Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article traces the historical evolution of risk perception around the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, Germany, from 1956 to 1997. It does so by targeting the evolution of water‐related risks. Federal hopes in the postwar era that the Nuclear Research Centre would bring progress and prosperity clashed with local values and local perception of nuclear engineering as dangerous to health and the environment. Various conflicts arose and opponents made use of their past lived‐knowledge to foster their arguments against future decision‐making, mobilizing stories from the past to shape the future. The conflict culminated in the 1990s, when the municipality decided to lease the Centre's waterworks for future drinking water supply. The main argument of the article is that even though the public discourse shifted over the years from water pollution toward greater risks such as nuclear meltdowns, the local risk perception stayed with the water‐related risks. The article shows how the locals perceived and narrated their risk perception against the decision‐making of authorities as well as against the reasoning of scientists and experts.

Drinking water in Germany is usually praised as the best-controlled food that can be enjoyed almost without exception. What constitutes high-quality drinking water is defined by law and drinking water should "inspire enjoyment, in other words, it should be colourless, clear, cool and odourless as well as tasty" (Deutsches Institut für Normung, 2017, DIN 2000:2017-02). Since this food is one of the basic human needs, it receives special social attention. When in 1956, the idyllic Rhine valley in the borderlands between the south west of Germany and France was turned into the nuclear capital of Germany with the siting of the Nuclear Research Centre in Leopoldshafen north of Karlsruhe, the local community feared especially a reduction of the water quality. This early perception of water risks ran like a thread through the history of the Nuclear Research Centre and the local population. This paper traces back the long-lasting conflict between the people in the Hardtwald area, where Karlsruhe and Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen are located, who valued their rural surroundings and lived mostly from agriculture in the 1950s and the claims as well as hopes of the Federal Republic of Germany, which saw the federal reactor station as central for the country's future flourishment in the post-war period (Gleitsmann, 2011). This clash of values between the Nuclear Research Centre, the different governments and the people of the Hardtwald area continued up until the 1990s, when the municipality of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen made plans to take over one of the water wells of the Nuclear Research Centre. The takeover became a strategic component in the municipality's Water Concept 2000, through which it aimed at modernising and securing its drinking water supply for the future. During the hearing, opponents cited past violations of rules and free interpretations of threshold values as the basis for their counter arguments. This body of knowledge from the past was knowledge lived by the opponents of the Water Concept 2000. The background ...

This article analyses the historical geography of nuclear energy through the spatial lens of river basins. Approximately half of the world's nuclear power plants were built along one or the other river. There, they gave rise to both conflict and cooperation. Drawing on the theoretical notion of water interaction, which takes into account relations of both conflictual and cooperative nature, we distinguish between such relations in three dimensions: space, environment, and infrastructure. The spatial dimension gravitates around social and political processes where proximity and distance are at the heart, often linked to the search for suitable sites for nuclear construction. The environmental dimension refers to conflict and cooperation around the radioactive and thermal pollution of waterways. The infrastructural dimension, finally, highlights how nuclear power plant builders, when they arrived from the 1950s onwards, had to relate to pre-existing infrastructural features of the rivers, which sometimes led to clashes with other actors and sometimes to more cooperative forms of interaction. In empirical terms, we focus on three European river basins that came to play particular-ly important roles in European nuclear history: those of the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe.

Nuclear energy has long attracted the attention of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. With this HSR Special Issue, we would like to push the scholarly frontier by highlighting the geographies of nuclear energy in the past and present. Nuclear energy is inherently interwoven with geography. We argue that to fully appreciate and grasp nuclear energy's geographical and spatial dimensions, approaches from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields are needed. This special issue thus includes contributions from history, geography, political science, technology assessment, science and technology studies (STS), and other fields. This article introduces this topic by outlining the state of the art of the geographies of nuclear energy and discusses different conceptual frameworks of how to understand nuclear-space interactions. In addition, the individual articles in this issue are briefly presented here and discussed within the research context. The articles themselves cover the geography of nuclear energy from beginning to end: from the mining of uranium, the planning and construction of nuclear power plants, the formation of public resistance, and the cooling of nuclear energy sites as well as the evolution of research centres and, last but not least, the political control and storage of nuclear waste. The collection of articles published here were part of the double session "Geographies of Nuclear Energy," presented at the RGS- IBG Annual International Conference 2021, and of the session "Atomic Rivers," presented at the ESEH Conference 2023.