Nuclear waste management in Lithuania and Sweden: responses to contingent historical and political circumstances

ABSTRACT

The Baltic Sea region is the site of a considerable number of nuclear power stations. Although predominantly operational, several have been decommissioned and new ones are in the planning stage. The volume of nuclear waste in the region continues to increase, while the development of national nuclear waste programs differs in each country. This article investigates national framings of nuclear waste issues in Lithuania and Sweden in order to understand their articulation in response to particular historical and political circumstances. Following the technopolitical framework, this article engages with the argument that nuclear industry developments create both incentives and constraints for nuclear waste programs that foster various forms of legacies; historical, technological, or political. Firstly, this article sets out the relation between the nuclear industry and nuclear waste issues in each country. Secondly, it reveals how decommissioning policies in both countries streamed nuclear waste programs developed in dissimilar sociopolitical contexts. The final section presents empirical details about constraints and incentives that become visible through analysis of the impact of nuclear policy legacies and continuities on waste regimes, including regulatory, licensing and participation practices, research programs, and technology innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear waste
• storage
• disposal
• Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant
• Soviet nuclear program

Acknowledgments

The research in Sweden was done in the framework of the Visby Programme of the Swedish Institute, and in collaboration with KTH and the “Atomic Heritage Goes Critical” project at Linköping University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lietuvos Ypatingasis Archyvas (hereafter – LYA), f. 1771 (Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party), ap. 247, b. 147, la. 5–9.

2. LYA, f. 1771, ap. 247, b. 147, la. 11–12.

3. LYA, f. 1771, ap. 255, b. 236, la. 2–12.

4. LYA, f. 1771, ap. 255, b. 236, la. 12.

5. LYA, f. 1771 ap. 269, b. 263, la. 16–19.

Additional information

Funding

T.This project has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund (project No 01.2.2-LMT-K-718-01-0084/232) under a grant agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT).

Notes on contributors

Andrei Stsiapanau

Andrei Stsiapanau received his PhD in 2010 in Social Sciences at Vilnius University. He has since worked as a postdoc at the Centre for Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at the Ecole des Mines in 2013 (Paris Tech), an associate professor at the European Humanities University, Vilnius (2014–19); a research fellow in the international research projects ‘Politics and Society After Chernobyl’, HoNESt (History of Nuclear Energy and Society), and Nuclear Legacies (Södertörn University, Sweden); a visiting scholar at KTH, Division of History (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently a research fellow in the EDUATOM project and associate professor at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, and a Swedish Institute visiting scholar at Linköping University (Sweden).