The year 2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the last time that Sweden was technically at war. Since then, Sweden has built an international image of itself as a peace-loving and morally advanced country. This is in sharp contrast with earlier Swedish history, in which Swedish Vikings and famous warrior kings like Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII caused havoc across much of the European continent. In Swedish history-writing as well as in the country's dominant social and political self-understanding, the 200 years of peace are typically attributed to a policy of neutrality, or non-alignment. The non-alignment policy has also been coupled - both in theoretical terms and in practical effect - with an expansive development aid policy towards former colonies and other developing countries in the South. The image of a benevolent and disinterested neutral country was further strengthened by high-profile international pro-activism, for example, through the United Nations and institutions like the Nobel Prize. However, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, a vivid debate among Swedish historians has led to reinterpretations Swedish neutrality during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper contributes to this debate by applying an environmental history lens to the analysis of political neutrality. Our hypothesis is that Sweden's non-alignment has been intimately linked to the country's role in the global natural resource system. Starting from the observation that Swedish non-alignment policy became firmly established precisely at the time of Sweden's resource-dependent industrial breakthrough in the late nineteenth century, we use primary and secondary sources to explore the intimate connections between two sets of actors: foreign policy actors and the rapidly expanding community of industrial actors. The latter sought to influence foreign policymaking both in the context of the need for secure access to natural resources not available domestically - of crucial importance for the country's growing production and export of steel, agricultural produce, and increasingly sophisticated technological artefacts - and in the context of investment in extractive industries abroad, particularly in colonial regions. At the same time, however, Swedish industrialists, engineers, and scientists active abroad were also eyed by the government as political tools.

The quest for the world's remaining natural resources has intensified markedly in recent years. A salient and controversial point of debate in this context has become the extent to and ways in which old colonial relations are argued to live on in a new global “resource colonialism”. Although Sweden is rarely thought of as a colonial power, Swedish actors are currently very active when it comes to resource exploitation in many parts of the world. As a small, neutral country with an excellent international reputation and virtually without enemies, we argue that Sweden has been able to mobilize the international resource system to its benefit much more effectively than many other European countries. This paper takes an historical perspective on the present by exploring the origins of Swedish interests and activities in the colonial resource arena from around 1880 to 1945. More precisely, we analyze and compare Swedish natural resource interests in three colonial arenas: Africa, Caucasia and the Arctic. In the case of Africa, we explore Sweden's virtually unknown - but highly active - participation at the Berlin conference in 1884-85. In the Caucasus case, we reinterpret the Nobel brothers crucial role in creating Baku's oil industry as a salient example of Swedish involvement in Russian resource colonialism. In the Arctic, we explore the connections between state and private interests in coal mining in Spitsbergen. An essential research issue concerns the extent to which it is possible to discern a common Swedish 'style' with regard to the country's interests and activities in colonial areas.

The period from 1870 to 1914 plays a unique role in the history of natural resource exploration and extraction. This article analyses, from a Swedish viewpoint, the connections between two actor categories of special importance in this context: scientific-geographical explorers and industrial actors. The article examines their activities in three broadly defined regions: the Arctic, Russia, and Africa. We show that the Swedes generally had far-reaching ambitions, on par with those of the large imperial powers. In some cases, notably in Africa, Sweden was not able to compete with the larger imperial powers; but in other cases, such as the exploration of the Arctic – from Spitsbergen to Siberia – and the industrial exploitation of coal at Spitsbergen and petroleum in Russia’s colonial periphery, Swedish actors played a leading role, in competition with players from the larger European nations. Our paper shows that scientific exploration and industry were closely linked, and that foreign policy also influenced the shaping of these links. We distinguish different types of knowledge produced by the Swedish actors, pointing to local, situated knowledge as the most important type for many resource-based businesses, although modern, scientific knowledge was on the increase during this period.

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.

This jointly authored essay reviews recent scholarship in the social sciences, broadly understood, that focuses on the materiality of energy. Although this work is extraordinarily diverse in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary influences and its theoretical and methodological commitments, we discern four areas of convergence and divergence that we term the locations, uses, relationalities, and analytical roles of energy materiality. We trace these convergences and divergences through five recent scholarly conversations: materiality as a constraint on actors' behavior; historical energy systems; mobility, space and scale; discourse and power via energy materialities; and energy becoming material.

A metaphor that is often used to describe energy supply is that of a nation’s blood circulation. Indeed, a permanent interruption in the supply of energy would be lethal to any society. Sweden – a neutral country in cold war Europe – belongs to those countries that are, and have been, very strongly dependent on imports of energy, and this implies a special vulnerability. Today two imported energy carriers – oil and uranium – each covers some 30 % of the total.

Sweden is of course not alone in its dependence on imported fuels. The world’s energy resources are unevenly distributed, and since the mid 19th century the pursuit of coal, oil, gas and uranium has been an important constituent of international politics and economics. The strongest nations have used economical, political and if necessary military means to control energy sources in far away territories in order to secure their energy supplies at home. This is often referred to as the geopolitics of energy, and there has been quite some research about it. There has been much less research on how small nations have tried to handle their dependencies on far away countries using “soft” means rather than “hard” ones. By studying how Sweden has done this we hope to contribute to an understanding of the geopolitics of energy of small nations.

We will focus at which actors and which motives that have been central in these decisions and whether it is possible to identify a distinct but evolving ‘Swedish model’ in actors’ attempts to deal with vulnerabilities stemming from energy import dependence, and if this model has applied to the energy system as a whole, i.e. the same model has applied to all types of fuels.

2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to partly or fully shut down their nuclear plants because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm.  

Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature. The resulting shutd0wns of nuclear power plants – and the attempts by nuclear operators to prevent such undesired measures – raise questions about the sustainability of nuclear energy in a rapidly warming world, whereby the meaning of sustainability differs from how this concept is usually discussed in the context of nuclear energy. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new modes of transnational cooperation.

This article argues that the history of nuclear energy can and should be analyzed as a history of water. Taking inspiration from David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old and recent efforts to merge the history of technology with environmental history, here the focus shifts from nuclear reactors to the "conventional" parts of nuclear power plants. This brings to the fore that a range of hydraulic technologies with long prehistories—pumps, pipes, valves, dams, dikes, and so on—have been crucially important for nuclear safety. The "atomic age" is fundamentally a hydraulic age and should be seen in relation to experiences gathered by past hydraulic civilizations.