KAIST STP cordially invites you to the following seminar.      

* Speaker :  Per Högselius / Associate Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
* Topic :  The "Nuclear Renaissance" in Historical Perspective
* Date : November 18 (Mon.) 17:30
* Venue : N4 Building / STP Seminar Room 1316 

The “Nuclear Renaissance” in Historical Perspective

Per Högselius
Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden 

At a discursive level, nuclear power can be said to have experienced its best days already during the 1950s. In the decades that followed, a rapid material expansion of nuclear power took place, but not at all to the extent or with the advanced technologies that had been at focus in the original nuclear visions. The Chernobyl disaster (1986) became an end-point in this development: since then, the role of nuclear power as a source of energy has stagnated, and since the late 1980s, at an aggregate statistical level, the number of nuclear power plants in the world has steadily decreased. The Fukushima disaster (2011) was not a turning point in this respect; it merely confirmed and further strengthened an already obvious trend. From this historical point of view it would seem natural to regard nuclear power as an “old” and largely failed technology.

In reality, however, in today’s global energy debate nuclear power is by no means regarded as failed, or as “old”. The Chernobyl disaster appears to have formed not an end-point, but a starting point for a new upsurge of nuclear research and development activities, along with a more positive stance regarding nuclear power among the general public in most parts of the world and from the side of governments. Radically different reactor models, fuel technologies and nuclear waste solutions have (once again) acquired a central position in the debate and received substantial research funding. This “nuclear renaissance”, as it has often been referred to, can be interpreted as a synthesis between the original visions in nuclear engineering (dating back to the 1940s and 1950s) and the many failures that the actors in the nuclear industry have been forced to deal with during more than half a century. The seminar will be devoted to analyzing this synthesis and the factors which have made it possible for the nuclear-industrial complex to promote and market nuclear power as a “new” and successful energy technology in the 21st century. At the center of the analysis will be the discursive, conceptual and linguistic strategies of the main actors, and the main argument is that it is their inventiveness in terms of developing such strategies, rather than in technological terms, that have made the “nuclear renaissance” possible. The analysis is linked to a discussion about how we can expect the Fukushima disaster to influence long-term trends in nuclear engineering and policy.

Per Högselius is Associate Professor of History of Technology and International Relations at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, and currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. He holds an MSc degree in Engineering Physics, a PhD in Innovation Studies, and a Docent (habilitation) degree in History of Science and Technology. He specializes in historical problematization of burning present-day issues in science and technology, particularly in energy (including nuclear power, natural gas, electricity, firewood, and oil) and a few other infrastructural sectors (telecommunications, railways, etc.). Most recently he published Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). In Sweden, he is also active as an author of popular history books and newspaper essays.

If you need more, please feel free to contact Jin-Yeong Park(alissa@kaist.ac.kr). 

Best Wishes,
Jin-Yeong Park.