Ulrike Felt
EASST/4S Conference “Making and Doing transformations” Amsterdam, 16-19 July 2024

EASST/4S Conference “Making and Doing transformations” Amsterdam, 16-19 July 2024

We are back from a great week at the EASST/4S Conference “Making and Doing Transformations” in Amsterdam. It was a great event, smoothly organised, very inclusive, offering lots of opportunities to connect and really stimulating – and all this with more than 3000 participants. The organisers did a really great job. We presented no less than 5 papers on diverse aspects of our project.
How to engage with invisible left-behinds of innovations? (Ulrike Felt, Sara Ortega and Livia Regen)
Between classification and measurement: the politics of monitoring microplastics in wastewater (Noah Münster)
Decommissioning as a practice of caring and waiting: turning the French graphite-moderated reactors into waste (Ange Pottin & Ulrike Felt)
Collateral transitions. Reassembling Societies, Data Centers and the Twin Transition (Carsten Horn & Ulrike Felt)
Choreographies of knowledge, concerns and responsible care in narratives of innovation residues (Michaela Zuckerhut & Kaye Mathies)
Now enjoying some summer holidays …. and then writing things up.

Workshop on European Commission’s Policy Making (24-26 June 2024)

Workshop on European Commission’s Policy Making (24-26 June 2024)

Three days of intensive presentations and discussions on the European policy dimensions with regard to innovation residues with Nicole Dewandre who has been working in the European Commission for 40 years. It was a great experience to discuss some aspects of our policy analysis.

Dismantling the French Graphite Reactors

Dismantling the French Graphite Reactors

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

Project Retreat #1 (February 2024)

Project Retreat #1 (February 2024)

Two days of intensive presentations and discussion on the different research sites across the three residues and the different national contexts.