Nuclear supply chain and environmental justice struggles in Soviet and Post-Soviet countries

ABSTRACT

This article addresses and contributes to the discussion on nuclear supply chain socio-environmental conflicts in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts by bringing it together with nuclear peripheralization and environmental justice approaches. Descriptive statistics and qualitative coding were applied to 14 cases identified in the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. Visible protests were first detected in 1976. The cases analysed comprise the whole nuclear supply chain; uranium mining bans, stopping nuclear reactors, and nuclear testing bans. Seven of the conflictive projects have been suspended by neighbours, citizens and communities, women, industrial workers, and Indigenous groups. However, nuclear projects remain of ongoing concern related to nuclear waste and potential nuclear accidents. Military violence intrinsic to nuclear power domination encounters anti-nuclear resistance in areas where nuclear socio-environmental legacies and current injustices are lived.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental conflicts
• nuclear supply chain
• peripheralization
• environmental justice
• EJAtlas

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to anonymous referees for their invaluable comments and suggestions provided during the peer-review process. We would like to thank the editor of the special issue, Anastassia Obydenkova, for her support and encouragement. We would like to thank all individuals and activists who contributed to the nuclear-chain cases in the EJAtlas. We are also thankful to our EJAtlas Barcelona team, and especially to Daniela Del Bene for reading and moderating the cases and to Brototi Roy, Thiri May Aye, Sofía Avila, and Grettel Navas for comments and suggestion provided. This research benefited from financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant ENVJUSTICE No. 695446.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. (Fredriksson & Wollscheid, 2007; Obydenkova, 2008, pp. 2012, Obydenkova, Arpino, 2018).

2. These states are all marked with legacies of Communism likely to affect public opinion, attitudes, behaviour, public trust to political institutions, protests, and policy choices (Beissinger & Kotkin, 2014; Lankina et al., 2016; Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2017).

3. Armenia and Belarus are member-states in all regional international organisations launched by Russia, but also member-states of the Eurasian Economic Union with only five states. Both Armenia and Belarus are the main benefactors of the EAEU (Libman & Obydenkova, 2018). It is plausible that in exchange for the economic benefits of this membership, they were suggested to host Rosatom.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Research Council [ENVJUSTICE 695446].