only, for which a less powerful and very compact type of cooling towers were built (lower left, to the right of the reactor building); these were used only when the Isar’s water flow was insufficient. The high-rise cooling tower that can be seen across much of Bavaria was constructed only when a further reactor, of the pressurized water type, was added later on (right). The boiling water reactor was shut down immediately after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The pressurized water reactor is supposedly still in operation, but apparently not on the day of my visit, judging by the lack of “smoke” (water vapour) from the cooling tower.

The Grafenrheinfeld NPP is also in Bavaria, but further north, in Lower Franconia, where the inhabitants usually don’t think of themselves as “Bavarians”. This cultural divide largely coincides with the physical drainage divide between the Rhine and the Danube river basins. Hence this nuclear station, which is no longer in operation (having been shut down in 2015), is situated not in the Danube basin, but on the Main, the Rhine’s most important tributary. When construction started in 1974 the Main was already a suitable river for cooling water supplies. This was because Germany had invested enormously in the 1950s and 1960s in making the Main navigable all the way up to Bamberg, taming the river and regularizing its water flow with the help of no fewer than 34 weirs and locks. The river is now part of a system that interconnects the Rhine and Danube river basins, the centrepiece of which is the Rhein-Main-Danube Canal.

A month later I returned to Germany. I first spent a few days at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, which turned out to be a treasure trove for nuclear-historical research. I then went up (or rather down) to northern Germany and the Lower Elbe region. There I went to see how the Stade, Brokdorf and Brunsbüttel nuclear power plants (of which only Brokdorf is still in operation, but only until the end of this year) were integrated into this North Sea estuary. In contrast to the plants erected along the Danube, Isar and Main further south, the main challenge here seemed to be flood (rather than water scarcity) management. The Lower Elbe region is historically very much a marshland and all nuclear – indeed, all industrial – projects are dependent on a reliable drainage infrastructure. Like in the Netherlands, that infrastructure is critically dependent on large pumps for lifting water, in this case into the Elbe (see the image below, far left). The nuclear stations along the Lower Elbe also made use of a pre-nuclear infrastructure of earthen dikes, which are typically 5 meters tall (upper and lower right). These have always formed the centerpiece of nuclear flood protection and hence they can be regarded as components in the nuclear safety system. However, after the 1999 flooding of the Blayais NPP in France, a plant that is located in an estuary very similar to that of the Elbe, German regulatory authorities started looking into the deeper history of flooding events in the North Sea and how new such events might potentially cause havoc to the Lower Elbe NPPs: would they be able to cope with an event on a par with the famous Storegga slide, which is believed to have caused a huge tsunami throughout the North Sea region back in 6200 BC?

Isar Nuclear Power Plant 2021, by Per Högselius

In early 2022 I will publish an article in Technology & Culture which discusses, in further depth, some of the above-mentioned issues relating to nuclearized landscapes, water scarcity management, flood protection, the complex interplay between nuclear and non-nuclear hydraulic construction. Have a look in our list of publications.

Siegfried Evens on Marcinelle and the European Coal and Steel Community

Sofia Jonsson , 2021-06-14

Our NUCLEARWATERS doctoral student Siegfried Evens, just got published with an article on the accident in the Bois du Cazier coal mine in Marcinelle, Belgium on 8 August 1956. You find the arcticle open access in European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, or you can read a summary below!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catastrophe_Marcinelle.jpg

Full article (open access): The seeds of a European risk society: Marcinelle and the European Coal and Steel Community

Siegfrieds own, terrific summary which you also can find on his Twitter account:

In 1956, a terrible accident with a mine chariot happened in the Bois du Cazier coal mine in Marcinelle, Belgium. 262 miners died, of which 136 Italians. The disaster was in many ways transnational. Casualties came from all over Europe (mostly Italy), but the risks that led up to the disaster were similar in other countries too.

My argument: the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) seized this opportunity to increase its power. In doing so, it laid the foundation of later risk management policies, or what we can call ‘the European risk society’. Marcinelle shaped how the EU deals with risk! EU historians have often argued that the impact of Marcinelle on the ECSC was limited and that ECSC failed in mine safety policy. While it was indeed not their proudest moment, we do not have to be too skeptical either. Yes, a lot of social measures regulating wages, working times, and immigration did not materialise. But a lot of other (more technical) measures did. Understanding the impact of Marcinelle thus means looking at risk management at large. The ECSC went all-in on social policy (still a difficult area for the EU today) and therefore created a (fake) contrast with other technical safety measures. Ironically, it is in the latter category it would be the most successful. Social and technical are hardly separable.

In the article, I follow the developments of a conference on mining safety and the foundation of the Mines Safety Commission. Both were important for internationalising many safety discussions and agenda-setting. They also brought risk assessment into the European institutions. Lastly, we have to analyse Marcinelle long-term. Whether the mines actually became much safer is doubtable. Many mines also closed soon after. But European risk management continued, especially in the Single Market. I even found references to Marcinelle in the Euratom archives.

The Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Interview with Andrei Stsiapanau*

, 2020-05-19

by Alicia Gutting, PhD student

Nuclear energy is a highly debated field and depending on the societal context usually either embraced or fully rejected. From an outsider position it sometimes seems as if there was no in between: you are either pro- or anti-nuclear. This does not solely apply to times of active nuclear energy generation, but it also affects the future and finding solutions for safe storage of nuclear waste. In today’s interview with Andrei Stsiapanau we will hear more about the nuclear debate in the former Soviet Union. Andrei is a guest in our Nuclearwaters project since January 2020 and he is a scholarship holder of the Swedish Institute Visby Scholarship Program for Senior Researchers. He researches how nuclear energy is being socially and politically debated in Russia, Belarus and Lithuania and he is especially interested in the politics of nuclear waste in Russia, Lithuania and Sweden.

Alicia Gutting: Andrei, could you please let us know what you have been working on in the past months?

Andrei Stsiapanau: During the last months I have been working on the nuclear waste management issues in Russia as well as in Lithuania and Sweden. When more and more nuclear facilities throughout the world enter the stage of decommissioning, it is becoming particularly urgent to find sustainable solutions to the issue of nuclear waste. The list of possible technical solutions for spent nuclear fuel and other types of waste include deep geological disposal after reprocessing (favoured in France, Japan, and UK); direct deep geological disposal (favoured in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Germany, USA and Czech Republic); surface long-term storage (favoured in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain). Each of these solutions translates into different ways on how to communicate, classify and govern nuclear waste in a particular country.

My research is focusing on how nuclear waste issues are communicated in various techno-political contexts. While studying how nuclear waste issues are being negotiated with communities in Russia, I discovered that natural resources like clay are used within nuclear waste discourses to mitigate the risk of potential radioactive contamination. It was my starting point to investigate how natural resources are used in various discourses about nuclear waste to make it less dangerous and harmful for people and environments. In the cases of Lithuania and Sweden, I am investigating how, through awareness and information campaigns, risks associated with nuclear waste are mediated and mitigated to transform the hazardous nuclear objects into manageable waste.

AG: What role does clay play?

AS: According to numerous researches on the role of the natural barrier in the nuclear waste disposal system, clay as well as crystalline rock are considered as a retardation medium for radionuclides migration. The multi barrier protection within nuclear waste technology illustrates how natural barriers or the geology of the disposal site will retard or mediate for both fluid flow and radionuclides migration in case of the engineering layer decay. This kind of technical vision of the disposal process promotes the natural protection layer as a reliable tool for absorption and immobilization of radioactivity. Geological and chemical studies of clay rock in various sites in the United States, France, Belgium, Canada and Russia show that clay has a number of absorption properties valuable for immobilization of the radioactive elements in the geomedia in case of the technical barrier decay. Thus, clay has become employed as a part of the nuclear waste management process. It represents a tool for absorption, immobilization and confinement of radioactivity. Including clay in the whole process of the nuclear decommission and decontamination makes it possible to reconsider the role of natural resources and materials in nuclear waste technologies and multi-barrier protection discourses.

AG: Are there differences in the Swedish and the Lithuanian (political) approach?

AS: Nuclear waste management systems in Sweden and Lithuania are developing in the context of decommissioning and nuclear phase out but following different trajectories and guidelines. The final repository for short-lived radioactive waste located at Forsmark in the municipality of Östhammar started operating in 1988. Lithuania is only now entering the phase of the construction of the landfill repositories for low and medium radioactive waste, and the construction of the geological disposal is programmed for after 2045. The Swedish approach represents an advanced example of nuclear waste management, based on the long-term experience of scientific research, transparent decision-making and continued reliance on public opinion and participation. Some connections in sharing nuclear waste management technology and experience exist between these two Baltic Sea countries. The Swedish nuclear waste authority, SKB, has been involved in the assessment of the existing nuclear waste facilities at the Ignalina NPP site in Lithuania since the 1990s. Swedish nuclear research and governance institutions continue to contribute to the transfer of knowledge and expertise in nuclear waste management taking part in numerous joint international research projects (BEACON; EURAD).

AG: What role does environmentalism play in the debate?

AS: As the two countries are at different stages of implementation of nuclear waste programs, it illustrates different levels of public engagement in the site selection process and environmental impact assessment of the radioactive waste disposals. In Sweden environmental issues are at the core of the public debate and concerns about the nuclear waste management program and are involving various actors, from local communities to International NGOs and leading national media outlets. In Lithuania environmental issues are less questioned, site selection is not contested and public participation is limited to local communities of the nuclear site with scarce media coverage. I suppose this situation will change with the start of a public discussion about the site selection for geological disposal of high radioactive waste and SNF and its environmental impact assessment. This debate will expand nuclear waste issues to the national scale. Considering environmentalism not only as participatory but also as scholarly concern, at the moment there are relatively few studies in environmental humanities and history about the uses of the natural resources in nuclear waste confinement and its impact on social and natural landscapes.

AG: Do people in the two countries differ in their risk perception?

AS: Different levels of public engagement in the nuclear decision-making illustrates different public opinion dynamics as well as public perception of nuclear risks. In Sweden due to the nuclear phase-out decision in 1980 and to the high impact of environmental movements, critical voices are prevailing the publicity concerning nuclear waste. In Lithuania the nuclear energy use became public only in the 1990s after the reestablishment of the independence and were associated mostly with Chernobyl disaster risks and anti-communist, sovereignty claims. During the transition period, the use of nuclear energy was considered as necessary for the economic and social developments of the country; political personnel, nuclear engineers and Lithuanian citizens embraced the energy produced by the Ignalina NPP as a national resource. The referendums about nuclear energy uses in Lithuania in 2008 and 2012 after the start of the decommissioning of the Ignalina NPP showed a rather radical change from pro- to anti-nuclear attitudes challenging the plan to construct a new NPP in the country.

*This interview originally appeared on the Nuclear Waters project website.

Launch of The InsSciDE Project

Sofia Jonsson , 2018-01-23

KTH will play an important role in the consortium, created under the coordination of professor Pascal Griset of Sorbonne Université and Director of the Institute of Communication Sciences (CNRS).

Nina Wormbs and Miyase Christensen will be a part of this Horizon 2020 project that kicks off now in January. The project consists of 14 research institutes from 11 European member states and will run for 4 years. A project page will soon show up at our homepage, but already now the press release is out:

CNRS hosts the launch meeting of the project InsSciDE -Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe.

The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) will host the launch meeting of the project InsSciDE -Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe- at the National Academy of Medicine (Académie nationale de médecine), on 26^th January 2018. InsSciDE is funded through the European Horizon 2020 framework under the coordination of Professor Pascal Griset, Sorbonne Université. KTH is one of the major partners of the consortium created to build the project.

The European Commission has called for the development of effective science diplomacy for Europe. InsSciDE– Inventing a Shared Science Diplomacy for Europe – is a project funded under Europe’s Horizon 2020 framework. KTH will play an important role in the consortium, created under the coordination of professor Pascal Griset of Sorbonne Université and Director of the Institute of Communication Sciences (CNRS). The consortium includes 14 institutes of research or training from across 11 European Member states as well as UNESCO. The 4-year project will engage historians of science and technology, networks of diplomats and scientists, experts of strategy and policy makers to bring science diplomacy into the foreground and better use it. InsSciDE starts with the hypothesis that Europe and Member states possess a great capital of science diplomacy experience – but today this is fragmented, heterogeneous and under-utilized. There is a need to reveal, formalize and communicate this intangible capital, develop its conceptual bases and elaborate tools to help European science diplomacy emerge and blossom. In the next four years, the project will investigate past and present experience, co-construct insights with practitioners, and provide theoretical and strategic frameworks and guidance to support stakeholder awareness and informed policies within the European Union. It will produce knowledge-based discussion material to help prepare practitioners, train some 50 young professionals, and disseminate results over a broad global audience. InsSciDE focuses on several Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 3: Good health, SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy, SDG 13: Climate action SDG 15: Life on Land, SDG 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions and SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals.

The launch meeting will bring together InsSciDE’s relevant stakeholders with its scientific Advisory board members: Catherine Bréchignac, Ambassador of France for Science and lifetime Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, Thierry Courvoisier, President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), Edgar Morin, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the ISCC, and other experts of international renown. Flavia Schlegel, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO, will take the floor. A discussion panel will allow several scientific attachés stationed in Paris to illustrate their current perceptions, experience and expectations.

These individuals will lay the foundation for InsSciDE in front of an audience composed of prominent players in the science diplomacy field (scientists, diplomats and academic specialists).

For registration please contact :

christophe.potier-thomas@cnrs.fr

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Launch of The InsSciDE Project

CNRS hosts the launch meeting of the project InsSciDE -Inventing a shared Science Diplomacy for Europe.

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