Détails de la conférence

Date | horaire

Résumé de la conférence

English. What happens to nuclear facilities when they become obsolete and need to retire? This question emerged already in the 1970s, when experts and policymakers realized that more attention had to be paid to the back-end of the nuclear energy cycle. Since then, the field of nuclear decommissioning has become one of the most relevant fields in the nuclear sector, but crucial questions have remained largely unexplored until recently: what are the socioecological implications of long and complex decommissioning projects? What happens to nuclear sites and host communities after decommissioning, and who decides? How much does it cost to decommission nuclear facilities? Who pays, and what funding schemes are in place to sustain the costs of decommissioning projects in different countries? Due to the variability of nuclear facilities’ technical, environmental, and socioeconomic characteristics, each decommissioning project presents site-specific challenges and opportunities. To capture the complexity and variety of decommissioning experiences, our project proposes a multidisciplinary and multisited research strategy that aims to offer a comprehensive view of the problem and of its concrete socioecological and economic reverberations at the community level. Our team uses a mix of research and communication tools: archival documentation, ethnographic observation, policy analysis, participatory workshops and open forums, and filmmaking. This mixed methodology enhances our ability to map out the relevant actors (both human and non-human) involved in decommissioning processes at multiple levels (international, national, regional) and to challenge current top-down expert approaches to decommissioning projects across different cultural, political, and regulatory contexts.

Français. Communautés en perte et en reconquête de pouvoir : étude comparative du démantèlement des sites nucléaires. Que devient une installation nucléaire lorsqu’elle devient obsolète et doit être mise à l’arrêt définitif ? Cette question s’est posée dès les années 1970, lorsque les experts et les décideurs publics ont pris conscience de la nécessité d’accorder une attention accrue à l’aval du cycle de l’énergie nucléaire. Depuis lors, le démantèlement nucléaire est devenu l’un des domaines les plus importants du secteur nucléaire. Toutefois, plusieurs questions essentielles sont longtemps demeurées largement inexplorées : quelles sont les implications socioécologiques de projets de démantèlement longs et complexes ? Que deviennent les sites nucléaires et les communautés d’accueil après le démantèlement, et qui en décide ? Quel est le coût du démantèlement des installations nucléaires ? Qui en assure le financement, et quels dispositifs financiers sont mis en place pour couvrir les coûts des projets de démantèlement selon les pays ? En raison de la diversité des caractéristiques techniques, environnementales et socioéconomiques des installations nucléaires, chaque projet de démantèlement présente des défis et des opportunités spécifiques au site concerné. Afin de rendre compte de la complexité et de la diversité des expériences de démantèlement, notre projet propose une stratégie de recherche multidisciplinaire et multisituée visant à offrir une vision globale du problème ainsi que de ses répercussions socioécologiques et économiques concrètes à l’échelle des communautés locales. Notre équipe mobilise un ensemble diversifié d’outils de recherche et de communication : documentation archivistique, observation ethnographique, analyse des politiques publiques, ateliers participatifs et forums ouverts, ainsi que réalisation cinématographique. Cette méthodologie mixte renforce notre capacité à cartographier les acteurs pertinents — humains comme non humains — impliqués dans les processus de démantèlement à différents niveaux (international, national et régional), tout en remettant en question les approches expertes descendantes actuellement dominantes dans les projets de démantèlement, à travers des contextes culturels, politiques et réglementaires variés.

Courte biographie

Davide Orsini holds a PhD in Anthropology & History and a certificate in Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (STS) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An anthropologist and historian of science and technology by training, Orsini has developed a semiotic approach to risk that pays attentions to the ways in which experts and non-experts build, share, and represent their underdstandings of health and environmental contamination. Davide Orsini is based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, as a Volkswagen Stiftung Change! Fellow and Principal Investigator of a five year research project titled (Dis)Empowered Communities: A Comparative Study of Decommissioning Nuclear Sites. Orsini has been a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in the years 2021–23 and a Zurich-Munich Fellow in 2024. Before returning to the EU in 2021, he held the position of assistant professor in the History Department at Mississippi State University (USA), where he taught history of technology, European history, and STS courses. Orsini is the author of several articles published in international peer reviewed journals and of The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), 2023 finalist of the European Society for Environmental History Turku Book Prize.

Lectures conseillées

About Davide Orsini’s recent work: / En lien avec les travaux récents de Davide Orsini :

Orsini, Davide and Uwe Lübke. (2025). “(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 8. DOI

Orsini, Davide. (2026). “Nuclear Decommissioning and the Political Economy of Waste: Exploring Nuclear Attachments in Italy,” Social Studies of Science. DOI

And to dive deeper into nuclear decommissioning: / Pour approfondir le sujet du démantèlement d’installations nucléaires :

Bärenbold, Rebekka, Bah, Muhammad Maladoh, Lordan-Perret, Rebecca, Steigerwald, Björn, Von Hirschhausen, Christian, Wealer, Ben, Weigt, Hannes, Wimmers, Alexander. (2024). “Decommissioning of commercial nuclear power plants: insights from a multiple-case study,” Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 201: 114621. DOI

Bell, Marissa. (2024). “We are a nuclear community’”: The Ethical, Political Economic, and Social Relations of Canadian Nuclear Waste Siting,” Antipode 57 (4): 1299-1319.

Blowers, Andrew and Pieter Leroy. (1994). “Power, politics and environmental inequality: A theoretical and empirical analysis of the process of ‘peripheralisation’,” Environmental Politics 3 (2):197-228.

Blowers, Andrew. (2017). The Legacy of Nuclear Power. Earthscan, Routledge.

Blowers, Andrew. (2019). “Generations of decay: the political geography of decommissioning.” In: Pasqualetti, Martin J. (Ed.), Nuclear Decommissioning and Society: Public Links to a New Technology, eighth ed. Routledge, pp. 161–173. DOI

Cram, Shannon. (2023). Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility. University of California Press.

Greco, Angelica and Daisaku Yamamoto. (2019) “Geographical political economy and nuclear power plant closures,” Geoforum, Vol. 106: 234-243.

Haller, Melissa, Michael Haines, and Daisaku Yamamoto. (2017). “The End of the Nuclear Era: Nuclear Decommissioning and Its Economic Impacts on U.S. Counties,” Growth and Change 48 (4): 640-660.

Irrek, Wolfgang. (2019). “Financing nuclear decommissioning”. In: Haas, Reinhard, Mez, Lutz, Ajanovic, Amela (Eds.), The Technological and Economic Future of Nuclear Power, Energiepolitik Und Klimaschutz. Energy Policy and Climate Protection. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp. 139–168. DOI

Kalshoven, Petra Tijtske. (2022). “The Fish is in the Water and the Water is in the Fish: Symbiosis in a Nuclear Whale Fall,” Cultural Anthropology 37 (2): 349-378.

Kalshoven, Petra Tijtske. (2023). “The Skyline is Changing: Editing Space and Discourse in Nuclear Decommissioning,” Visual Anthropology 36 (5): 487-514.

LaGuardia, Thomas. (2012). “Decommissioning of Nuclear Power Plants,” in Laraia, Michiele (Ed.), Nuclear decommissioning: Planning, Execution and international Experience. (Woddhead Publishing), pp. 831-888.

Laraia, Michele. (2018). Nuclear Decommissioning: Its History, Developments, and Current Status. Springer.

Orsini, Davide and Uwe Lübke. (2025). “(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 8. DOI

Orsini, Davide. (2026). “Nuclear Decommissioning and the Political Economy of Waste: Exploring Nuclear Attachments in Italy,” Social Studies of Science. DOI

Pasqualetti, Martin (Ed.) (1991). Nuclear Decommissioning and Society: Public Links to a New Technology. (London: Routledge).

Pasqualetti, Martin et Al. (1991). Special Nuclear decommissioning Issue, The Energy Journal Vol. 12, 1991. URL

Ross, Linda. (2023). “Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Energy Past to Heritage Future,” Heritage and Society 17 (2): 296-315.

Saraç-Lesavre, Başak. (2020). “Desire for the ‘worst’: Extending nuclear attachments in southeastern New Mexico,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (4): 753-771.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Collaborative. (2020). Socioeconomic Impacts from Nuclear Power Plant Closure and decommissioning: Host Community Experiences, Best Practices and Recommendations. URL

Yamamoto, Daisaku, Julia Feikens, and Melissa Haller. (2021). “Nuclear-to-Nature Land Conversion,” Geographical Review 111 (3): 415-436.

Wimmers, Alexander and Christian von Hirshhausen. (2024). “Organizational models for the decommissioning of nuclear power plants: Lessons from the United Kingdom and the United States,” Utilities Policy 91: 101843.

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