Brand New or More of the Same Nuclear? (De)Constructing the Economic Promise of the European Pressurised Reactor in France and the UK

ABSTRACT

Technological innovation needs construction of promises and expectations to mobilise resources and supportive networks, yet exaggerated promises risk leading to disappointment and undermining this very support. Drawing on an analysis of secondary literature and press articles, the concepts of hype cycle and Regimes of Economics of Techno-scientific Promises (ETP) are applied to examine the construction of the largely failed promise of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed to spearhead a French-led ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the 1990s. The debates on the EPR economics in France and the UK illustrate the country-specific features that condition the ability of an incremental in-between innovation, in an archetypically ‘modernist’ field of technology, to survive in today’s ‘presentist’ era of shrinking timeframes. The phase of disillusionment depicted in the hype cycle can better be described as two country-specific processes whereby the initial promise was continuously modified and requalified in order to maintain its legitimacy and credibility. As an incremental innovation, the EPR continues to struggle between the contrasting needs of demonstrating radical novelty and experience-based continuity. This tension is accentuated by the country-specific legacies and imaginaries, including the historically shaped ideological trust in the state and the market.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear energy
• sociology of expectations
• techno-scientific promises
• European pressurised reactor
• incremental innovation

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to express his sincere gratitude to the two anonymous peer reviewers and the editors of Science as Culture for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Markku Lehtonen is researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is also adjunct professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland; associate researcher at the Groupe de Sociologie Pragmatique et Réflexive (GSPR), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris; and Associate Faculty at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex. His research focuses on public governance, promises, and public controversies in the areas of energy, environment, and sustainability, with particular interest in megaprojects.

Notes

1 https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-reactor/History-of-reactor-development.

2 https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle.

3 Following the Fukushima disaster, the government suspended the planned EPR project at Penly.

4 To identify occurrences of the concept of subsidies, I included in the search also terms such as public support and state support.

5 TVO is owned by a consortium of power and industrial companies, with Pohjolan Voima (59%) and 51%-state-owned Fortum (26%) as its largest shareholders (https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/company/administrationandmanagement/tvogroup.html).

6 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hinkley-point-c-to-power-six-million-uk-homes.

7 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/regulated-asset-base-rab-model-for-nuclear.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF) [grant number 794697-TENUMECA].