More Than a Half-Life? Communities, Heritage and Creative Participation in Nuclear Decommissioning

The impact of nuclear facilities extends well beyond site boundaries. Communities which become home to nuclear facilities are subject to fundamental change. This is experienced when they are first constructed, often accompanied by a population influx and a new built environment. Change of a different kind, however, occurs when nuclear facilities reach the end of their working lives and enter decommissioning, with job losses and associated social instability: both arrival and departure are state-mandated processes.

For communities around such sites, ‘the nuclear’ is part of the everyday, and has been since they were constructed up to 70 years ago. Rather than something unusual, nuclear facilities become part of a way-of-life. ‘Everyday nuclearity’ (Hecht 2012), is one aspect that differentiates nuclear sites from other locations of deindustrialisation, with them identified as different from common case studies: thus, the histories and consequences of decommissioning have rarely been discussed in academic work on deindustrialisation. As a relatively recent occurrence, this is perhaps unsurprising. Yet a growing body of scholarship is focusing attention on decommissioning communities, showing how public engagement, heritage activities and creative practices can help navigate disruption caused by technological change.

This paper will use examples drawn from nuclear energy sites in Lithuania and the UK to show how this current form of deindustrialisation presents researchers, creative and heritage practitioners and industry representatives with a unique chance to shape legacies whilst change is underway, rather than after the industry has gone. The lengthy timescales of decommissioning and waste management allow us to find new ways to assess community need that help local people shape the memory and heritage of sites. This paper will foreground these cultural consequences which sit alongside technical and economic considerations. These communities share similarities, but local nuances means that a one-size-fits-all approach does not necessarily apply. What is consistent, however, is that all sites have a community heritage which can be interacted with and created in different ways, allowing people to take a form of control of the one aspect of decommissioning that is truly theirs.