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.

How to cite: Ross, L.: More Than a Half-Life? Communities, Heritage and Creative Participation in Nuclear Decommissioning, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-67, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-67, 2025.

The successful opening of Calder Hall nuclear power station  in 1956 showcased the potential peaceful uses of nuclear technology and embodied hope for a cheap and plentiful source of electricity. Nine commercial Magnox reactors were subsequently built across the UK. Building on the existing grid network of hydroelectric power stations in the area, Trawsfynydd nuclear power station (Gwynedd, North Wales) became a major employer in the surrounding area during its construction (1957-1965) and operation, providing stable and skilled jobs to local residents and those who had relocated to work at the site. 

This paper will discuss data collected from interviews with former employees of Trawsfynydd nuclear power station to explore its impact during construction, operation and ongoing decommissioning. It will examine the experiences of working in a new and evolving industry, including provision of training and expectations surrounding job stability, and the requirement to respond to political and global events. 

In 1993 Trawsfynydd became one of the first first nuclear power stations to cease operation, instead becoming one of the UK’s decommissioning prototypes. The shift from energy generation to closure and decommissioning marked a major milestone in the mindset and aims of the site, and as such the effect on the site, workforce and surrounding community will be considered. 

This paper is part of a wider doctoral project, which uses archival, survey, and interview data to apply a values-based approach to the tangible and intangible heritage of UK nuclear power stations, to inform the future heritage management of sites. Key themes from archival and survey data will be applied in conjunction with the interview data to draw on wider themes across the Magnox fleet. 

How to cite: Potter, W.: From Construction to Decommissioning: Memory, Community and Adaptation at Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, North Wales, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-73, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-73, 2025.

Decades after the nuclear euphoria of the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent surge in construction of nuclear power plants, today the global nuclear industry is entering an unprecedented phase of nuclear decommissioning. Estimates suggest that within the next 25 years over half of all nuclear power plants worldwide will have begun decommissioning. At the same time, conventional ‘greenfield’ decommissioning outcomes are proving to be increasingly unsatisfactory solutions in an era of peak soil depletion and global climate crisis. The sociocultural significance of nuclear power plants—as utopian architecture, symbols of existential threat, and major economic forces in their regions—is being erased as part of the decommissioning process. Yet the decontaminated but deeply disturbed sites that result from this process more closely resemble brownfields or wastelands than the images of lush meadows and thriving habitat the term ‘greenfield’ conjures.  

This predicament calls for a new approach to the growing number of nuclear brownfields around the world; an approach that understands these locations as complex multi-dimensional, multi-scalar and multi-temporal landscapes inextricably linked to their geophysical, socioeconomic, and cultural context. Drawing on landscape (architecture) theory, such an understanding of former nuclear power plants facilitates the conception of an adaptable landscape-led strategy that not only addresses the unique legacies of these sites but also initiates their transformation into meaningful post-nuclear landscapes. Tested at nuclear power plants across Germany, this landscape strategy pioneers a new approach to the transformation of former nuclear power plants but also other energy brownfield sites around the world. 

The planned talk will present a landscape reading of former nuclear power plants and introduce a landscape-led transformation strategy for these sites developed by the author.

How to cite: von Einsiedel, S.: Post-nuclear landscapes – a landscape strategy for the transformation of decommissioned nuclear power plants, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-88, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-88, 2025.

Thurso and the wider Caithness region in the United Kingdom have undergone significant transitions over the past several decades. A major turning point was establishing a nuclear research and development centre at Dounreay in the 1950s. This project not only shaped technological advancements in nuclear energy but also profoundly impacted the social fabric of the local community. The construction and operation of the site brought economic prosperity, advanced job opportunities, very good education, and a sense of purpose to the region and beyond. However, the nowadays ongoing decommissioning process presents new challenges, raising concerns about economic stability, infrastructure, community cohesion, and future prospects.

This study aimed to explore the lived experiences of individuals affected by the nuclear project at Dounreay. Understanding these experiences is essential in informing discussions regarding the potential location of nuclear waste storage facilities, particularly at existing nuclear sites. By capturing personal narratives, this research provides insight into how nuclear projects influence communities over time, from initial socio-economic booms to long-term socio-economic challenges.

The study used an exploratory qualitative approach based on constructivist grounded theory for its systematic, inductive nature, enabling in-depth exploration of lived experiences. Given the under-researched impact of a nuclear site in Caithness, this methodology uncovered new insights. Data collection occurred from March to November 2023 via purposeful snowball sampling. Participants were recruited through gatekeepers, media, and social platforms. Nineteen individuals (10 women, 9 men, aged 36–71) participated in semi-structured interviews via phone or online.

Participants recalled the thriving era when the Dounreay site was established and operated. The influx of varied skilled or unskilled workers led to a population boom, fostering a vibrant community with excellent education opportunities, well-paying jobs, and economic benefits beyond the nuclear industry. Many participants described a cosmopolitan atmosphere. However, as time passed and decommissioning progressed, the community is facing challenges. While some good job opportunities remain, participants highlighted issues such as deteriorating infrastructure, declining economic prospects, and a sense of being forgotten by policymakers.

Despite these challenges, there was a strong consensus in favour of new nuclear projects, as history has demonstrated their capacity to bring social and economic thriving. Many participants emphasised the need to retain the expertise and prevent a knowledge drain. There was optimism that future nuclear initiatives could restore prosperity, address social issues such as drug problems, and secure benefits for future generations. The community’s historical relationship with the nuclear industry was often cited as a source of optimism and hope.

The study identified two key themes: a positive nostalgic view of Dounreay’s past and rising challenges from decommissioning. These findings contribute to discussing nuclear energy’s role in regional development and its long-term impact on host communities.

The results of this study indicate that they are transferable to support the site selection process and potential ways for improved public engagement procedures, which should be discussed following the given insights.

How to cite: Derrer-Merk, E., Noorikalkhoran, O., Jain, L., Taylor, R., and Merk, B.: Dounreay - Transition from fishing village to atomic town: Experiences from past and present. A qualitative approach , Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-29, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-29, 2025.

Taking care of nuclear residues – the diverse left-behinds of “nuclear activities”– requires careful preservation of knowledge to prevent future risks, which in turn tacitly governs meaning and management; thus, it presupposes technical as well as social continuity and stability over centuries. This situation raises questions: How do state-led efforts to institutionalize nuclear memory relate to the lived experiences of communities that coexist with nuclear residues? And what happens when nuclear waste and residues, despite efforts to control this legacy, fades from public as well as expert awareness—only to resurface later in contested and unexpected ways?

This research explores the uneasy space between memory and forgetting when it comes to nuclear residues in France, focusing on two distinct case studies: the Centre de Stockage de la Manche (CSM) in La Hague, the oldest French nuclear waste storage site, now operated by Andra (the waste management company), and the Bois-Noirs uranium mine in Saint-Priest-la-Prugne, owned by Orano (the French nuclear fuel multinational holding). While both sites bear the imprint of France’s early nuclear history marked by military secret, urgency, and a “pioneering” spirit, their trajectories over time have diverged significantly.

Built in 1966, the CSM first operated as a precariously built surface storage site that contained traces of long-lived elements and that caused radioactive leakages; from the 1970s to the 1990s, it raised controversy from citizen groups. From 1994 onwards, it has been actively integrated into the state’s nuclear waste management infrastructure by Andra, and its residues were progressively archived and made “visible” through regulated oversight, public reporting, and controlled site visits as part of an explicit “memory” effort.  

In contrast, the Bois Noirs former uranium mine remains in a state of legal ambiguity. The institutional archive documenting its potential environmental and health effects – the main concern being water contamination – is dispersed among different actors and into arguably imprecise large-scale national databases. There, the memory of nuclear residues is contested terrain, kept alive through the persistent efforts of local activists who push back against what they perceive as the deliberate erasure of nuclear contamination from public discourse.

These cases reveal that nuclear residues are more than just material legacies; they are also the subjects of memory work—embedded in narratives that shape how they are perceived, governed, and projected into the future. The way a nuclear residue is remembered or forgotten shapes whether it is treated as a manageable risk, a hazardous burden, or an inherited, invisible relic of the past. However, the comparison also allows us to explore potential similarities in institutionalized memory work, while the two cases show substantial differences.

This research draws on an assemblage of fieldwork, archival work, interviews, and media analysis to trace the multiplicity of narratives that define nuclear memory (or forgetting) at these sites.

This research is conducted as part of the ERC Advanced Grant “Innovation Residues – Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée futures” (GA 10105480; PI: Ulrike Felt) at the University of Vienna.

How to cite: Felt, U., Demeter, R., and Pottin, A.: Between Memory and Forgetting: Following the History of Nuclear Residues in two French sites , Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-113, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-113, 2025.

My dissertation, Tracing Nuclear History: Mapping the Crossroads of Nuclear Justice and Climate Change, examines nuclear justice in the context of climate change, highlighting the interconnected challenges both crises pose for justice and security. It explores the historical and material links between nuclear activities and their lasting consequences, arguing that climate change exacerbates the burdens borne by communities affected by the nuclear legacy. By centring local experiences of harm, the study reveals how these are connected to broader systemic injustices and global power structures.

As part of this, my presentation aims to understand overall connections from the past to the present and into the future. It seeks to explore how the path dependency of proliferation also determines disarmament and disposal. It underscores the need to examine the entire nuclear cycle – including uranium mining, nuclear weapons production, testing, and waste disposal – as a network of materialities that both shape and are shaped by political spaces. In doing so, it highlights the intergenerational local impacts, the ambivalences and nostalgias of nuclear culture, and the glocal interconnections. The presentation situates these processes within broader discussions of justice, security, and collective responsibility, reflecting on how nuclear cultural heritage is shaped, contested, and envisioned for the future.

How to cite: Saar, E.: Path Dependencies and the Nuclear Cycle: Connections Between Proliferation, Disarmament, and Disposal, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-158, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-158, 2025.

This paper discusses the role of rituals in the transmission of transgenerational memory in radioactive heritage practices through the author’s artistic research project ‘Canticle of the Nuclear Sun’. The title references what has been thought to be the most ancient text in the Italian language, a poem from Francis of Assisi dated around 1224—Canticle of the Sun—a hymn to nature and life. A second reference is a collective ritual that took place in the Kontiolahti area, where a Lutheran congregation gathered around a carving sculpture created by Finnish artist Pessi Manner to perform a nature prayer service on the theme of the “Canticle of the Sun” as a protest against uranium prospecting. For his sculptures Manner used, among other symbols, the symbol of the sun (Kainulainen, 2011).

Ritual patterns is a term developed by the author to describe performative and artistic practices that more or less freely refer to the religious practice of rituals. The common use of the term ritual as a repetitive action pattern is considered by the author as a mundane derivation of religious ritualistic practices. Traditional rituals, although different in every culture, hold the capability of generating an idiosyncratic transformation in the collective sense of reality (Geertz, 1973). Ritual patterns in artistic research may thus function as speculative practices to address various implications of nuclear policies in relation to the transmission of memory through deep time.

The paper focuses on artistic research in the territory of Sardinia, the author’s homeland, and the ancient practice of “Canto a Tenore”, an ancient traditional polyphonic singing for four voices. Sardinia hosts 60% of NATO military bases in Italy, a territory also used for testing experimental weapons and rockets and disposing of old weapons and chemicals. Birth malformations and cancer within the population, as well as a large number of animals reported as born with deformities, are linked to these practices, in particular to the emissions of depleted uranium. Currently (2025), there is a discussion on whether 8 sites within the territory of the NATO bases in Sardinia can be used to host a national site for high-level nuclear waste storage.

Sardinia is one of the oldest geological regions of the Mediterranean Sea: ritualistic traditions and folklore are deemed to be rooted in prehistoric times. The paper is developed with the insights of linguist Andrea Deplano, who traced the etymology behind the words used in the "Canto a Tenore” and discovered that sounds that were thought not to have a meaning were instead understandable in the Sumerian-Akkadian language. The unfolding of ritual patterns is thus intended as a way to seek forms of embodied knowledge within the understanding of “Nuclear Natures”; the term is used following Strom (2018), to consider an interaction between a concept of nature as a sheer force and humans’ created nuclear structures and contaminants.

How to cite: Del Rio, A.: Canticle of the Nuclear Sun: An Exploration of Rituals in Artistic Research to Address a Proposal for the Long-term Burial of Radioactive Waste in Sardinia, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-30, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-30, 2025.

The Nuclear Culture Deep Geologic Repository Workshop brings together artists and researchers in Nuclear Cultural Heritage to expand the Deep Time discourse of radioactive waste repositories to consider their geopolitics within a contemporary decolonial context.

This unique gathering of researchers will enable new ways of thinking about the role of arts practice-based research in marking radioactive waste sites for future generations. In 2024 the group undertook field-research at Finland’s Onkalo geologic disposal facility for high level radioactive waste currently under construction at Olkiluoto in Eurajoki managed by Posiva. In 2025 they were planning to visit Sweden’s Final Repository for Short-lived radioactive waste at Forsmark, Östhammar, managed by SKB. This has not been possible and instead the group are researching Sweden’s nuclear history through its cultural centres and the landscape around the repository site.

European Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) programs have been supporting cultural work in this field for several years and have established certain cultural and aesthetic tropes which will be explored from a wider critical and decolonial perspective. This workshop brings together experienced researchers in the field of nuclear culture and heritage to undertake primary field research to enable new paradigm shifts in the discourse. The experience of the site visits will be consolidated and evaluated in this paper to develop research frameworks for new conceptual understandings of the repository project.

The Nuclear Culture Research Group was established in 2011 by curator and artist Ele Carpenter, who is now Professor in Interdisciplinary Art & Culture at Umeå School of Architecture, and Director of the UmArts Research Centre at Umeå University. Carpenter curates large scale survey exhibitions of contemporary art investigating nuclear aesthetics and has facilitated artistic field research in Underground Research Labs for radioactive waste in Japan, France, Belgium, Finland and the UK.

The Research Concept is to explore how to bring together nuclear decolonial perspectives on geologic waste and deep time marking systems from Nordic, Eastern European, Canadian, and indigenous Australian perspectives. The workshop will focus on developing new conceptual frameworks that go beyond the site marker, and integrate the repository project into contemporary nuclear cultural heritage and decolonial discourse addressing the following research questions:

• How does artists research into the decolonial contexts of Deep Geologic Repositories contribute to the discourse of nuclear memory and Nuclear Cultural Heritage?
• How are repositories a form of Material Witness to the legacy of 20^th C nuclear technoscientific practices?
• How can temporalities beyond human-centred time be articulated through the materiality of DGR information and technology through artistic practice in collaboration with anthropology and geology?
• How can an interdisciplinary arts research analysis investigate DGR’s as a model for rethinking the decolonial geopolitics of the nuclear military industrial complex?

How to cite: Carpenter, E., Berger, E., Rindzeviciute, E., Schuppli, S., Scarce, Y., and Ruhland, G.: Interim Field Report: Nuclear Culture Deep Geologic Repository Workshop, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-105, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-105, 2025.