One of the most mysterious stories in Estonian energy history revolves around the planning of a nuclear power plant (NPP) at Lake Võrtsjärv between 1967–1972. Despite the absence of planning documents in the energy archives and the impracticality of an NPP given Estonia’s abundant oil-shale energy production, the story, though sounding fishy, is well established in media and oral sources.

In a regime where open confrontation with the central government was risky, alternative resources in the envirotechnical system of the NPP, such as water, fish and land, were mobilised to protect the lake. By utilising envirotechnical systems as a method to locate alternative sources, we have traced the negotiations within the central planning processes of inland fisheries and water resources. As ecosystemic nature protection strengthened, scientists managed to defer the NPP and reorganise the entire fisheries industry at Lake Võrtsjärv, recovering the populations of valuable fish.

This article investigates the juncture of hydropower and nuclear engineering traditions at the South-Ukraine Energy Complex in the USSR from the late 1960s onwards. Engineers from the hydrotechnical institute Gidroproekt majorly contributed to the envisioning, planning and realisation of this energy complex. A nuclear power plant would provide the energy grid's baseload, while accompanying hydropower plants would contribute the peak-demand-regulation. In combination, synergies beneficial to agricultural irrigation and pisciculture could be created. A mixture of hydraulic and nuclear technocratic traditions manifested itself in a large-scale attempt to change the natural environment – as envisioned proof of Soviet technological superiority.

Starting in 1970, this article studies how Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built. It follows the station’s operational history until 1982. During this year, reactor block one suffered a torn reactor channel, already four years prior to the well-known catastrophe of 1986. It uncovers the genesis of these accidents by analysing everyday history at the construction site. Construction relied on long established tools and processes, tried out at large-scale and mostly non-nuclear development areas. Masons, carpenters, and welders dealt with planned quotas and deadlines, material and personnel shortages, as well as a lack in quality management. The tools they used to build this nuclear giant were rather a shock of the old (Edgerton) than futuristic.

It uncovers circumstances, non-alignments, and decisions that amounted to a working environment that was characterised by a technocratic culture. This culture overemphasised the fulfilment of plans and quotas to the detriment of safety as should have been warranted by the nature of a nuclear reactor as specified in plans and regulations. By following the construction of the plant in its everyday struggles, this article shows characteristics of the working culture that evolved on-site and led to the accident of 1982. This innovative approach helps to understand, why and how the catastrophe of 1986 could have begun – beyond the two standard reasons established in the literature of a faulty reactor design and mistakes made by the operators.

Dieser Artikel untersucht die Entstehungsgeschichte des Atomkraftwerks Tschernobyl. Er beginnt im Jahr 1970 und verfolgt die Arbeit vor Ort bis einschließlich 1982. In diesem Jahr platzte ein Reaktorkanal und das bereits vier Jahre vor der bekannten Katastrophe von 1986. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Entstehung dieser Unglücke durch die Analyse der Alltagsgeschichte auf der Baustelle. Diese basierte auf tradierten Vorgängen und Geräten, die bereits zuvor auf großangelegten und größtenteils nichtnuklearen Anlagen zur Anwendung kamen. Maurer, Schreiner und Schweißer mussten planmäßige Quoten und Fristen einhalten, mit nicht ausreichendem Material und Unterbesetzung klarkommen und Wege finden, mit schlechtem Qualitätsmanagement umzugehen. Die Mittel, die sie dafür nutzten, waren dabei eher ein shock of the old (nach Edgerton), als futuristisch.

Es werden Umstände, Unzulänglichkeiten und Entscheidungen analysiert, die grundlegend für ein technokratisches Arbeitsumfeld waren. Diese technokratische Kultur betonte im Übermaß die Erfüllung von Plänen und Quoten, während sie der Sicherheit nicht die Wertschätzung beimaß, die durch die Natur eines Kernreaktors, wie in Regularien spezifiziert, vorgegeben hätte sein sollen. Dieser Artikel zeigt die Charakteristika einer Arbeitskultur auf, die sich vor Ort entwickelte und zum Unfall von 1982 führte. Er tut dies, indem er Alltagsprobleme beleuchtet. Dieser neue Ansatz kann dazu beitragen zu verstehen, warum und wie die Katastrophe von 1986 beginnen konnte – und das weitergehender als mit den beiden bisher in der Literatur etablierten Gründen eines fehlerhaften Reaktordesigns und Bedienungsfehlern der Operatoren.

This article investigates the juncture of hydropower and nuclear engineering traditions at the South Ukraine Energy Complex in the USSR from the late 1960s onwards. Engineers from the hydrotechnical design institute Gidroproekt played a key role in the envisioning, planning and realisation of this unique project. It combined a nuclear power plant and its cooling water reservoir with a pumped-storage hydropower plant and an accompanying run-of-river hydropower plant, allowing for potential synergies with irrigation and pisciculture. A mixture of hydraulic and nuclear technocratic traditions manifested itself in a large-scale attempt to change the natural environment as proof of Soviet technological superiority.

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.

This book examines these multifaceted entanglements between nuclear energy and water as they have evolved historically, from the early days of nuclear engineering during World War II up to today. The main argument will be that the past and present of nuclear energy—and its “strange career,” as environmental historian John McNeil aptly called it—cannot be properly grasped without taking a multiplicity of water issues into account. The book comprises 21 in-depth case studies, each of which explores nuclear-water entanglements from a different perspective. The chapters cover a range of “wet” analyses of nuclear power, but also of uranium mining, fuel cycle activities, and radioactive waste management, along with the multiple water risks linked to nuclear weapons and “peaceful” nuclear explosions. In geographical terms, the book takes us from the South Pacific and Southern California to Europe’s Atlantic coasts and interior rivers, and from the nuclear depths of the former Soviet Union to present-day India and the Persian Gulf.

Chernobyl was built at the northern tip of the Dnepr Cascade – a vast industrialisation effort comprising six hydropower plants and their respective reservoirs. While it brought nuclear power to Ukraine, the conceptualisation of the station was based on experiences and knowledge gained during the construction of those six hydropower plants. Here the plant will be analysed as a product of previous industrialisation efforts and as a  cornerstone of a wider energetical system encompassing not only Central Ukraine, but also Belarus. National boundaries, while important regarding political and planning decisions, are irrelevant for the massive impact the power plant had on the joint envirotechnical system of Ukraine, Belarus, and ultimately also Russia.

This presentation investigates how Chernobyl will consider how the envirotechnical  system of the Lower Dnepr basin was renegotiated by adding a nuclear facility to the Dnepr Cascade. Through the realisation of the Kiev Hydropower Plant and thus the  creation of its vast reservoir, the envirotechnical system of Kiev Province changed  profoundly. Through the addition of the nuclear power plant, it was further developed into yet something new, combining established hydropower expertise with futuristic  nuclear experimentation on the domestic RBMK and All-Union nuclear know-how. This led  to a technocratic reshaping of a unique envirotechnical system that enabled the  industrialisation of agriculture in southern Ukraine’s steppe lands, industrial growth in  major cities, and the creation of base load and steering capacities of the whole electricity grid.

The recently destroyed Kakhovka Dam and the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station are inextricably linked legacies of Soviet energy infrastructure that have become major concerns in the midst of the war in Ukraine. Achim Klüppelberg from the Nuclear Waters project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology is an expert on nuclear energy in Ukraine and Russia, and he joins the podcast to provide an in-depth analysis of the dire situation in the lower-Dnieper region. He also explains the enduring risks and complexities surrounding nuclear energy and infrastructure in the post-Soviet space, including Chernobyl, and discusses an array of nuclear issues related to the Russian Arctic.

This chapter discusses an example of public outreach, which happened on the campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in pre-pandemic times on 05 June 2019. The event took place 25 metres under the university in an artificial cave, which was constructed to host Sweden’s first nuclear reactor. In R1’s former reactor hall, the place where part of the Swedish nuclear bomb project was researched during the 1950s, a viewing of the final episode of HBO’s Chernobyl-series and a subsequent podium discussion were organised.

What Chernobyl means to different people has dramatically changed over time. Today, its image mostly invokes fear of radiation, illness, as well as uncertainty. The ruins of the plant are regarded as a somewhat unpredictable source of danger that needs constant attention and monitoring. This is a remarkable historical change from how Chernobyl used to be seen. Before 1986, the construction of Ukraine’s first major nuclear power plant symbolized progress and the hope for a better future. In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and recent media coverage of nuclear energy in this context, Chernobyl has truly become a memory space, serving as a place for projections of a multitude of attitudes regarding nuclear safety, catastrophe, war, maintenance and negligence.