Back to the past of nuclear energy Nuclear energy is often thought of as a highly modern technology, yet it has much deeper historical roots than commonly imagined, building on the engineering knowledge accumulated by earlier societies. The NuclearWaters project aims to explore these parallels and integrate nuclear energy into a much deeper history of engineering, as Professor Per Högselius explains. The nuclear energy industry
is often thought of as being built on modern science, in particular the discovery of how to split the atom and harness the resulting release of energy. However, while modern physics and chemistry research has undoubtedly been central to the development of nuclear power, the industry is actually part of a much longer history, believes Professor Per Högselius. “Nuclear engineers and industry advocates tend to talk about new reactors as essentially another way of generating steam. So nuclear reactors actually have a place in a longer history of steam engines,” he says. Based at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Professor Högselius is the Principal Investigator of the NuclearWaters project, an initiative which aims to analyse the history of the nuclear energy industry from a water-based perspective. “We want to look at the history of nuclear energy from a water-based perspective, so we are looking not at nations, but rather bodies of water,” explains Professor Högselius.
NuclearWaters project This research centres around six case studies, in which Professor Högselius and his colleagues aim to probe deeper into the history of nuclear energy. While modern nuclear reactors are highly complex, Professor Högselius says that a nuclear power plant shares some features with other forms of power generation. “With nuclear power, essentially nuclear fission is used to boil water. There are many components
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which are more or less the same as in conventional thermal power plants,” he outlines. Nuclear power was nevertheless seen as an exciting, innovative source of energy when it was first developed, and many countries invested a lot of resources in it, particularly in the post-war era. “Nuclear energy entered the stage at a time when demand for energy was growing rapidly. During the post-war period, especially from the ‘50s onwards, electricity consumption grew across the Western world,” says Professor Högselius. “This new source of energy was seen as somehow different, and there were highly ambitious visions about what it could do.”
all built nuclear power plants in the Rhine river basin, so they depend on water from the basin and its major tributaries,” says Professor Högselius. The question of how different countries interacted to address public concerns and coordinate their work is of great interest for Professor Högselius and his colleagues. “For example, peasants and farmers were worried about what would happen if these nuclear power plants were built. How would that affect the local climate?” he outlines. A nuclear power plant is highly disruptive to the local ecology, while vast amounts of water are required to cool a reactor, another topic of interest in the project.
Engineers in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and other ancient societies struggled with precisely the same issues that nuclear hydraulic engineers struggle with today. They were trying to
manage floods, to keep water flowing. These visions were based to some extent on the idea that nuclear energy represented a radical break from what had gone before, now researchers in the project aim to explore a different perspective. One case study looks at the history of the nuclear industry in the area around the Baltic Sea, while another focuses on the Rhine river in western Europe, both of which are transnational bodies of water. “The Rhine passes through a number of western European countries, including France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany. They have
Marine pollution may affect the quality of cooling water, for example if an oil spill occurred close to a nuclear power plant. “In that type of situation water at the required quality might not be available any longer, and the safe operation of the nuclear power plant might be at stake,” explains Professor Högselius. Safety is a paramount concern in the nuclear industry; it’s important to note here that many accidents were not caused by the nuclear fission process, or even the reactor itself. “Nuclear accidents are often related to failures in much more mundane
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