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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the history of governing nuclear accidents in France and internationally. While nuclear disasters posed serious threats to nuclear energy during the Cold War, they have been increasingly perceived as intrinsic and ‘manageable’ events of nuclear operations, a process that can be described as ‘the normalisation of accidents’. This article shows how the end of the Cold War facilitated normalisation, through an internationally shared approach to nuclear safety, based on regulatory organisations, which contributed to displacing the political controversy related to nuclear energy in France and Europe.
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers of Cold War History, as well as Karena Kalmbach for their detailed and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Nuclear Knowledges workshop on French nuclear histories and politics and the support of the ANR VULPAN project. The fieldwork on which this publication is based also received financial support from the ANR project Agoras (ANR-11-RNSR-0001). I wish to thank all project members and partners for their support in fieldwork access. In addition, I am grateful to Olivier Borraz for his continuous support of my PhD research.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). The Chernobyl accident is barely mentioned in the global history of the Cold War and not mentioned at all in international references in the field: Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2 Simo Laakkonen, Viktor Pál, and Richard Tucker, “The Cold War and Environmental History: Complementary Fields,” Cold War History 16, no. 4 (2016): 377–94. Some important contributions exist: Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, ed. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas (London: Routledge, 2013).
3 Gabrielle Hecht, “Quelques mots coloniaux à propos de la nucléarité exceptionnelle de la France et de la banalité du nucléaire français,” Cosmopolitiques, no. 16 (2006): 181–95; Karena Kalmbach, “Radiation and Borders: Chernobyl as a National and Transnational Site of Memory,” Global Environment, no. 11 (2013): 130–59; Karena Kalmbach, “Frankreich nach Tschernobyl. Eine Rezeptionsgeschichte zwischen ‘Nichtereignis’ und ‘Apokalypse’,” in Politik und Gesellschaft nach Tschernobyl, ed. Melanie Arndt (Berlin: Links, 2016), 237–55. Exceptionalism also relies on specific institutional configurations, such as sector-specific decision-making, which strengthened the executive at the expense of elected officials. For France: Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe, “Entre la banalisation, l’exception et l’expérimentation: l’évolution des débats politiques sur le nucléaire,” Atome et société, actes du colloque, 30–31 mai 1996, Palais du Luxembourg, Paris, Centre Antoine Béclère, 1997.
4 Laura Ciglioni, “Italian Public Opinion in the Atomic Age: Mass-market Magazines Facing Nuclear Issues (1963–1967),” Cold War History 17, no. 3 (2017): 205–21; Silvia Berger Ziauddin and Sibylle Marti, “Life after the Bomb: Nuclear Fear, Science, and Security Politics in Switzerland in the 1980s,” Cold War History 17, no. 3 (2018): 1–19.
5 Hecht, Being Nuclear – Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, 10.
6 Başak Saraç-Lesavre and Brice Laurent, “Stress-Testing Europe: Normalizing the Post-Fukushima Crisis,” Minerva 57 (2019): 239–60; Sonja D. Schmid, “A New ‘Nuclear Normalcy’?,” Journal of International Political Theory 15 (2018): 1–19.
7 Valerie Arnhold, “L’apocalypse ordinaire. La normalisation de l’accident de Fukushima par les organisations européennes et internationales de sécurité nucléaire,” Sociologie du Travail 61, no. 1 (2019). [published online].
8 Sezin Topçu, La France nucléaire: L’art de gouverner une technologie contestée (Paris: Seuil, 2013); Sezin Topçu, L'agir contestataire à l'épreuve de l'atome. Critique et gouvernement de la critique dans l'histoire de l'énergie nucléaire en France (1968-2008), PhD Dissertation EHESS, Paris, 2010. p. 35; 194
9 Topçu, La France nucléaire.
10 The ethnographic sources rely on 100 semi-directed interviews with public officials, nuclear experts, industry, and regulators in France at the European and international levels. Fifteen days of direct observations in the European regulators’ associations, the WENRA, and the ENSREG allowed the study of work on the Fukushima accident. All interviews were conducted under the condition that their anonymity would be guaranteed.
11 Elisabeth Roehrlich, “The Cold War, the Developing World, and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957,” Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 195–212. Karena Kalmbach, “Revisiting the Nuclear Age: State of the Art Research in Nuclear History,” Neue Politische Literatur, no. 62 (2017): 49–69.
12 Soraya Boudia, “Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks,” History and Technology 23, no. 4 (2007): 389–406.
13 Hecht, The Radiance of France; Topçu, La France nucléaire.
14 For an attempt to statistically represent nuclear power plant accidents, see, for example: Spencer Wheatley, Benjamin K. Sovacool, and Didier Sornette, “Reassessing the Safety of Nuclear Power,” Energy Research & Social Science, no. 15 (2016): 96–100.
15 There is some evidence that the possibility of accidents was acknowledged somewhat more openly during the previous decade (the 1960s) in international conferences and sometimes also in national public discourses. In response to the mobilisation of the exceptional danger and potential consequences of large-scale core-melt accidents by anti-nuclear movements, the stakes of such discourses changed, however. The WASH report has to be understood in this context: it received considerable public attention and was used to legitimate the development of nuclear power plants at an industrial level in the US. See, for example: Joachim Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975 (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983); Maël Goumri, “Analyse socio-historique de choix controversés en matière de dispositions de sureté sur les Installations Nucléaires de Base (INB): le cas d’accidents graves” (Thèse de doctorat en sociologie, Université Paris Descartes, forthcoming).
16 Steve Rayner, “Uncomfortable Knowledge: The Social Construction of Ignorance in Science and Environmental Policy Discourses,” Economy and Society 41, no. 1 (2012): 107–25.
17 Interview with an IAEA official, Vienna, 2016; Interview with French nuclear regulator, Paris, 2017.
18 Frank Bösch, “Taming Nuclear Power: The Accident Near Harrisburg and the Change in West German and International Nuclear Policy in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” German History 35, no. 1 (2017): 71–95.
19 Eliseo Veron, Construire l’événement: Les médias et l’accident de Three Mile Island (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1981). Several media sources include this idea; for instance: France Inter, “Un jour: Accident nucléaire à la centrale de Three Miles Island” (sic!), 18 February 1986.
20 While a formal moratorium was discussed, it was eventually discarded; local protests, regulatory decisions, and a changed international context led to a decade-long pause in the extension of the nuclear programme me: Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). In Europe, Sweden decides on a moratorium on nuclear energy in 1979 and a referendum on medium-term phase-out in 1980; Luxemburg abandons projects to build nuclear power plants in 1979; Spain holds a moratorium from 1982 onwards and abandons five reactor constructions indefinitely. Denmark abandons its civil nuclear programme in 1985.
21 Joseph V. Rees, Hostages of Each Other: The Transformation of Nuclear Safety since Three Mile Island, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
22 IAEA, Principles and Standards of Reactor Safety (Juelich, 5–9 February 1973), Proceedings Series. See also: J. Shaw, “A Review of the Symposium on the Principles and Standards of Reactor Safety – 1973,” Annals of Nuclear Science and Engineering 1, no. 1 (1974): 55–65.
23 The number of annual incidents remained comparatively low. See David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA, 1997).
24 Cyrille Foasso, Atomes sous surveillance: Une histoire de la sûreté nucléaire en France (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012).
25 This paper does not claim that this separation would actually be possible, as safety remains intrinsically related to the political stakes of nuclear energy. However, this objective motivates collective action on the side of nuclear industry, experts, and regulators regarding formal organisations, formal rules of career trajectories, and narratives on the distancing of politics.
26 Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards, The Technopolitics of Cold War: Towards a Transregional Perspective (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2007).
27 See, for instance, the mission report of B. Roche and A. Cayol, Rapport sur la mission effectuée aux Etats-Unis. Service Central de Sûreté des Installations Nucléaires, Institut de Protection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (D.S.N.), 1979.
28 Mission d’étude sur le déroulement de la crise, l’accident nucléaire de Three Mile Island, Sofedir, 4 juin 1979, quoted by Cyrille Foasso, Atomes sous surveillance. Une histoire de la sûreté nucléaire en France.
29 Service central des installations nucléaires: integrated in the Ministry of Industry.
30 Institut de protection et de sûreté nucléaire: department of expertise on nuclear safety in the CEA.
31 I speak of a ‘single’ national operator in France by way of simplification. Formally, several other licence-holders of nuclear installations exist in France, operating, for example, research reactors. However, the size of the EDF and its importance for electricity production in France explains the particular role of the company in France and Europe, including the relationship with regulatory organisations.
32 Mission d’étude sur le déroulement de la crise, l’accident nucléaire de Three Mile Island.
33 François Cogné, “Les grands programmes expérimentaux de sûreté des installations nucléaires, Avant-propos,” Revue Générale Nucléaire, no. 4 (1982): 328.
34 Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power – The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
35 See also: Anna Weichselbraun, “Constituting the International Nuclear Order: Bureaucratic Objectivity at the IAEA” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016).
36 Elisabeth Roehrlich, “The Cold War”.
37 Anna Weichselbraun, “Constituting the International Nuclear Order: Bureaucratic Objectivity at the IAEA”; Gabrielle Hecht, “Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the Making of the IAEA,” Osiris, 21 (2006): 25–48.
38 This does not mean that specific ways of cooperating did not exist between the Soviet Union and Western parties, be it in reactor design or nuclear safety, but they were project-specific and did not allow the IAEA to become an international reference for nuclear safety. J. Shaw, “A Review of the Symposium on the Principles and Standards of Reactor Safety – 1973.”
39 Fischer, History of International Atomic Energy Agency.
40 Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident (IAEA Safety Series No. 75-INSAG-l).
41 IAEA, INSAG-7, The Chernobyl Accident: Updating of INSAG-1, Vienna, 1992.
42 IAEA, Safety Culture, INSAG-4, Vienna 1991.
43 IAEA, Bulletin 40/2/1998.
44 Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014); Susanne Bauer, Karena Kalmbach, and Tatiana Kasperski, “From Pripyat to Paris, from Grassroots Memories to Globalized Knowledge Production: The Politics of Chernobyl Fallout,” in Nuclear Portraits: Communities, the Environment, and Public Policy, ed. Laurel Sefton Macdowell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 149–89.
45 Interview with an ASN official, Paris, 2017.
46 It is the second principle of the highest level of norms in the hierarchy of the IAEA: IAEA, Safety Fundamentals, no. SF-1.
47 As our interviews show, safety authorities often demand this mission with the aim of strengthening their autonomy from ministerial tutelage and obtaining increased resources.
48 Office parlementaire d’évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques, Rapport sur les conséquences de l’accident de la centrale nucléaire de Tchernobyl et sur la sûreté et la sécurité des installations nucléaires, 17 Décembre 1987.
49 Published annually by the Member of Parliament Claude Birraux, after a large-scale debate in 1989 on the future of nuclear energy in France, the reports recall the French public authorities’ lack of credibility. Office parlementaire d’évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques, Rapport sur le contrôle de la sûreté et de la sécurité des installations nucléaires, no. 183 (1990–1991), or Office parlementaire d’évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques, Rapport sur le contrôle de la sûreté et de la sécurité des installations nucléaires, no. 484 (1997–1998).
50 ‘The importance of a favourable environment in political, legal and regulatory terms is crucial. It is generally recognised that this factor is responsible for the failure of the US nuclear program, in spite of its initial technological lead’: Intervention of Pierre Tanguy (General Safety Inspector, the EDF) during the parliamentary debate in 1989.
51 The SCSIN, later the ASN, summarises its own history as a ‘long march towards independence and transparency’. Philippe Saint-Raymond, Une longue marche vers l’indépendance et la transparence. L’histoire de l’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire française. (Paris: La Documentation française, 2012).
52 Preliminary report transferred to the Ministry of the Environment in 1993. For the final report:, Jean-Philippe Colson and Jean-Paul Schapira, Les enjeux d’une loi nucléaire en France. Rapport final, Octobre 1994. Fonds Ministère de l’Environnement: direction de la prévention des pollutions et des risques, Elaboration de la réglementation, 20150632/1-20150632/11, Archives nationales.
53 Topçu, La France nucléaire.
54 Reference to incidents in Tricastin, Superphénix, and Pierrelatte, in an article entitled “Après les incidents nucléaires en France: Une énergie de transition?”
55 The IPSN was established as a formal organisation (IRSN) independent from the CEA by law no. 2001–398.
56 Interview with a former member of the ministerial service SCSIN (renamed DSIN, then ASN), Paris, 2016.
57 The policy change in Germany towards a nuclear phase-out policy in 1998, after the first federal government in coalition with the Green Party, for instance, implied the retreat of Germany from European projects, such as the initially Franco-German new generation EPR reactor.
58 This argument did not correspond to the technological and institutional reality of the Soviet nuclear programme. Several of the concerned reactors were of the same type as Western pressurised water reactors: Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 125–54.
59 Pro-nuclear member states attempting to avoid too-restrictive regulations and anti-nuclear member states attempting to avoid an institutionalisation of nuclear energy in the EU; see Regina S. Axelrod, “The European Commission and Member States: Conflict Over Nuclear Safety,” Perspectives 26 (2006): 5–22.
60 Internal note on the topic of ‘élargissement et sûreté nucléaire’, 10 March 1998, no. IPSN/RI/98.181/JBC/mm. (Fontenay-aux-Roses: IRSN Archives).
61 The negotiations had been continuing for several years in the framework of other EU research and assistance projects. In some cases, such as Lithuania, the government had already agreed to shut down reactors in the framework of the accession process. See, for example, Thomas R. Wellock, “‘The Children of Chernobyl’: Engineers and the Campaign for Safety in Soviet-designed Reactors in Central and Eastern Europe,” History and Technology 29, no. 1 (2013): 3–32.
62 Such interventions can be found in the press, for instance: H. Morin, “La France se prepare aux consequences d’un accident de type Tchernobyl sur son sol,” Le Monde, 20 February 2008.
63 Interview conducted in Vienna, 2016.
64 Both the IAEA and the WENRA gained further formal, human, or legal resources after the Fukushima accident. The ASN and the IRSN obtained additional permanent civil servants and maintained a stable budget in an otherwise shrinking general budget for the French administration.
65 The near-totality of EU countries pursued or intensified former policy orientations, including Germany, who stuck to the nuclear phase-out programme already adopted in 1998, in response to post-Chernobyl political conflicts; see Wolfgang C. Müller and Paul W. Thurner, The Politics of Nuclear Energy in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
66 This matter was subject to discussions regarding budgetary and agenda priorities, both during the stress-tests and after the proposal of a common European response to nuclear emergencies (the HERCA-WENRA approach), as shown by several interviews conducted in the framework of this study.
67 Valerie Arnhold, “L’apocalypse ordinaire.”
68 Interview, Austrian regulator, Vienna, 2016.
69 WENRA, first proposal about European ‘stress-tests’ on nuclear power plants, 12 April 2011.
70 European Council, “Conclusions,” 24–25 March 2011: 11.
71 Interview with a member of the European Commission, 2015; Interview with a member of WENRA, 2016.
72 Interview with a European regulator, Brussels, 2016.
73 IAEA, International Fact-finding Expert Mission of the Fukushima Daiichi NPP Accident following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, 24 May–2 June 2011: 13.
74 Especially, the elements of the previous IRRS missions, such as the one conducted after an earthquake in 2007; IAEA, IRRS mission report to Japan, IAEA-NSNI-IRRS-2007/01.
75 Council directive 2014/87/Euratom of 8 July 2014; amending directive 2009/71/Euratom establishing a community framework for the nuclear safety of nuclear installations.
76 Yannick Pince, “The French Consensus on Nuclear Weapons Policy: The Political History of an Idea (1972–1988),” Cold War History (forthcoming).
77 Julie Blanck, “Gouverner par le temps: la gestion des déchets radioactifs en France, entre changements organisationnels et construction de solutions techniques irréversibles (1950–2014)” (Thèse de doctorat en sociologie, Paris, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 2017).
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Valerie Arnhold
Valerie Arnhold is a doctoral student at the Centre for the Sociology of Organizations in Paris and a contract researcher in the “Nuclear Knowledges” project (Centre for International Studies in Sciences Po). Her phd dissertation proposes a sociology of nuclear accidents and their government in France, on the European and international level.
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