Exploring nuclear Germany

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-12-06

This text was first published by Per Högselius on the Nuclearwaters-Blog on 3 December 2021.

Exploring nuclear Germany

As the most recent wave of the corona pandemic rolls in over Europe, it seems that much of the past summer and autumn was a narrow window of opportunity for international travel. I now feel happy that I managed to make use of that window.

In late September I went to Regensburg to participate in a conference on infrastructures in East and Southeast Europe (see my separate blogpost on that). After the conference, I stayed on in Bavaria for a couple of days. I rented a car and a bike and went to take a close look at the water supply arrangements for three German nuclear power plants and the nuclearized landscapes that have emerged as a result of nuclear construction there from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Gundremmingen is the only German nuclear power plant situated directly on the Danube. It started to be built already in 1962 and was one of Germany’s first nuclear power plants. There was a fierce debate during construction about possible contamination of the region’s drinking water. Less known is that plant construction demanded a complex reengineering of the Danube, which was dammed upstreams and also a few kilometres downstream to create a reliable and regular water flow for cooling the reactors. This generated an artificial water reservoir, the shores of which, as I was able to experience directly, are nowadays still very popular places for various leisure activities. Nuclear hydraulic engineers also built a canal to divert Danube water to the nuclear plant. The early pioneering reactor at Gundremmingen was shut down long ago. However, the plant was expanded through the addition of two much more powerful reactors: one boiling water reactor (seen to the left in one of the pictures below) and one pressurized water reactor (seen to the right), which today makes the plant area look very diverse. The pressurized water reactor was closed in 2017. The boiling water reactor, supported by one cooling tower, is still in operation, but like all remaining German NPPs, its days are numbered.

The Isar nuclear power plant is named after the Danube tributary on which it was built. Here, too, nuclear construction was intimately linked to other hydraulic projects aimed at “taming” the river. The Isar was dammed and equipped with hydroelectric turbines (see the image to the upper left), which now still contribute to the safety of the nuclear station, because they ensure that electricity will always be available locally even in the case of a regional power failure. This made it unnecessary for the nuclear operators to invest in emergency diesel generators. The Isar plant was originally designed for one boiling water reactor only, for which a less powerful and very compact type of cooling towers were built (lower left, to the right of the reactor building); these were used only when the Isar’s water flow was insufficient. The high-rise cooling tower that can be seen across much of Bavaria was constructed only when a further reactor, of the pressurized water type, was added later on (right). The boiling water reactor was shut down immediately after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The pressurized water reactor is supposedly still in operation, but apparently not on the day of my visit, judging by the lack of “smoke” (water vapour) from the cooling tower.

The Grafenrheinfeld NPP is also in Bavaria, but further north, in Lower Franconia, where the inhabitants usually don’t think of themselves as “Bavarians”. This cultural divide largely coincides with the physical drainage divide between the Rhine and the Danube river basins. Hence this nuclear station, which is no longer in operation (having been shut down in 2015), is situated not in the Danube basin, but on the Main, the Rhine’s most important tributary. When construction started in 1974 the Main was already a suitable river for cooling water supplies. This was because Germany had invested enormously in the 1950s and 1960s in making the Main navigable all the way up to Bamberg, taming the river and regularizing its water flow with the help of no fewer than 34 weirs and locks. The river is now part of a system that interconnects the Rhine and Danube river basins, the centrepiece of which is the Rhein-Main-Danube Canal.

A month later I returned to Germany. I first spent a few days at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, which turned out to be a treasure trove for nuclear-historical research. I then went up (or rather down) to northern Germany and the Lower Elbe region. There I went to see how the Stade, Brokdorf and Brunsbüttel nuclear power plants (of which only Brokdorf is still in operation, but only until the end of this year) were integrated into this North Sea estuary. In contrast to the plants erected along the Danube, Isar and Main further south, the main challenge here seemed to be flood (rather than water scarcity) management. The Lower Elbe region is historically very much a marshland and all nuclear – indeed, all industrial – projects are dependent on a reliable drainage infrastructure. Like in the Netherlands, that infrastructure is critically dependent on large pumps for lifting water, in this case into the Elbe (see the image below, far left). The nuclear stations along the Lower Elbe also made use of a pre-nuclear infrastructure of earthen dikes, which are typically 5 meters tall (upper and lower right). These have always formed the centerpiece of nuclear flood protection and hence they can be regarded as components in the nuclear safety system. However, after the 1999 flooding of the Blayais NPP in France, a plant that is located in an estuary very similar to that of the Elbe, German regulatory authorities started looking into the deeper history of flooding events in the North Sea and how new such events might potentially cause havoc to the Lower Elbe NPPs: would they be able to cope with an event on a par with the famous Storegga slide, which is believed to have caused a huge tsunami throughout the North Sea region back in 6200 BC?

Isar Nuclear Power Plant 2021, by Per Högselius

In early 2022 I will publish an article in Technology & Culture which discusses, in further depth, some of the above-mentioned issues relating to nuclearized landscapes, water scarcity management, flood protection, the complex interplay between nuclear and non-nuclear hydraulic construction. Have a look in our list of publications.

”Två fel gör inte ett rätt” – How China is taken as an argument to not act for the climate

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-11-22

Nina Wormbs, Professor of History of Technology at the division, has published an article relevant in the context of the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 17 November 2021. In the following we will present a short summary of its main points in English, while you can read the original in full length and in Swedish here.

Summary:

When climate issues are discussed in Sweden, China is often taken as a comparison. In fact, people use China as an argument to not act in regard to climate change.

During the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, the focus was also on China, since the country is highly invested in coal both at home and abroad. It is obvious that we need to work with China together, since its emissions are enormous. Despite this, China has recently undertaken steps towards a sustainable society.

In particular, it has become normal to point to China in a debate, if one does not want to engage with those questions the current climate crisis is bringing up. This can include coal power plants but also a justification for flying to Mallorca or Thailand for fun, because Chinese tourists could be seen in Gamla Stan. In order for this practice not to spread further, we have to understand why those arguments are not valid and what they result in.

First, it makes no sense to motivate one’s own harm-doing by arguing that someone else would produce even more harm.

Secondly, the comparison with China’s emissions are an eternal but nevertheless problematic way of relativising one’s own influence. Because you are always able to find someone who produces more emissions than yourself. More than Sweden. More than Europe. Of course it is important how much we emit as humanity, but the China-argument suggests that there would be some form of give- and take, like as if life would be a zero-sum-game. Instead, it is the opposite: every ton of CO2 counts.

Additionally, the China-argument points to an understanding, in which one does not have to do a tiny bit of right, while someone else does so much wrong. Maybe this argument is spreading, because more and more people repeat it. People in Sweden have limited knowledge of China. China is bigger, has more people, and all of them are striving towards a better life. That’s why it might be easy to point to China, in order to relativise one’s own responsibility.

Thirdly, China is often portrayed as an enemy in Swedish media. It can therefore be seen as a nation different from Sweden, being imagined like the negative “other”.

Why are the USA never mentioned in this context, despite their higher historical and per-capita-emissions (IPCC and carbonbrief.org)? Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also hardly ever named, even though they are leading the per-capita-emissions statistics.

If one looks into the emissions of production chains of consumer goods, of which a lot are produced in China but used somewhere else like in Sweden, the territorial basis for emission-calculations seems off.

Furthermore, within most individual nations the gap between rich and poor gets bigger, which means that the individual emissions are not what the average suggests, but rather high if you are rich, or low if you are poor. Therefore, it would be a great idea to change the focus from nations to individuals, like Chancel and Piketty suggested in 2015. This makes even more sense, since the richest 10% of the world’s population accounted for 50% of emissions since 1990. Those 10% can be found in every country, but they are not evenly distributed. More so, since 40% of those live in the USA, while only 10% live in China. It might be a cold shower for a Swedish discussant that every Swede with a monthly income of over 27,500 SEK belongs to this group.

This is not being written to support China’s climate policies. Instead, it is to show that China is not relevant if one wants to discuss a domestic climate action plan, as the relationship between being rich and producing lots of emissions is evident – and Sweden is one of the richest countries on earth.

Postdoc in Crisis (or not?)

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-10-25

By Marta Musso and Lina Rahm, first published in our division’s Biennial Report 2019-2020 “Integrative Humanities”

During the summer of 2020, the journal Nature conducted a study on how the pandemic had affected postdocs’ careers as well as their well-being. Six out of ten stated that the pandemic had worsened their career opportunities, and more than half stated that they had experienced work-related anxiety and worry. The title of the article that presented the study was accordingly Postdocs in crisis.

One could say that a crisis is an event where the normal order of processes and institutions can no longer cope with new external conditions. The Coronavirus has revealed to us how we, as humans, are inevitably interlinked to a more-than-human world, a world which, in many ways, is also incalculable and outside the comfort zone of established knowledge (see the first-hand experience of dealing with the Coronavirus by Division Professor Marco Armiero, at this link). Further, it seems like the Covid crisis has been more conspicuously framed as a crisis of death, mourning and suffering, than, for example the so-called migrant crisis in 2019, where institutional problems were more highlighted (instead of the death, mourning and suffering connected to that). How societal phenomena are framed thus seems to depend on who is ‘touched by’ its consequences and how. As Marxist art critic J.J. Charlesworth tweeted: “There was never any lockdown. There were just middle-class people hiding while working-class people brought them things.”

So, even though we have been affected and concerned by the pandemic in many ways, we must also be ‘read’ with our privileges in mind. We could, to a large extent, avoid the worst rampages of the virus, and we were fortunate to work in a department that did its utmost to accommodate the new conditions of the distance mode. By creating a convivial and participatory atmosphere – through virtual APT meetings, higher seminars, helpful “shut-up-and-write” workshops, computer-mediated “semla celebration fika” (and physical stroll-meetings with social distancing) – we have been spurred to continue to take part of the research environment in very concrete ways.

If one important element for researchers has emerged from this pandemic, and especially for researchers using historical documents (NB: it’s not only historians!!), it is the importance of accessing archives in the digital sphere. Digitisation processes have been discussed and prepared for by archivists and institutions for at least the past 20 years, since the World Wide Web started to spread. Most archives, at least from rich countries, have opened a web presence of some sort; many are proceeding fast towards the complete digitisation of their collections, in order to allow researchers to access their documents 24/7, anywhere in the world. Others have at least a web presence where it is possible to search their catalogues through search engines, making archival research as fast and immediate as ever, usually from national-level portals, or hosted by the national archives of their country. International-level portals aggregating archival institutions from many different countries have also started to emerge (think of Europeana, Archives Portal Europe, or Internet Archive), institutions with very ambitious goals of becoming parallel entities to Google, where it is possible to search for all pre-digital cultural production as well. Before the pandemic, these projects never gathered too much attention. Except for archivists actively campaigning for digital access, digital archives were still a niche subject. Some professionals even boycotted them out of fear of making the physical institutions obsolete; researchers still traditionally work by organising their research around the trip to the archive; only a handful of institutions allow requests of digitisation on demand – something that now, with the pandemics, professional archive-goers have discovered the hard way. With institutions closed, billions of documents and related researches are on hold; conversely, collections that are available online are flourishing, providing a much-needed lifeline to researchers who are sometimes working on tight deadlines, and whose jobs expire when the funds expire, whether or not the research was carried out.

On a personal level, our post-doc research projects can still continue thanks to something that now feels like fantastic planning skills, but that really was just a stroke of luck. During previous archive trips, both of us photographed and digitised (“for personal use”) an amazing quantity of documents, which was too much for a single research task, but which are now being used for our current studies. The decision of taking thousands of photographs during the archive trips was not due to the idea that there might one day be a pandemic: indeed, before Coronavirus, our idea of a pandemic resembled a thrilling zombie apocalypse; never had the idea of “staying at home” and “social distancing” crossed our minds. The rationale behind it was to make the best use of the money and time spent on trips to very distant institutions, and because of the desire to check every single piece of a folder, while allowing for time, later on, to view and review as many papers available in the archive as possible.

Now that we cannot go to the physical archives, our own digital memories of the archives became the new archives that we could inhabit. Hopefully, the pandemic has helped to raise awareness of the importance of digitisation as a fundamental aspect of accessing our heritage, and something complementary, not in opposition, to archives and museum institutions.

Our Image of the Savannah Reveals who we are

Sofia Jonsson

, 2021-10-18

In the think piece, “Our image of the savannah reveals who we are” (Vår bild av savannen avslöjar vilka vi är), doctoral student Erik Isberg reflects on how our image of the early people on the savannah has change over the centuries and how it is characterized by its time. The text originally was published in Swedish for Sverigesradio.se. Below is a translated, shorted version.

Full text with references: Vår bild av savannen avslöjar vilka vi är

Our image of the savannah reveals who we are

Already 60 years before Christ, the Roman poet Lucretius speculated whether the first humans were of stronger stuff than the spoiled civilized equivalent, and in the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed a similar idea, contrasting an idealized image of a harmonious state of nature against a corrupt contemporary. However, after World War II, theories about the origin of humankind gained new weight: they were to be substantiated scientifically rather than philosophically.

In the book “Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America”, the historian of ideas Erika Lorraine Milam writes a kind of savannah’s cultural history from the end of World War II.

The popular science stories of the 1950s about the origins of humanity emphasized cooperation, everyone’s common roots and the ability to communicate as an essential human trait. They were often cheered on – intellectually and financially – by Huxley’s Unesco. However, as the dream of a harmonious world began to fall and the balance of the cold war terror took over, the mood on the savannah also changed.

60’s pay attention to man’s inherent aggressiveness. A new generation of popular science writers highlighted characteristics such as violence and dominance as defining for the first humans. This inherent aggression had dictated the conditions of existence on the savannah, where those who wanted to survive had to establish a violent capital.

This savannah did not become particularly long-lived. Milam places the end of the idea of The Killer Ape, the dominant male as ruler of the savannah, to the 1980s. Who stepped in and took his place? No one, she answers. “When violence and prejudice became personal,” Milam writes, “biological theories of aggression and human nature became inadequate.” Collective explanatory models lost status and when the Cold War regime began to loosen up, the terrorist balance of our ancestors disappeared. Time had run out from the savannah, free individuals who left the stone axes in the grass and did not want to feel any common prehistory replaced The Killer Ape.

Nevertheless, the cultural history of the savannah does not end here after all. We find it everywhere at the bookstores’ top lists, and in TV productions and radio shows, it is an obvious foundation. Rather than disappearing, the savannah just seems to have changed shape. The prehistory that appears in the health literature appears as a continuation of the ideas that Milam describes in her book, but where the individual is more interesting than the common. Today we do not refer to our ancestors in matters of violence and prejudice, instead they are used to answer questions about how to live a better life. In this way, the savannah retains its moral implications, but not for society at large, but for the individual. Huxley’s vision of society has been replaced by self-optimization.

Swedish epidemiologist Anders Wallensten, author of the book The health mystery (Hälsogåtan: evolution, forskning och 48 konkreta råd, Bonnier Fakta, 2020), presents a savannah where the community is larger and the group’s cohesion is crucial for its continued survival. However, the goal of the community is not, as was the case in the utopian descriptions of the 1950s, a new society, but how individuals, through the support of the community, are to create a good life. Cooperation and community do not appear as goals in themselves, but as means for the individual to realize himself. In addition, the individual’s responsibility seems almost absolute.

Since Julian Huxley stood on the steps in Paris, the inhabitants of the savannah have repeatedly changed shape, and the popular science writers of the future will probably let the savannah be populated by additional new inhabitants, where the props remain but the ensemble is replaced. Perhaps the self-optimizing savannah people will have to make sacrifices for each other when pandemics and climate change hit their contemporary counterparts. Or something completely different happens. Perhaps the most interesting thing is not what answers the savannah can give us, but what questions we think it can answer.

Text: Erik Isberg, doctoral student in the project SPHERE

Norwegian oil and Antarctica

Sofia Jonsson

, 2021-09-20

Authors: Alejandra Mancilla, professor in Philosopy, UiO & Peder Roberts, associate professor in Modern history, UiS & researcher, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH

The most recent IPCC report paints a dark picture. Among other things, melting Antarctic ice could put many parts of the world underwater. We therefore want to pose two questions: do we have the necessary tools to preserve Antarctica, and thereby also the world? And can the Antarctic Treaty states (including Norway) claim that they are fulfilling their commitments under the Treaty when they continue to pursue oil-focused policies?

Norway is one of the 29 consultative parties to the Antarctic Treaty, which marks its 60^th anniversary in 2021. Many celebrate that the treaty has achieved peace and scientific cooperation. Additionally, it is 30 years since the Protocol on Environmental Protection (widely known as the Madrid Protocol) was agreed. Since then no further legal instruments have been developed to deal with new challenges – above all, the climate crisis. We argue that the Antarctic Treaty does not lack the necessary tools to address this challenge, and that instead it is a matter of more ambitiously interpreting the texts that already exist, and the responsibilities of the individual countries involved.

The Madrid Protocol states that the parties commit to protecting “the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems.” This phrase (which occurs nineteen times in the text) leads to the question: what does it mean to protect ecosystems that are dependent and/or associated with Antarctica? The Protocol, like the Treaty itself, covers the area from the South Pole to latitude 60 degrees south, but to attain that goal it is necessary to act further north. Actions outside the geographic boundaries of the Antarctic Treaty should therefore be taken into account when evaluating the extent to which a state fulfills its commitments to protect Antarctica.

The Protocol also asserts that Antarctica has “intrinsic value”. Intrinsic value stands in contrast to instrumental value. Using Antarctica as a laboratory is an example of the latter, where Antarctica functions as a means to achieve the end of increasing scientific knowledge. Intrinsic value, on the other hand, demands that we treat Antarctica as an end in itself. What exactly that means is a discussion that the Antarctic Treaty parties are yet to have, but which could lead to a more ambitious interpretation of the Protocol’s mandate.

The processes that drive climate change and loss of biodiversity do not follow political geographical boundaries. For Antarctica, it is not enough to regulate activities within the Treaty area itself: activities beyond must also be considered. The states that signed the Madrid Protocol committed themselves, in a way, to protect the whole world. It is high time that citizens of the signatory states voiced that demand, particularly in the context of elections. Committing to meet or exceed the targets set in the Paris Agreement would be a good start.

As a founding member of the Antarctic Treaty that continues to be active in the continent, Norway should take the lead in this process. The country has a self-image as an enthusiastic advocate of human rights and environmental causes at the global level. If it wishes to live up to its reputation, Norway ought to begin by stopping issuing new permits for oil exploration and taking concrete steps toward reducing fossil fuel production. Thus can Norway truly make a contribution to protecting Antarctica.

New Division Report out!

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-06-21

From Transformative, to Defining, to the Intergrative Humanities. The Division has published reports since the beginning of the 1990s, but only in the last six years on a biennial basis. The first years the reports were annual, basic information on staff, courses, seminars, and activities. Since 2015 the reports are themed and open up to all the voices at the Divison with a mix of deep analyzis of publishing patterns, basic information on projects, staff, events etc. and personal reflections from the people who worked with the Divison during the two years represented. The report on Intergrative Humanities was released on June 17, and sums up the two very diverse years, 2019 and 2020.

The theme of the current report reflects our thinking around how humanities knowledge is gaining in significance, which is increasingly by engaging in broad and complex problems that require multiple competencies. – Sverker Sörlin

As a teaser we are republishing the following piece (pp. 14-15). If you want to read the whole thing, download the report and read it here.

Our Work Environment

By Sabine Höhler and Sofia Jonsson

From two hectic but very exciting years with numerous new projects, employees and events, the pace indeed slowed down somewhat during 2019 at the Division. We continued to fill our calendars with both bigger and smaller events. We also ordered noise-cancelling earphones and started a subscription to plants for our corridors. We stopped expanding and instead settled on a number of around 50 employees, which remained steady through the end of 2020. During this period, we also hired our third administrator, making the admin team complete.

Home office in Älvsjö, Ziggy Stardust the Cat

Trying to think back to 2019 during an ongoing pandemic is slightly challenging. We remember that it was the usual busy year full of events and full of the small things we all took for granted then. We started the year with an on-site Higher Seminar with our doctoral student Jean-Sebastién Boutet, and we continued with Marco Armiero’s Docent lecture. Per Högselius held his inaugural lecture as a new professor in history of technology. These events were likely framed by cake in the kitchen. We also initiated a Thursday afternoon fika, a regular coffee break for the intake of cake and other sweets. Our work environment was very much stomach-steered. Work place meetings would always involve the traditional “fralla” or bun. Our two corridors were filled with employees and guests, we met over a lunch, a coffee and a chat in the kitchen most every workday. Our families joined us for the annual picnic to kick off the summer break. To kick off the fall term, we travelled to Falun and climbed down into the old copper mines. A happy crowd decorated for Christmas before we all sang carols to a nice cup of “glögg” before the Holidays.

Being such a social work place, with a spirit built on collegiality, food, and a friendly atmosphere on site, the pandemic and the new restrictions it entailed were a huge adjustment and a struggle for many of us. In March 2020, new regulations sent us all into home office and our guests were forced to return to their home countries. Our workplace meetings moved to Zoom and the archives around the world were left unexplored. The spontaneous chat over a coffee in the kitchen seemed impossible to replace in the digital space. Some of us ended up in complete lockdown with kids at home, adding Teletubbies to their workday. On top of this, we experienced Zoom fatigue from all our online meetings and we developed a vulture neck after sitting crouched in a bad working position at a temporary desk for far too many hours.

Was it all that bad? No, we did manage to create some great memories together after all. In June we had an open-air party to celebrate Daniele Valisena’s PhD defense. In August we had a “hub” kick off, where we met in smaller groups spread out over Stockholm in colleagues’ gardens, discussing teaching and work environment both in smaller groups on site and over Zoom. We had a small and spread-out mingle for Jesse Peterson when he defended his PhD thesis in October, with cheese, songs and tears in the kitchen. Not to forget that at long last we could welcome our overseas colleagues to our online Division meetings. In addition, we got to enjoy the unexpected delivery of a piano to the Division in Real Time during a work place meeting!

Something I Have Learned from COVID-19

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-02-01

The following text was published by Marco Armiero in Environment and History 26 (3), pp. 451-454, in August 2020. Marco writes as acting president of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).

I hope I am not taking advantage of my position as the president of our society to write what might seem to be a quite personal text. Feminist practices and scholarship have taught me that the personal is never only personal but also political. In my own work I have always blended – someone less sympathetic would say mixed up – the personal, the scientific and the political, convinced, as I am, that we know the world not only through concepts and words but also through emotions and political passions. So, please bear with me in my perhaps inappropriate trespassing of those various realms.

I would like to start by thanking all of you for your caring and warm support during these difficult times. As many of you may already know, I have been seriously ill with COVID-19. I was hospitalised for almost one month, spending ten days in the Intensive Care Unit. My condition was critical. During that time, and in my convalescence, I felt the privilege of being part of such a loving community; my family and I never felt alone. In this weird time of quarantine, colleagues and friends unleashed their creativity, overcoming geographical distance, my difficulties in speaking, and the physical distancing that the virus has imposed upon us. I happily run the risk of sounding cheesy but I wish to say that so much love was an amazing therapy – together with all the antiviral drugs and assisted breathing tools I received from the hospital. An academic society is not a group of friends, I realise this very well. But friendship, caring, and love can make a difference also in an academic society.

I have often campaigned for a scholarship that has the ambition to contribute to changing the world; perhaps this experience has taught me that we need to also change the ecologies of our relationships and feelings, starting from where and who we are.

Someone told me, trying to cheer me up, that it must have been my obsession with bottom-up research and empirical fieldwork that brought me into the eye of this epidemic: ‘It was not enough to read about COVID-19, you had to experience it first-hand.’ Jokes aside, I wonder what I have learned from that unplanned fieldwork. I should immediately confess that it is not easy for me to reflect on my experience because it is painful and very emotional. While writing these few lines, I feel inadequate for the task and I am struggling with myself over whether I have actually something to say that might be of general interest. Perhaps, this is lesson number one: being humble and not pretending always to have something smart to say.

When I arrived at the local hospital here in Sweden, nurses and doctors were sure I was coming from Italy, perhaps after a short visit to family or friends. Indeed, I am from Italy – if you have ever heard me speaking in English, you would have no doubt about it – but I was not coming from Italy. The need to track the contagion is often a relevant tool in the control of epidemics like the current one. In Italy, at least at the beginning of the pandemic, there was an attempt to follow the movement of the virus from one subject to another, aiming to stop the spread of the contagion. Even now, regional governments have the authority to declare a ‘red zone’ – that is, to lock down a specific area (a town, a neighbourhood or perhaps a hospital) where the virus is especially prevalent in order to end the contagion. I was also asking myself – at least when I was still conscious – how and where I got infected, revising in my mind the last two weeks of my existence. Isn’t this lesson number two?

I believe that, in general, people in the Global North do not think of their daily lives in those terms. We move in antiseptic, immunised environments, assuming that the world around us is not affecting our bodies, at least not with such immediate consequences. Even fewer of us would routinely see other human beings as biological threats. COVID-19 reminds us of what Stacy Alaimo has defined as trans-corporeality– that is, the interconnectedness of all beings with the material world in a dialectic relationship which transforms both of them simultaneously.

Although not employing this post-humanist lexicon, Alfred Crosby was arguing something very similar to trans-corporeality in his volume on the history of the Hispanic Flu: ‘The human body is a collocation of wonders, and none is more wondrous than the lungs. Here, quite literally, the line dividing the body from its environment is thinnest. The embodied experience of trans-corporeality in the dramatic form of COVID-19 calls for rethinking our understanding of the daily, familiar environment and its invisible/invisibilised relationships to the wider world. Several scholars have stressed that the present pandemic is the result of the expansion of intensive animal farming and the impingement of market-oriented agriculture on the wild. The organisation of production and consumption makes invisible the links connecting our daily environments with these wider networks of exploitation, but the body is the middle ground where those connections can become visible again, sometimes in a spectacular form as with COVID-19. The illusion that we live in a completely isolated and immunised environment is shattered.

However, while revealing the interconnections of the world and the impossibility of preserving indefinitely the safety of a small portion of it alongside the ruin of the rest, my experience of COVID-19 also goes almost in the opposite direction, and here we come to lesson number three. I got the virus in its aggressive form, as did many others around the world, but this does not make all of us equal. Rob Nixon once wrote that we might all be in the Anthropocene but in different ways. Similarly, Robert Bullard wrote that not all communities are created equal. COVID-19 is not the biological equaliser reducing our socio-ecological structure to the bare strength of our bodies. Race, class, gender and history matter in this pandemic. Many countries impoverished by colonial and neoliberal extractivism and exploitation have extremely weak health infrastructures; plus, as Mike Davis has noted, epidemics do not occur in a void, acting instead in combination with lack of food, inefficient sanitisation and poverty. Several studies are pointing at the unequal distribution of the virus, which seems to hit already vulnerable people more severely, including ethnic minorities, migrants and prison inmates. Obviously, this is not because of inappropriate behaviours – blaming the victims is always an easy toxic narrative – but rather because the virus is completely embodied into the current socio-ecological relationships which reproduce inequalities and privileges.

Something I have learned from COVID-19 is that I survived because I live in the ‘right’ part of the world, I belong to the ‘right’ class and I am not an illegal immigrant. Even now, going through my convalescence/quarantine, it is clear to me that my privilege makes my experience bearable. The appeal to social distancing and washing hands frequently are fantasies – perhaps insults – for most people who live in overcrowded environments, without services or are homeless. The very idea of home as a safe place denies the reality of domestic violence against women – and in fact several sources mention an increase of gender-based violence during the quarantine. And apart from violence, for many women the pandemic has brought even more care work. No, through COVID-19 I have not discovered how much we are all the same, but, on the contrary, the extent to which inequalities are inscribed in our lives and deaths.

But the truth is that I did not think of any of those issues when I was in the hospital, when I was intubated or when I was struggling to breathe. I was instead thinking of my family, I was afraid of not seeing them again; I was wondering whether I would see my daughter getting older, if I had been a good father and partner. I was afraid to die and I did not think about the many deadlines I was missing, the grants I did not get and the books I did not write.

Perhaps, this is lesson number 4, but this lesson might be just for me.

MARCO ARMIERO
President of the European Society for Environmental History

Discussing the issue of flying and sustainability

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-01-18

By Nina Wormbs

The week before Christmas, a number of colleagues at the Division gathered for a workshop where we discussed flying habits. It was part of the research project Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice at the EECS school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, led by Daniel Pargman with funding from the Swedish Energy Agency. Elina Eriksson led the workshop with support from Daniel and Aksel Bjørn-Hansen.

The aim of the project is to see how we might reduce the carbon footprint of KTH that stems from flying. Since flying is a large part of KTH emissions and totally dominates those of travel, it could be seen as low hanging fruit. At the same time, travel is nowadays also part and parcel of academic culture. Thus, there are interesting obstacles to change behaviour.

Academic flying has interested us at the Division for many years and as a response to a discussion at our kick-off in 2015, the blog The travelling scientist was launched and Johan Gärdebo had a small project with workshops of similar kind.

In the workshop we received information on our flight patterns, data that the project has collected after great work. It was not easy for Pargman and his colleagues to get a full picture of the flying at KTH, and not even now do they know for certain the sources of KTH flying emissions. This data is of course crucial since the government has required that public agencies work with their emissions. And if we do not have data, we cannot report and reduce.

It turned out that flying at our Division, perhaps not so surprisingly, was not evenly distributed among our colleagues for the year 2019. Of 47 employees, 12 did not fly at all, whereas some made about a dozen flights. Moreover, the type of flights varied, and this is particularly interesting since the focus is CO2 emissions. Based on our division’s data a medium-range flight to Europe emits 3,4 times as much as a Scandinavian flight. And an intercontinental flight emits 20 times as much. Not surprisingly, Division emissions from intercontinental flights make up almost 80 percent. (See figure below.)

In the workshop we were encouraged to think about travelling and if and how to change it. This we did in small groups (everything on zoom of course) and with feedback through Menti. The first question regarded what flights could be avoided and common suggestions were intercontinental ones, very brief conference trips and those of committee work. On the other hand, field trips and archival work was hard to avoid.

This was most likely connected also to the insights of the pandemic, where we have realised that some things can indeed be done differently. The second question in the workshop focused on precisely this: what did we learn from the pandemic that we can use in the future. Here answers varied from the longing for real meetings with colleagues to realising that many meetings work fine digitally. Some digital conferences that we have experienced also shows that this was of meeting can be more inclusive.

About a dozen people joined the workshop, and hopefully it can still help the Division in contributing to a constructive change. KTH has environmental and emission targets and if we do not want to see hard regulation from above, we need to work from below. The workshop participants were in agreement that we have a responsibility to reach the climate objectives and most also believed that flying less is possible.

Nina Wormbs

Co-author of Grounded: Beyond flygskam (2019)

Experiences in Digital Teaching

Achim Klüppelberg

, 2021-01-11

Covid-19 has profoundly changed the way we work as scholars of the humanities. Teaching is no exception to this. The digitisation of university education was abruptly maximised and teachers were to a big extent forced to adapt to the new reality of online teaching on their own.

Kati Lindström has written about her experiences during the autumn term. She is a researcher with a lot of know-how both in teaching in general and in digital education in particular. In her opinion, the systems we use can be majorly improved. Canvas as a teaching platform is limited under these new conditions and needs a drastic makeover or at least generous supplementation to make education more efficient. As a result of inefficient software, teachers need to spend a lot of time on tedious clicking-work, which easily could be made obsolete. During the last term, this got out of hand.

The stress, which is put upon teachers, manifests in different forms. For Kati, it took the form of severe arm pain, which under the given circumstances is hard to mitigate. Therefore, the question needs to be asked:

A computer mouse, being used by a hand. A keyboard, pen, headphones and a mug are standing left of it. The picture is kept in black and white.

What can we improve in the field of digital education during the upcoming terms?

In the face of the surging Covid-19 pandemic, we will most likely not be able to go back to normal any time soon. So if we have to do online teaching to this extent for the foreseeable future, it should be in the interest of everyone to enable the conduction of education within the boundaries of (professional) sustainability.

Please check out the original blog post by Kati Lindström here. The link directs you to Kati’s home page.

The Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Interview with Andrei Stsiapanau*

, 2020-05-19

by Alicia Gutting, PhD student

Nuclear energy is a highly debated field and depending on the societal context usually either embraced or fully rejected. From an outsider position it sometimes seems as if there was no in between: you are either pro- or anti-nuclear. This does not solely apply to times of active nuclear energy generation, but it also affects the future and finding solutions for safe storage of nuclear waste. In today’s interview with Andrei Stsiapanau we will hear more about the nuclear debate in the former Soviet Union. Andrei is a guest in our Nuclearwaters project since January 2020 and he is a scholarship holder of the Swedish Institute Visby Scholarship Program for Senior Researchers. He researches how nuclear energy is being socially and politically debated in Russia, Belarus and Lithuania and he is especially interested in the politics of nuclear waste in Russia, Lithuania and Sweden.

Alicia Gutting: Andrei, could you please let us know what you have been working on in the past months?

Andrei Stsiapanau: During the last months I have been working on the nuclear waste management issues in Russia as well as in Lithuania and Sweden. When more and more nuclear facilities throughout the world enter the stage of decommissioning, it is becoming particularly urgent to find sustainable solutions to the issue of nuclear waste. The list of possible technical solutions for spent nuclear fuel and other types of waste include deep geological disposal after reprocessing (favoured in France, Japan, and UK); direct deep geological disposal (favoured in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Germany, USA and Czech Republic); surface long-term storage (favoured in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain). Each of these solutions translates into different ways on how to communicate, classify and govern nuclear waste in a particular country.

My research is focusing on how nuclear waste issues are communicated in various techno-political contexts. While studying how nuclear waste issues are being negotiated with communities in Russia, I discovered that natural resources like clay are used within nuclear waste discourses to mitigate the risk of potential radioactive contamination. It was my starting point to investigate how natural resources are used in various discourses about nuclear waste to make it less dangerous and harmful for people and environments. In the cases of Lithuania and Sweden, I am investigating how, through awareness and information campaigns, risks associated with nuclear waste are mediated and mitigated to transform the hazardous nuclear objects into manageable waste.

AG: What role does clay play?

AS: According to numerous researches on the role of the natural barrier in the nuclear waste disposal system, clay as well as crystalline rock are considered as a retardation medium for radionuclides migration. The multi barrier protection within nuclear waste technology illustrates how natural barriers or the geology of the disposal site will retard or mediate for both fluid flow and radionuclides migration in case of the engineering layer decay. This kind of technical vision of the disposal process promotes the natural protection layer as a reliable tool for absorption and immobilization of radioactivity. Geological and chemical studies of clay rock in various sites in the United States, France, Belgium, Canada and Russia show that clay has a number of absorption properties valuable for immobilization of the radioactive elements in the geomedia in case of the technical barrier decay. Thus, clay has become employed as a part of the nuclear waste management process. It represents a tool for absorption, immobilization and confinement of radioactivity. Including clay in the whole process of the nuclear decommission and decontamination makes it possible to reconsider the role of natural resources and materials in nuclear waste technologies and multi-barrier protection discourses.

AG: Are there differences in the Swedish and the Lithuanian (political) approach?

AS: Nuclear waste management systems in Sweden and Lithuania are developing in the context of decommissioning and nuclear phase out but following different trajectories and guidelines. The final repository for short-lived radioactive waste located at Forsmark in the municipality of Östhammar started operating in 1988. Lithuania is only now entering the phase of the construction of the landfill repositories for low and medium radioactive waste, and the construction of the geological disposal is programmed for after 2045. The Swedish approach represents an advanced example of nuclear waste management, based on the long-term experience of scientific research, transparent decision-making and continued reliance on public opinion and participation. Some connections in sharing nuclear waste management technology and experience exist between these two Baltic Sea countries. The Swedish nuclear waste authority, SKB, has been involved in the assessment of the existing nuclear waste facilities at the Ignalina NPP site in Lithuania since the 1990s. Swedish nuclear research and governance institutions continue to contribute to the transfer of knowledge and expertise in nuclear waste management taking part in numerous joint international research projects (BEACON; EURAD).

AG: What role does environmentalism play in the debate?

AS: As the two countries are at different stages of implementation of nuclear waste programs, it illustrates different levels of public engagement in the site selection process and environmental impact assessment of the radioactive waste disposals. In Sweden environmental issues are at the core of the public debate and concerns about the nuclear waste management program and are involving various actors, from local communities to International NGOs and leading national media outlets. In Lithuania environmental issues are less questioned, site selection is not contested and public participation is limited to local communities of the nuclear site with scarce media coverage. I suppose this situation will change with the start of a public discussion about the site selection for geological disposal of high radioactive waste and SNF and its environmental impact assessment. This debate will expand nuclear waste issues to the national scale. Considering environmentalism not only as participatory but also as scholarly concern, at the moment there are relatively few studies in environmental humanities and history about the uses of the natural resources in nuclear waste confinement and its impact on social and natural landscapes.

AG: Do people in the two countries differ in their risk perception?

AS: Different levels of public engagement in the nuclear decision-making illustrates different public opinion dynamics as well as public perception of nuclear risks. In Sweden due to the nuclear phase-out decision in 1980 and to the high impact of environmental movements, critical voices are prevailing the publicity concerning nuclear waste. In Lithuania the nuclear energy use became public only in the 1990s after the reestablishment of the independence and were associated mostly with Chernobyl disaster risks and anti-communist, sovereignty claims. During the transition period, the use of nuclear energy was considered as necessary for the economic and social developments of the country; political personnel, nuclear engineers and Lithuanian citizens embraced the energy produced by the Ignalina NPP as a national resource. The referendums about nuclear energy uses in Lithuania in 2008 and 2012 after the start of the decommissioning of the Ignalina NPP showed a rather radical change from pro- to anti-nuclear attitudes challenging the plan to construct a new NPP in the country.

*This interview originally appeared on the Nuclear Waters project website.

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Something I Have Learned from COVID-19

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Discussing the issue of flying and sustainability

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Experiences in Digital Teaching

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The Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Interview with Andrei Stsiapanau*

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