Three lessons for industry/policy:
- We can and should rethink nuclear education
- Nuclear expertise should expand and be as interdisciplinary and inclusive as possible. Including social science and humanities knowledge
- Coordination between the government, industry, and universities is crucial.
Key findings:
- Nuclear expertise is historically constructed
- "The nuclear engineer" didn't exist but emerged through expanding what was considered "nuclear" expertise.
- This was political and very different in 🇺🇸 and 🇸🇪
- There was a mismatch between education and industry/ society needs
📚New publication!
Expertise is currently a challenge for the nuclear industry. And a skilled workforce is key if we want our nuclear reactors to be safe
History teaches us some valuable lessons. I studied the history of nuclear engineering education in 🇺🇸 and 🇸🇪
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
This is really an important statement from Rep. Foster, confirming that even at the classified level, the administration has no plan at all to secure Iran's several bombs' worth of HEU. That's a huge danger to U.S. security -- from Iran, or from "loose nukes."
In these uncertain times – with energy security, nuclear threat, and climate scepticism at the forefront – SPRU and the @sussexnrggroup.bsky.social feel like ideal places to work right now!
It's been an interesting first month. And many more exciting events and collaborations to look forward to!
Well-managed nuclear energy with publicly trusted rules for safety, security, waste management, and nonproliferation has a chance of growing at the scale needed to help mitigate climate change. Poorly managed nuclear energy with weak rules does not.
Operator of Belgian #nuclear plants may need to spend €3 billion to dismantle them
www.brusselstimes.com/1912177/oper...
A #booktip for a cold november weekend:
"The nuclear-water nexus" edited by @perhogselius.bsky.social and @siegfriedevens.bsky.social
In the book 25 authors investigate how access to water has shaped the atomic age in fundamental ways.
Published as #Openaccess at @mitpress.bsky.social
One of these two positions will entail field work in Belgium
French proficiency is required, Dutch is a plus.
It's a great project that has the potential to lead to important new insights about Belgium's relationship with nuclear technologies
So, to my Belgian colleagues, please spread the word!
Our panel was with Martin Kohlrausch, Jens van de Maele and @cecipax679.bsky.social. Check out their work as well!
Looking back at a great @shothisttech.bsky.social conference in Esch-sur-Alzette last week!
🏭 On a very eye-catching campus, a former steelworks
🧑🔬 Had a great panel on "expertise" (look how happy we were afterwards)
⚛️ Presented my work on the history of nuclear expertise & engineering education
it was a pleasure to share info on Robert O. Anderson that I & especially @odinnmelsted.bsky.social have collected w/ @roycerk2.bsky.social & glad that info proved useful in deflating one of the conspiracy theories in this apparently "mid" & misleading book:
Congrats!!
Poster showing a wind turbine from frog perspective. The picture is in light pink and blue nuances and announces a PhD course in energy humanities. More information can be found in this website. https://www.uis.no/en/research/collaboration/the-greenhouse-centre-for-environmental-humanities/humanities/apply-for-phd
I am really excited to announce the call for the PhD Course in Energy Humanities!
Held at the @greenhouseuis.net from 1-5 December.
Applications are welcome until 24 October.
#envhum #envhist #energyhistory
The highlight of the conference for me, however, was my Master and Commander moment on board the Briggen Tre Kronor ⛵⚓
@eseh.bsky.social in Uppsala felt very much like coming home, not only because it was in Sweden🇸🇪
🌍One word dominated the conference: Anthropocene
☢️& lots of nuclear history! Had the pleasure of presenting ongoing work on Belgian (anti-)nuclear history
💧+ I was part of two exciting water panels!
URL and ALT text to follow.
excited to share the call for the workshop
EXTRACTIVE NATURES / NATURES OF EXTRACTION
happening at @uobrisceh.bsky.social on 6-7 Nov 2025,
made possible by the @britishacademy.bsky.social
deadline: 10 September!
full call below ⤵
#envhist #envhum
@siegfriedevens.bsky.social scattered nuclear landscape in Belgium, with little national regulation until late 1980s/1990s. Local and transborder anti-nuclear protests, interantional influences really important, but success not entirely clear in face of corporate decisions to drop nuclear plans.
"Creating #Chernobyl" article out now!
#envhist #nuclearwaters #nuclear
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The Technocratic Culture Behind Chernobyl’s Disaster
Recently my new article about nuclear Ukraine was published. In this article, I am using a technocratic culture perspective to analyse what was going on at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant before that fateful night in April 1986, when reactor block…
Look what came in the mail today! I was thrilled to contribute a chapter to this volume by @perhogselius.bsky.social and @siegfriedevens.bsky.social, based on a fantastic conference in Stockholm.
2000 years ago: the Romans would let an aqueduct destroy the Gardon Valley. We need clean water, but at what cost?
Look, the Guardian is hardly a pro-nuclear newspaper and you can definitely ask a tech bro to do the same old nuclear marketing pitch. But when you make up historical facts, use them to argue for investing billions of £ in new nuclear, and there is no factcheck, there really is a problem!
8. "Today we have this added motivation to get rid of fossil fuels." It's not added. This motivation already existed in the nuclear sector since the very beginning. It was just more related to energy dependence than climate change. But nuclear's competition with fossils is not new at all.
7. "France is not too dissimilar on how its government functions." Not sure if this is true at all, but certainly not for nuclear. France's nuclear policy has been quite unique in how state-centred, centralized, and nationalistic (see The Radiance of France by @gabriellehecht.bsky.social) it was.
6. "The French fleet arrived on time and within budget. 55 were built basically at the same time." His chronology is very off here. A period of 3-4 decades is not "the same time." And they were definitely not all on time and budget.
5. "In relative terms, the same amount of people has died from nuclear as wind/solar." The problem with these kinds of quantitative comparisons is that they are so unnuanced. Are all deadly workplace incidents in nuclear facilities over 9 decades in those numbers ? And all latent radiation deaths?
4. "Small modular reactors, like submarine reactors, used to fit under a kitchen table." Maybe this was a joke. But Admiral Rickover would not have found it funny. Obviously untrue though.
3. "We need a lot of mines for critical minerals for renewables." Correct. But at no point does anyone mention uranium mines and the historical impact on people and the environment they have had.
2. "Three Mile Island and Chernobyl put an end to the expansion of nuclear power." The expansion had already stopped before 1979. Reactor orders were already going down in the US from 1974 onwards. The main cause was high costs.
