The sustainability of nuclear energy amidst climate change and environmental regulations poses critical challenges, particularly in European contexts where major rivers like the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône are experiencing declining water levels and rising temperatures. We scrutinise the operational difficulties nuclear power plants encounter, arising from insufficient cooling water and environmental mandates that prevent the discharge of overly warm cooling water into rivers. These conditions have led to partial or full shutdowns of nuclear facilities across France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Romania, and other countries, emphasising the tension between nuclear energy as a low-carbon solution and its environmental impacts. We explore the concept of sustainability in the context of riverine nuclear energy from three angles: technical challenges posed by water scarcity, regulatory constraints on cooling water temperatures, and the ecological impacts of thermal discharges on riverine ecosystems. In our analysis we reveal an emerging contradiction between ensuring electricity supply and adhering to environmental protections, highlighting the need for a reevaluation of nuclear energy's role in a future sustainable energy landscape.

»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.

Nuklearisierte Flussgebiete: Konflikt und Kooperation an Rhein, Donau und Elbe«. This article analyses the historical geography of nuclear energy through the spatial lens of river basins. Approximately half of the world’s nuclear power plants were built along one or the other river. There, they gave rise to both conflict and cooperation. Drawing on the theoretical notion of water interaction, which takes into account relations of both conflictual and cooperative nature, we distinguish between such relations in three dimensions: space, environment, and infrastructure. The spatial dimension gravitates around social and political processes where proximity and distance are at the heart, often linked to the search for suitable sites for nuclear construction. The environmental dimension refers to conflict and cooperation around the radioactive and thermal pollution of waterways. The infrastructural dimension, finally, highlights how nuclear power plant builders, when they arrived from the 1950s onwards, had to relate to pre-existing infrastructural features of the rivers, which sometimes led to clashes with other actors and sometimes to more cooperative forms of interaction. In empirical terms, we focus on three European river basins that came to play particularly important roles in European nuclear history: those of the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe.

This article revisits the topic of energy materiality against the backdrop of Russia's war on Ukraine. It examines how views on energy materiality have had to change considering the war; how historical, political science/IR, anthropological, and geographical approaches to war and energy systems may provide insights into the continuities and discontinuities in energy materialities facing Europe and the rest of the world; and what research agendas in this space could look like moving forward. A war that was unexpected by many has led to many unexpected outcomes, foremost a remarkable degree of adaptability in those places dependent on the energy supply and value chains impacted by the conflict. Nevertheless, from issues ranging from climate change to fertilizers—therefore, truly global in scope—this war has wide-ranging implications for energy materiality, and how social scientists may seek to understand it.

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.

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.

Energy Crisis! Electricity Price drama! The threat of global energy poverty! Media are generous with spectacular titles. Yes, energy is important, and yes, nearly all societal challenges are connected to how we convert, distribute and use energy. Therefore, the KTH Energy Platform and KTH Library presented an exhibition with the theme Towards the energy of the future – the invisible revolution behind the electrical socket.

The exhibition displayed showcase illustrations from the book made by Lotta Waesterberg Tomasson, as well as books related to energy and electricity from the KTH Library's collections. In parallell with the exhibition, a series of live popular science lunch seminars with presentations of selected chapters of the book took place. As part of the exhibition, students from KTH's Electrical Engineering program also showcased exciting projects that connect to the anthology’s contents, made with materials and equipment from the student-driven ELAB and “Studentverkstan”. Visitors were also invited to share their reflections and ideas on energy.