Today many brave people are demonstrating in Germany against the fascist AfD (Alternative for Germany). It would be great if the party could be forbidden on the basis of extreme rightwing propaganda, which denounces the right to live for everyone.
Greetings especially go out to the protesters in Dortmund, Gießen and Göttingen. I hope the demonstrations are going to turn out massive and powerful. AfD needs to be stopped!
But of course, demonstrations are just one way to articulate legitimate progress. It is also important to not tolerate fascist tendencies among your fellow neighbours, family and friends. If we are not vigilant, AfD might get the chance to influence the future government of Germany, just as they have already demonstrated in Thüringen and Saxonia.
2023 was a turbulent year for me. I am grateful for many great experiences that helped me to grow as a novice scholar and as a person. In the following I would like to reflect in a few paragraphs on this past year. But before I start: Merry Christmas and happy end-of-the-year holidays to everyone! I hope you will have a marvellous New Year’s Eve and that you will find the strength to follow up on your new year’s resolutions.
My 2023 started unconventional as I stayed for six weeks in the 180.000-people-town of Darmstadt in Western Germany (close to the Frankfurt with the airport). As visiting scholar at the Division for History of Science led by Martina Heßler, I was able to discuss our work in a new environment and to pick up on some new theory perfectly fitting for my dissertation. I also found new (and old) friends there, which was great. This stay certainly also helped to keep the connection between our division at KTH and Darmstadt alive.
On 20 March 2023 it was time for my final seminar (80%) of my doctoral education. Eglė Rindzevičiūtė from Kingston University in London travelled from the United Kingdom to Stockholm to discuss the development of my dissertation. This seminar was a key event in my education at KTH and it helped me to improve my text tremendously. Following this seminar I regrouped and then created a plan for finishing the dissertation. A plan that later had to be revised.
In 2023 I presented my research in Darmstadt (Germany), Tübingen (Germany), Bern (Switzerland), and at different venues in Stockholm. As always, presenting helps to sharpen the arguments and the feedback from the audience supports the writing process. Personally, I enjoy public speaking and while these events were stressful, they were also all very rewarding.
From spring until the end of 2023 I also acted as PhD-representative at our Department of History and Philosophy at KTH. This was a new experience for me on a doctoral level of student administration; a responsibility I at first did not want to take over but eventually fit in reasonably well.
As 2023 was coming to a close, the writing and finalisation process of my dissertation took over all my work. Slowly I finished all my teaching responsibilities and focussed on improving the kappa and the individual articles. In the end, the writing took longer than we previously planned. Nevertheless, the defence is now scheduled for 22 March 2024. After some brief holidays, I will start again working on the dissertation on 2 January in the new year.
“Thank you” to everyone who impacted my work so positively during the past twelve months! Let’s hope 2024 will be even better, with lots of Nuclearwaters-publications coming up.
Resulting from an exciting PhD-course on Public Humanities at Uppsala University, headed by Maria Ågren and Sven Widmalm, recently an edited volume on public history was published. When I came to the office a couple of weeks ago, I found a handful of freshly printed copies, which made me very happy!
In “Public History in Action. Past and Present Practices of Making History Public”, we have explored several ways and techniques of how to engage the general public with academic historiography. Some examples are the creation of historic boardgames, Reddit threads, acting as an expert witness in land-disputes, worker’s history written by labourers themselves, and innovative ways of rethinking museal exhibitions. But the book contains many more.
I am grateful that I was able to contribute a chapter about an exciting event, Johan Gärdebo, Siegfried Evens, and I organised back in June 2019. At KTH’s former nuclear reactor hall (“R1”), we viewed together the last episode of HBO’s miniseries “Chernobyl”. It was a fascinating session that resulted in inspiring disccusions afterwards.
If academic history is supposed to be relevant to our societies, academics need to regularly interact with the broader public. This book provides several ideas on how this can be done.
Klüppelberg, Achim: Using Historical Media to Start a Public Debate on Nuclear Energy. Watching HBO’s “Chernobyl” 25 Metres Underground, in: Cornu, Armel/ Smedberg, Carl-Filip/ Vorminder, Sarah (eds.): Public History in Action. Past and Present Practices of Making History Public (Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 61), Uppsala (Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia) 2023, 93-111.
Siegfried Evens, Achim Klüppelberg, and Johan Gärdebo at the event in R1 in 2019. Picture by “Ny Teknik”.
As my last credited course during my PhD-education, I participated in the Occupy Climate Change Online School during this spring term. The online school, being organised by a team of renowned international scholars headed by Marco Armiero and administered by Anja Moum Rieser, brought together many different lectures about political ecology, environmental justice, and political science with a focus on the climate crisis, decolonialism, and just energy transitions.
I am glad that I was able to participate and to learn so much. My thanks and regards go to the many teachers in this course, who, and that is the most important thing in my view, taught us things that were dear to their hearts, with a conviction that change is indeed possible. The course was characterised by its international participants from many corners of the world. Being part of something that combines so many different worldviews and opinions on the basis of one joint struggle was very inspirational to me.
Of course, we also had to fulfil a final course assignment. Mine was about the climate crime that took place in January this year in Lützerath, Western Germany. As it is usus in this course, the finished products are published in the Atlas of the Other Worlds. In the following I will give a brief introduction to my piece. If it catches your interest, you can find the full version here, in the atlas.
On 14 January 2023, the international climate movement met at the lignite open pit coal mine Garzweiler in Western Germany to protest the continuous mining business of the corporation Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, better known as RWE. The culmination point of years of protests was the little village of Lützerath, which was squatted for about two years to prevent RWE’s large digging machine to destroy its houses and to get to the coal beneath it. On this day, 30,000 – 39,000 people travelled to the pit colloquially known as “Mordor”, an huge desert-like moonscape, with coal power plants blowing their climate-destroying fumes into the air, clearly visible at the horizon. It was a powerful protest, but it was futile in the end. Lützerath was destroyed and the coal is being dug up, public climate commitments, the Paris climate agreement, and protests notwithstanding. To add injury to insult, the German green party both ruled the federal energy ministry and the regional environmental ministry concerned with Lützerath: Instead of fighting RWE, they embraced the company’s goals and sanctioned the destruction of the village.
Together with others I travelled to Lützerath and took part in the protests. In the following I have interviewed five fellow protestors in a semi-structured manner. Following their testimonies, a small article has been written that documents what happened there and how the climate injustice took place in Germany.
Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier made by Thomas Römer with Open Street Map data. CC BY-SA 2.0.
At this point I would also like to point to the Environmental Humanities Lab, which recently became a centre, at my division of history of science, technology and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Marco Armiero used to be its director and created together with others this excellent research hub. The online school was organised under its umbrella. If you want to, check out their website and their wonderful programme for the upcoming autumn term. At the moment, Adam Wickberg acts as interim director, until Robert Gioielli takes over as new associate professor for environmental humanities at out division from 01 January 2024.
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.
Hopefully you have all had a great summer, including some well-deserved vacation, icecream, sunshine, and – depending where you are – some refreshing swims! As my doctoral education is slowly but surely coming to a close, it is time to give a brief overview where I am and what the stepping stones are, I still need to reach.
In Lahemaa National Part, close to Tallinn during this summer. Photo by Anina Vogt.
As of now, there is only about half a year left to finish my dissertation. All parts of my cumulative dissertation based on articles are fairly developed. In my kappa, the text that frames the thesis and discusses theory, research questions, and the actual technocratic culture analysis, I am focussing right now on updating the literature review. Here I am thankful for the valuable comments that I got from Eglė Rindzevičiūtė during my final seminar at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. It is important to relate my work, especially my theoretical contribution regarding technocratic culture, to that of established scholars in the field. Apart from the literature review, I need to adjust the conclusion accordingly. Then I only need to shorten and improve the text.
My first article discussing South-Ukraine Energy Complex is already accepted in the journal Europe-Asia Studies and is scheduled to be published in 2024. Apart from the proofs, I am not expecting to do anymore work on this one.
The second text is the book Per Högselius and me have been writing together about the Soviet nuclear archipelago. Here the main work has been done and the finalised manuscript is with the publisher, Central European University Press. There will be one last round of edits, which cannot be substantial.
Number three about the creation of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the genesis of a technocratic working culture on-site had been handed in to NTM Technikgeschichte at the beginning of this week. I expect quite a lot of work that still needs to flow into this one before it can be published. But regarding the dissertation, it has developed far enough.
Article number four is also about Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. But it focusses purely on an interpretation of this nuclear power plant from an hydropower planning perspective. Chernobyl will be interpreted as the 7th extension to the Dnieper Cascade, a series of six subsequent hydropower plants along the Dnieper. In another future article I will discuss the knowledge transfer that took place here. But for this dissertation, article number four will focus on the links between the Dnieper Cascade and Chernobyl. A draft exists, but it needs substantial work to go into it. If you are interested about that one, you can listen to my presentation at the upcoming ESEH Conference in Bern in the Panel “Nuclear Environments” that Aske Hennelund Nielsen and me have organised and that takes place on Friday morning next week.
Text number five is a chapter in the edited Nuclear Water Nexus Volume about the fishing enterprise in the contaminated cooling pond of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This text as well as the volume is with the publisher now. I assume there will be major edits needed to it. Once again, for the context of the dissertation it should be in decent form though.
The last article of my dissertation is written together with Kati Lindström about the Estonian Nuclear Power Plant never actually built at Võrtsjärv. This text is in the writing stage and our developed draft needs to be finished.
Apart from the finalisation of all of these texts, my manuscript needs to pass the evaluation of an external reviewer first. I will hand it in most probably in September and hope for it to be accepted soon. Next, a lot of formalia need to be in place and the committee as well as my opponent need to agree upon a date. But this is taken care of by my main supervisor, Per Högselius. Last but not least the dissertation needs to be printed and distributed. All in all I hope to defend my dissertation in February 2024. But in the past I that date has been postponed because of reasons outside of my influence, so we need to be realistic about this.
In general I will focus on my writing during the höst termin. Apart from that I will continue to act as the PhD-representative for history and philosophy at our department. Occasionally I might step in as a teacher in our Swedish Society course. Next week I will be presenting in Bern at this year’s ESEH Conference. In September there will be a workshop on energy transitions at Södertörn University in Stockholm which I helped to organise and I was invited to the KTH WaterCentre to give a talk about my research. Besides these tasks, I will try to stay away from any more time-consuming commitments. Let’s hope that everything works out! Any major updates will be posted here.
A stunning mural seen in Tallinn. Photo by Achim Klüppelberg.
The following essay is a repost from a text written by me and published on the blog Undisciplined Environments on 31 March 2021. Check out the blog! It is wonderful and lots of interesting people publish there on relevant topics regarding climate change, social change, and energy transition.
Liquidator’s memorial at Chernobyl NPP and second Sarcophagus in the background.
In a global state of climate emergency, technocratic voices for nuclear renaissance to curb greenhouse gas emissions are becoming prominent. The current anniversaries of the disasters at Fukushima (10 years) and Chernobyl (35 years) demand a reflection.
Nuclear energy as a contributor for the mitigation of global warming is heavily discussed among environmentalists and nuclear experts. While it is clear that fossils need to be replaced by alternative energy sources, people divide around the question whether nuclear could be an option for the future.
A debate surfaced after the ecomodernist manifesto proposed a technocratic approach in 2015, supporting the benefits of technofixes in a world which would be split into culture and nature. Political ecologist Giorgos Kallis disagreed, arguing with Latour and Žižek for the inseparability of human society and nature. He also argued against large technological systems, since such systems would result in the division of society into consumers and experts – and who could then challenge the experts? For him, this could not be ideal, since “a society powered by nuclear energy [could not] be a society of equals or of mutual aid.”
In the meantime, Robbins and Moore did not see this strong divide and rather saw themselves mediating for common ground between ecomodernists and environmentalists. Five years later, their theories were put to the test, as nuclear historian Kate Brown has found herself in a very practical struggle, after publishing Manual for Survival.
She analysed Chernobyl’s negative health consequences in Belarus and Ukraine on the basis of declassified material in central and county archives, supplemented by oral history. Quickly she got attacked by nuclear experts, challenging her interpretation of source material with an alleged lack of knowledge about radioactivity. By turning towards flora and fauna, she was able to add so-to-speak living archives of radioactive contamination.
It was a struggle over discursive power on the question of how many died and fell ill because of radioactive fallout that could have been prevented. Because how could nuclear energy become an alternative option for future energetics, if accidents could be so severe, as Brown claimed?
In February 2021, earth hosted 443 operational civil nuclear reactors with a total net electrical capacity of 393 GWe [1]. 50 more were under construction [2]. It was only one reactor, featuring only 1 GWe, which due to its disintegration at Chernobyl in April 1986, introduced earth to its first disaster rated seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).
It was only one tank filled with several dozens of tons of liquid radioactive waste from the Mayak reprocessing facilities, which exploded in September 1957 and which was enough to contaminate vast stretches of land in the Urals, forcing 10,180 people to be evacuated and at least 22 villages to be abandoned, while being rated six on the INES [3].
A lesser-known accident happened at the very top of the Kola peninsula in the Russian North, at Andreev Bay, 60km away from the Norwegian border. There, a nuclear waste storage facility suffered a radwaste cooling pond leak, causing contaminated water to flow into the Barents Sea. Clean-up lasted until 1989, and during that seven-year-period hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water discharged uncontrolled into the sea with consequences yet unknown. Ultimately, spent nuclear fuel assemblies were sent to Mayak – the very place which suffered the waste tank explosion 25 years earlier.
As of today, there is no definite solution to what we should do with radioactive waste stemming from the industry. Neither do we know, what to do with the nuclear legacy of sites of atom exploitation. The civil and military branches have produced stretches of uninhabitable land, scores of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel, bombs, events during which radioisotopes were released into air and water, and long-term health consequences for affected people. Thus, earth has suffered significant environmental pollution for the nuclear-driven advancement of human societies in the 20th and 21st century.
Storage for low- and medium radiating waste at Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, Lithuania. Photo by the author.
Nuclear energy is one of the most potent electricity sources humanity has invented so far. Hence, we witness a nuclear renaissance in Eastern Europe in general and in Russia in particular, during which advocates of nuclear power stress its low-carbon emissions and potential to fill the gap left by coal, gas and oil. States like Sweden and Germany face a similar choice – Shall they place their ambitions for a sustainable future in promoting wind, solar, hydrogen and other renewable electricity sources or in the nuclear industry, with its temptingly vast potential?
A key component for evaluating any answers to this question is the topic of nuclear safety. How sure can we be that problems of the sort mentioned above will not happen again? Nuclear disasters such as at Chernobyl, Fukushima or Mayak are not common and surely do not reflect the whole state of nuclear safety in the global nuclear industry. Nevertheless, they show what can happen if things get out of hand.
The expansion of nuclear energy is closely linked to the development of a technocratic culture, which procures legitimacy through the achievement of economic and political goals. Since nuclear stations are major long-term investments, such a project can only be conducted if backed by either a state, like in China or Russia, or by very rich and stable private companies, like in the USA. In some cases, such as in Japan or France, both spheres link.
If both spheres merge, then it is clear for the industry to have fiscal guarantees and greater influence upon the public opinion on the expansion of nuclear energy. For politicians this is tempting, because the nuclear industry provides a lot of stable jobs, an aura of progressiveness, certain dual-use possibilities and – most important – the promise of the solution for multiple economic problems, such as import substitution for fossil fuels, economic growth through the stable provision of electricity, and political prestige through nuclear high-technology. In short, both help and legitimise each other.
Historically, in such situations a technocratic culture emerges. This culture intrinsically legitimises the sacrifice of important safety principles for the sake of the advancement of the project and economic feasibility. If both spheres merge, who can critically control nuclear safety? When the French author Simmonot, writing about the entanglements between the French nuclear industry and the government, declared that ‘nucleocrats do not sleep’, he knew that the interest for quick profits presented a grave danger for nuclear safety and thus for whole societies confronted with nuclear power plants [4].
Now, when scholars speak of a nuclear renaissance, the Soviet successor state Russia is at the helm of renewed efforts in modernising, promoting and expanding formerly Soviet nuclear energetics. New ex-Soviet reactors are being built in Russia, Finland, Belarus, Turkey, Bangladesh, China and India. Furthermore, some are planned in Hungary and Egypt. How many of these countries link government and nuclear industry and how can we be sure that nuclear safety is warranted by the significance it needs? [5]
So, if proponents of nuclear energy argue for a nuclear renaissance to combat climate change, they should address the question of safety and the links to politics and other controlling institutions in a transparent way. The focus should be on how the safety of nuclear power can be guaranteed and further nuclear catastrophes prevented. Furthermore, we need first to find a solution for long-term radiating nuclear waste. Another unsolved issue is the healing of contaminated landscapes created by nuclear accidents.
Concluding, to legitimise the merging of a nuclear industry and a government is a way to contribute to a technocratic working culture. Such a culture has been detrimental in the past to nuclear safety. The examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima show this clearly. In the current state of climate crisis, we should focus on the rapid development of alternative renewable energetics. To push nuclear energy now might help to curb greenhouse gas emissions – but it would increase the risk for potential radioactive contamination. Therefore, this topic should not be engaged in a technocratic, but instead in a democratic way.
[3] See IAEA Press Release: USSR Provides Details of Accident in 1957 at Military Nuclear Plant in Southern Urals, Vienna 26 July 1989, p. 2, and the following report by Nikipelov, B.V./ Romanov, G.N./ Buldakov, L.A. et al.
[4] Simonnot, Philippe: Les nucléocrates (capitalisme et survie), Grenoble 1978.
[5] See International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group: Safety Culture (INSAG-4), Vienna 1991, p. 1.
On 15 June 2023 Eric Paglia, the host of the Polar Geopolitics Podcast and researcher in the division of history of science, technology, and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, interviewed me about the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, its meaning for the war in Ukraine and the geopolitical position of Russia.
Kakhovka dam with hydropower station, by Artemka, 06 April 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract
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.
Our project at KTH has released a new newsletter, full with stories about what we did during the last months, pictures, and of course publication lists.
Achim Klüppelberg 