ESEH 2023 in Bern: Panel on “Nuclear Environments”

Right now I am sitting in a study room at a hotel in Bern. The Suisse capital is beautiful. At the moment we are living through a heat wave that at least for me is the hottest I have felt this summer. I guess that is no surprise, given the fact that I am regularly based in Stockholm. I am participating in this year’s ESEH-Conference here. The European Society for Environmental Humanities had invited panel proposals on environmental topics. Aske Hennelund Nielsen from Erlangen and me worked together and created the panel “Nuclear Environments. Waste, Animals, Water and Infrastructure in the 20th and 21st centuries.”

The panel, chaired by Melina Antonia Buns (Stavanger University), features apart from Aske’s and my presentation excellent contributions from our colleagues in Linköping. Axel Sievers will speak about “Nuclear Space and Storage Natures. Fixation of Ecologies, Naturalization of Waste and Uneven Development”. Anna Storm and Rebecca Öhnfeldt will talk about “Caring for wild animals at nuclear power plants. A local emotion management device?”.

If you are also in Bern and joining the conference, please consider joining us at Unitobler (Yes, Toblerone!) F 022 on Friday morning 9-10.30am.

Abstract:

Nuclear technologies have played a decisive role in shaping natural environments since 1945. Atomic weapons have shaped landscapes and geographies through sustained nuclear testing, creating topographies of craters and distributed radioactive isotopes throughout the atmosphere on a global level. Nuclear power plants have through their construction upset waterways and shorelines and created new environments to better suit the placement of atomic energy installations. Animals have found themselves trapped within these changing environments, at the mercy of the Nuclear Industry and the personal of nuclear sites. Nuclear technologies have not only created physical craters and contaminated landscapes, but also mental craters, forcing scientific and local actors to mediate these changed environments. The mounting challenges of nuclear waste storage and re-naturalisation of formerly nuclearized landscapes pose theoretical and epistemological questions.

With this panel, we wish to examine some of the many ways that nuclear technologies have impacted, shaped and transformed environments as well as the scientific discourses on these altering settings. The panellists discuss how different nuclear technologies and their usage has (re)formed environments since 1945, using different both national and international cases. In particular we examine France, the western Soviet Union, Sweden, the UK, and the US in an international perspective.

The panel consists of both junior and senior scholars from different research institutions in Germany and Sweden working with new perspectives and approaches on how to make sense of the nuclear environment of the past and today.