Half-Lives/Afterlives: labor, technology, nature, and the nuclear decommissioning business
Nuclear decommissioning is the final part in the life of nuclear power plants (NPPs) after they permanently cease to operate. Decommissioning strategies, including the management of hazardous materials, largely depend on NPPs reactor technology, operating history, and ecological context and therefore require long-term and site-specific projects, whose complexity far exceeds the commonly debated problem of waste disposal. Treated as a marginal issue until the mid-1970s, nuclear decommissioning became a crucial expert sub-field when first generation NPPs permanently shut down. Since then, it has expanded globally and is destined to grow further as countries like Italy (1991) and Germany (2011) decided to phase out nuclear energy production. While social studies of science and technology have abundantly analyzed the controversies caused by high-level waste disposal and the siting of deep geological repositories, they have substantially ignored other critical aspects of decommissioning, such as the formation of a global market of decommissioning services, workers safety and training, costs, expert knowledge management, and the fate of nuclear sites after decommissioning. Another limit of these studies is that they have examined the social implications of decommissioning disjointly from its technical dimensions, which remain exclusive technical expert territory. To overcome the above limitations, this research tackles the unexplored problems of nuclear decommissioning—beyond waste disposal—through a comparative study of decommissioning projects in Italy and in Germany. It adopts a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective to examine the social, technological, and ecological dimensions of nuclear decommissioning in tandem. In the pursuit of this research plan, I am seeking to establish and advance my academic career in Europe and to integrate my professional skills in view of consulting opportunities for regulatory agencies and affected local communities.