The NUCLEARWATERS project continues to deliver essential research results. This was showcased on Friday 3 May, when Siegfried Evens, a doctoral student in the project, successfully defended his PhD thesis on the history of nuclear safety seen through the lens of water.
The dissertation, entitled “Streams, Steams, and Steels: A Transnational History of Risk Regulation in Nuclear Power Plants (1850–1985)”, starts out from the observation that the technologies that enable water and steam to circulate in nuclear power plants – pressure vessels, steam generators, pipes, valves, and pumps – have been much neglected in earlier research on the history of nuclear energy. Siegfried’s PhD thesis seeks to counter this by studying how national and international actors have historically regulated the risks linked to these crucial reactor components and materials.
Relying on archival sources from the US, France, Sweden, and multiple international organizations, as well as on interviews, the dissertation develops a new, longue-durée history of nuclear safety, going back to the origins of water and steam risk management in the nineteenth century. Such a historical perspective on nuclear risk regulation reveals two important insights. Firstly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the usage of water and steam technologies in nuclear reactors revealed new types of risks. These “ambi-nuclear risks,” as Siegfried calls them, are a hybrid of older steam risks, such as leaks, breaks, and explosions, and new risks of radiation and contamination. Secondly, between the 1950s and 1980s, new regimes were created in the US, France, and Sweden to regulate these risks. Initially, during the 1950s, non-nuclear steam regulations were applied directly to the first nuclear power plants. Yet, as power plants increased in size, accidents occurred, and nuclear technologies became increasingly controversial, “ambi-nuclear risk regimes” were created to adapt or “nuclearize” the older regulations. They included new safety measures and methodologies that were directed toward preventing radiation releases, but at the same time they mobilized older technologies, institutions, knowledges, and ideas related to thermal hydraulics and metallurgy. Ambi-nuclear risk regimes were shaped by a wide variety of historical actors through negotiating boundaries between “nuclear” and “non-nuclear” knowledges, components, risks, and regulations. Private or semi-private engineering associations played a particularly vital role in this.
Siegfried Evens’ thesis thus shows how nuclear safety as we know it today became nuclear as the result of a transnational long-term process that was greatly determined by much older non-nuclear water and steam risks. The research results contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on risk, nuclear technologies, and water in fields like history of technology, environmental history, STS, and risk sociology. Most importantly, the thesis expands the time frame in which nuclear risk has traditionally been studied. It challenges dominant conceptions of nuclear power as innovative or exceptional, instead connecting questions of nuclear risk to longer historical developments in water management and industrialization. This demonstrates the importance of historical contingency for understanding risk and preventing (nuclear) disasters.
We were very happy that Prof. Scott Gabriel Knowles from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), a leading expert on the history of disasters, accepted our invitation to be the faculty opponent. We were equally pleased to have Prof. Maria Rentetzi from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Prof. Thomas Wellock from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Dr. Anna Åberg from Chalmers University of Technology in the examination committee.
The defense, which took around 3½ hours, was followed by a reception at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, and later in the evening by a party that, fittingly, took place in the R1 Reactor Hall at KTH, where Sweden’s first nuclear reactor was started up back in 1954.
NUCLEAR WATERS 