Ange Pottin & Ulrike Felt

The French graphite moderated reactors (GMR) were stopped in the early 1990s and are now confronted with questions of decomissioning.  Inherited from a time with lower standards of care for the afterlife of nuclear installations, they contain important quantities of irradiated graphite that has become unstable over the years. We analyze the decommissioning of French GMRs as a practice of both caring and waiting. While having initially followed a “deferred decommissioning” strategy (an activity that turns an operating machine into a residue through technical, legal, and organizational processes), by now the plan is to reach full decommissioning around 2100. This defacto long-term waiting strategy is controversial. The regulators defend the norm of “immediate decommissioning”; the operator points to the absence of a final disposal site for graphite impeding the full transformation of GMR into waste.

This case (1) illustrates that waste is not a clear-cut entity, but the product of ever-changing standards and practices of care, and (2) points to the need for closer scrutiny of the multiple temporalities co-existing in the decommissioning process.

Image: By Clicgauche – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3373581