Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Energy Past to Heritage Future

ABSTRACT

This article surveys literature and practices relating to nuclear cultural heritage to provide a state-of-the-art review of the field. It focuses on nuclear cultural heritage as it relates to the decommissioning of civil nuclear sites, primarily in Lithuania, Sweden and the United Kingdom, showing that it is a fast-growing and interdisciplinary field. It places nuclear cultural heritage within the wider heritage context before outlining the challenges that it faces, marking it as distinct within the heritage arena. To do this it explores how “materialities,” “communities” and “locations” shape and are shaped by nuclear cultural heritage. It concludes that collaboration between industry representatives, nuclear communities, heritage practitioners and researchers is essential if society is to develop the field whilst decommissioning and change is underway, rather than after the industry has gone.

KEYWORDS:

• Atomic
• critical heritage
• nuclear
• nuclear cultural heritage
• nuclear energy
• nuclear power
• heritage
• industrial heritage

1. Introduction

Nuclear cultural heritage is a fast-growing and interdisciplinary field of research and practice. As many of the world’s nearly 500 commercial nuclear reactors move towards decommissioning, nuclear cultural heritage gains significance through technological, social, and environmental change. It spans past, present and future, linking the technology’s development in the military maelstrom of the mid-twentieth century with the current challenges of decommissioning. Technologically, the process of decommissioning is as ground-breaking as nuclear power’s inception, with new procedures being developed as attention shifts from operating to dismantling facilities: something that was not necessarily planned for when they were built. Socially, communities are subject to significant change as decommissioning alters the structure of employment around which many “atomic” societies matured. Environmentally, decommissioning requires us to look forward and safeguard nuclear waste; not only determining the most appropriate way of storing it, but addressing how we transmit warnings thousands of years into the future to a society which may be fundamentally different from ours. In mapping key strands of research and practice relating to nuclear cultural heritage, this article will identify how it can operate as a critical device, enabling us to assess the ambiguous legacies of nuclear infrastructures: showing that the civil nuclear industry inspires a heritage which is in firm dialogue with the future.

This article is structured around how “materialities,” “communities” and “locations” shape and are shaped by nuclear cultural heritage. These overlapping areas are first situated within the wider heritage field, revealing that whilst there are many synergies, the complexities of the nuclear industry means that its cultural heritage is by nature distinct. At its center is collaboration: between industry, heritage organizations and members of communities affected by the rise, maintenance, decline and future of nuclear projects and their legacies. This article, which finds grounding in an increasingly rich field, will synthesize diverse approaches to provide a state-of-the-art review. Detailed work has already been undertaken in response to the need to define nuclear cultural heritage (Rindzevičiūtė 2019), determining that it includes “anything that has come into contact with nuclear science and technology: a vast and hybrid field” (4–5). Given this diversity, it is unsurprising that it has been identified as having a role to play in producing new forms of society through its collection, interpretation and governance.

Taking the lead of the “Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage” (NuSPACES) project, this review primarily assesses literature, practices and case studies which respond to decommissioning and heritage-making in Lithuania, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Constraints of space do not allow for a global review, nor one which incorporates non-English language, both of which are here identified as valuable topics for future research. Although the review concentrates on nuclear cultural heritage as it relates to the decommissioning of civil nuclear facilities, nuclear energy had its genesis in the mid-twentieth century development of atomic weapons, with both heritages interlinked. Most notably, the pace of nuclear cultural heritage-making has quickened in light of reactors and facilities reaching the end of their working lives as they enter decommissioning. This has resulted in the nuclear industry fostering a strong interest in cultural heritage, not only because of its need for a robust information governance strategy to facilitate demolition and safeguard the management of waste (Pescatore 2019), but also as a means of social compensation in instances of socioeconomic change. More pointedly, recent global developments are refocusing loss, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which commenced in 2022, threatening the latter’s nuclear infrastructure. Russian action against Ukrainian sites including Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia has involved the military targeting of civil nuclear power facilities. Loss moves beyond the peaceful motives of decommissioning, towards a process where the military destruction of infrastructure “can be considered a destruction of the collective memory and archive” (Rindzevičiūtė 2023, 18; 21): comprehending this has become a distinctive contemporary challenge of the field.

2. Heritage

In establishing nuclear cultural heritage as “an expansive concept” (2019, 4), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė and contributors set out its complexity: to analyze it requires engagement with a range of practical and theoretical heritage processes. Heritage has a substantive body of literature, and grounding this study in elements of its development helps determine the signifiers which mark nuclear cultural heritage as similar to – or distinct from – existing heritage narratives. From seminal works such as David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) to recent “Heritage Futures” scholarship (Harrison et al. 2020a), each has influenced an evolving interpretation of what constitutes “heritage.” As such, its definition is never “fixed,” something made more complex by the fact that heritage is at once a theoretical perspective, a professional praxis, a tangible object and an intangible way-of-life. At its most straightforward, this article looks to Harrison’s definition of heritage as a “formally staged experience of encountering the physical traces of the past in the present” (2013, 1). It also looks beyond this formality, recognizing that “memory and heritage processes can take place without any professional heritage actors involved” (Storm 2014, 6). Here “heritage from below” (Robertson 2012), whereby communities initiate their own heritage processes outwith the elite “authorised heritage discourse” (Smith 2006), takes precedence.

A focus on nuclear cultural heritage both responds to and seeks to develop the “critical turn” in heritage studies, the growth of which has been well-explored (Gentry and Smith 2019; Harrison 2010). Through critical heritage, these physical traces of the past are “a performance in which the meaning of the past is continuously negotiated in the context of the needs of the present” (Gentry and Smith 2019, 1149). As a field it emerged in response to political and cultural analyses as society experienced deindustrialization, globalization and transnationalism (Harrison 2010, 5): its relevance as a mode of inquiry for nuclear cultural heritage is immediately apparent. When critical heritage’s investigative role in the relationship between “top-down” and “bottom-up” (Harrison 2010, 8–9) practices is considered, it provides a further analytical framework for a heritage which is created via both methods. It also signifies a shift away from nuclear’s positioning as a celebratory symbol of modernity towards its reassessment as difficult heritage (Rindzevičiūtė 2019; Storm, Krohn Andersson, and Rindzevičiūtė 2019). “Difficult heritage,” Sharon Macdonald asserts, challenges the “identity-affirmative nature of heritage-making” (2009, 2–4): something which resonates with a field whose meaning is continually being re-evaluated. Early narratives of progress bound up with national achievement co-exist with those of stigma, destruction and disaster; medical achievements sit alongside the colonialism associated with uranium mining; Cold War secrets and threat run side-by-side with increased social value; anti-nuclear activism shares space with tourism and heritage. It is clear that new types of actors, practices and material cultures are appearing in the sector.

These advance a dialogue which, at times, is both “celebratory” and “difficult.” The resulting heritage is, as Storm suggests, neither positive nor negative; following John Giblin, it is instead an “expression of intensified cultural negotiation” (2014, 6; Giblin 2014). This can see heritage practices used as a way of creating belonging and identity in communities which once thrived on their nuclear status (Dawney 2020a; 2020b; 2021). Here, the “rupture” (Dawdy 2010) of decommissioning results in social dissonance which can be partly worked through via heritage. Elsewhere, the rupture was more pronounced with the nuclear industry’s arrival. This is particularly the case with the “extractive and exploitative character” (Rindzevičiūtė 2022, 22) of the years of atomic expansion, where communities were dispossessed by colonizing powers across Africa, Eastern Europe, the Arctic, Central Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands (Bauer and Penter 2022; Hill 2019; Kayser 2023; Malin and Alexis-Martin 2020). Involvement in heritage can counter this sense of disinheritance through participatory practice.

Critical heritage itself has found new modes of expression and investigation. In “breach[ing] the usual borders of what counts as heritage,” recent “heritage futures” scholarship refocuses the discipline (Harrison et al. 2020c, 487–488). Here, the emphasis is on how broad heritage practices can “contribute to the making of future worlds” (Harrison et al. 2020b, xxix), partly through bringing heritage practices into conversation with fields which share objectives with the heritage domain. One such field is nuclear waste management, which faces the challenge of knowledge preservation within the context of “radical uncertainty about the distant future” (Harrison et al. 2020, 11). These visions, as Rosemary Joyce argues, are shaped by the past uses of materiality, reflecting the topic’s archaeological dimension (2020). Uncertainty is something which Anders Högberg and Cornelius Holtorf (2014a; 2014b; 2015; 2020) expound, challenging heritage practitioners to embrace the unknown, as is done by nuclear waste managers. Similarly, Vincent Ialenti’s ethnographic fieldwork among Finland’s nuclear waste disposal experts reveals “mind-bending visions” for the future which are embedded in everyday practices (2020, 3–4). Through resisting “shallow time discipline” (143), challenges become opportunities for creativity, with practitioners better equipped to deal with heritage’s “changing characteristics” (May and Holtorf 2020, 275; Wollentz et al. 2020, 304). Whether heritage is an object in a museum or barrel of nuclear waste, we do not, however, know if either will be appreciated or understood as it is today as “all futures will want, and need, to shape their own Now” (Högberg and Holtorf 2015, 100). To address this, Högberg and Holtorf recommend a strategy developed from nuclear waste management which considers the long-term whilst acting for the short and medium terms. Keeping “knowledge alive” in the latter will, they argue, have the best chance of reaching or impacting on the former (2015, 99).

The argument that heritage professionals could learn from the nuclear industry is, however, double-edged. Harrison develops this, indicating that this relationship is more of a dialogue than a one-way learning experience as the two are brought together as “interrelated spatial and discursive processes of managing forms of redundancy (2020, 43).” As heritage becomes an increasingly important part of decommissioning, the nuclear industry will rely on its practices and procedures as it develops its new and perhaps unexpected heritage-related identity. Taking this further, much of the nuclear industry’s future-thinking considers not only the storage of waste, but how to communicate with societies which will be fundamentally different from our own; where language and semiotics will have changed and where even “the existence of the ‘human’ is in doubt” (Keating and Storm 2023). Cultural heritage will take a leading role in preventing the loss of this knowledge, with information about nuclear technology and its toxic legacy passed on in ways which exceed the capabilities of data management systems (Ross 2023, 221). As part of its future-thinking, the nuclear waste industry has consulted with heritage professionals, artists, storytellers and semioticians (Carpenter 2016, 48–49; Volkmar 2022) to identify ways of passing on nuclear memory. Thomas Keating and Anna Storm examine some of these, showing how geographers and social scientists have “sought to think and communicate memory of nuclear things” through the modes of the archival, the aesthetic, and the speculative (2023, 1). Through these they identify new routes for nuclear memory research, with each attempting “to re-imagine nuclear waste futures in ways that resist certain conventions of the present” (3). Here, the shifting temporalities of nuclear cultural heritage become clear.

Grounding these temporalities – including Högberg and Holtorf’s future “Nows” – in the present allows us to assess how this knowledge is being kept alive. The heritage discourse is routinely framed around an “endangerment narrative” which is tied to anticipated loss (DeSilvey and Harrison 2020, 1; Holtorf 2015; May 2020, 72). As Caitlin DeSilvey and Rodney Harrison state, “heritage relies, to a large extent, on notions of endangerment and consequential attempts to arrest or reverse processes of loss and change” (2020, 1). Endangerment is one of the tools used by cultural heritage policymakers to encourage public participation in heritage, whether that be cultural and pleasure-based or political and governance-based (May 2020, 71). This, however, is often founded on public anxiety over the loss of the asset, whereby “the future is only apprehended as a threat to the past” (2020, 83). Due to radioactive contamination, it is unlikely that civil nuclear sites will survive as heritage attractions in the same way as the infrastructure of, for example, former coalmines, which have in many cases been adaptively re-used as sites of industrial heritage (Cocroft 2019, 85).

Having made this case, there is an alternative. Much as these sites of industry have their own toxic legacies, where contaminated land needs to be managed or remediated before re-use, so too can nuclear sites be released for other uses. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported on the redevelopment and reuse of nuclear facilities as part of “the systematic coverage of the entire range of decommissioning aspects” (IAEA 2011, foreword). When published in 2011, complete site clearance was not considered the “optimal” option; rather repurposing was promoted as a sustainable opportunity, drawing on experience from the non-nuclear sector. Few of its case studies feature facilities redeveloped for heritage, with sites generally adapted for other energy or nuclear waste storage purposes. Determining why this is the trend provides scope for further research, on the basis that individual countries develop their own decommissioning policies and strategies. The majority do not prioritize re-use policy: in many cases, it is simply incompatible with heavily contaminated sites. As Christophe Xerri explains in his appraisal of the re-use of nuclear sites, nuclear energy is still a young industry, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has not attracted high-level preservation support (2019, 123). While many will not be preserved, neither will they become ruins; the “material archives” of past lives and labor (Dawney 2020a, 38). Yet alongside this unavoidable loss sits the enduring presence of nuclear waste, which may remain radioactive for over 100,000 years. For both aspects, collaboration between industry and the cultural sector, nuclear communities and academia is essential if artefacts and documents are to survive. Action taken now will contribute to meaning being maintained for an unknown future in which values will be negotiated within the strictures of that society.

Here we find the duality of nuclear cultural heritage: radioactivity means that the inevitable loss of material culture is accompanied by a near-permanent – although isolated from the human environment – presence. This dichotomy is something which carries through from nuclear technology, which has, since its inception, been promoted as both exceptional and banal (Hecht 2009). This “dynamic tension” (Sastre-Juan and Valentines-Álvarez 2019, 6) can be seen in the fact that whilst it has industry-specific risks, it is also dependent on “conventional” technologies including IT, construction, energy infrastructure, landscape design, chemical processes, and water (Högselius 2022; Rindzevičiūtė 2019, 5). It also engenders a strong loyalty, much like that enjoyed by coalmining communities or company towns, where the “social contract … extends into cultural manifestations such as town planning, architecture, and ways of life” (Storm and Kasperski 2017, 37). Returning to heritage, it must, therefore, be considered alongside other forms of industrial heritage, defined by The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) Charter in 2003 as “the remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific value,” including “places where energy is generated.” With regards to industry, there exists “a large gap of ‘the twentieth century in our lives’” as tacit knowledge is lost as employees retire (Rindzevičiūtė 2022, 26–27). This is even more pointed for nuclear cultural heritage, with the “everyday nuclearity” (Dawney 2020b; Hecht 2012) of nuclear energy production marking it out as “notably different from common case studies”: thus, Leila Dawney notes, the histories and consequences of decommissioning have been rarely discussed in academic work on deindustrialization. Decommissioning is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon, with the emerging literature – including Dawney’s own – helping position it within the wider industrial heritage discourse.

What emerges is the dialectic nature of nuclear cultural heritage. The tension between loss and presence marks nuclear cultural heritage as distinct within the broader heritage field. Considering the nature of nuclear “loss,” however, allows us to take this idea of distinctiveness further. The nuclear industry worldwide has operated within a regime of secrecy since its inception (Anaïs and Walby 2016; Rindzevičiūtė 2021). Within this, narratives have been closely controlled, most often by governments. In the nuclear sector, access to cultural heritage has long been “restrained in the name of technological safety, national security and corporate economy” (Rindzevičiūtė 2022, 12) in a manner not necessarily seen in other industries. Many aspects of heritage are selective – science and technology collections in museums are “shaped by individual idiosyncrasies, serendipity and happenstance” (Alberti 2022, 73). These three concepts do not sit well within a highly regulated industry. Yet nuclear-related heritage-making does, in some ways, rely on this approach, not least because the secrecy which guards nuclear programes masks public knowledge. In this, it is important to acknowledge a paradox: as sites enter decommissioning, their public-facing activities, such as the operation of visitor centers, often cease. How can people participate in or facilitate nuclear cultural heritage-making when the industry is, by nature, restricted? Does the “endangerment narrative” hold up when the public does not know what exactly it is going to lose? Does this “heritage of secrecy” become important in and of itself, resulting in another distinctive facet of nuclear cultural heritage? These questions track through the materialities, communities and locations of nuclear cultural heritage to which this article now turns.

3. Managing Materialities: Institutional Perspectives

The long timescales of decommissioning allow for the development of effective heritage strategies. In examining the “materialities” of nuclear cultural heritage, this article takes a case study approach to assess institutionally-initiated heritage, using the examples of Dounreay in the UK and Ågesta in Sweden to show how differing levels of nuclear industry involvement leads to varying results. What becomes clear is that associating heritage with decontamination, waste management and decommissioning is a necessary step in embedding it within these practices, and is a key takeaway in the formulation of cultural legacy for any industrial site.

Heritage must be seen as part of a complex landscape in which it represents not only heritage-for-heritage’s sake, but acts as a vehicle for social, economic and political outcomes: the value of a critical heritage approach to nuclear cultural heritage becomes increasingly clear. Nuclear decommissioning has moved the discourse on nuclear materiality from the secluded laboratory or reactor hall to the public realm (Carpenter 2016, 48). Questions of safety sit alongside those of preservation, with nuclear materialities being of both heritage and operational interest. Whilst this process encourages future-thinking, considering nuclear materiality and what is kept or disposed of offers us physical access to the past with radioactive objects bearing “material witness” (Schuppli 2015); forever changed after their moment of exposure.

Nuclear decommissioning presents an enduring, if unintentional, endangerment narrative. During this, people are working towards the closure of their industry and an uncertain employment future which reflects a “threat to the past” (May 2020, 83). Although a lengthy process distinct from many industrial closures, “which often involved a ‘grab-and-run’ approach to saving heritage documents or objects amid’ a “body count” of lost factories and jobs’ (Gibbs 2021, 4; Lawson 2020; Ross 2023, 224), decommissioning’s emphasis on efficiency and safety risks the loss of history and materialities (Rindzevičiūtė 2022, 15). Coupled with access complications, the professional collecting of nuclear cultural heritage all too often “takes the form of ‘rescue collecting’ or ad hoc ‘salvaging’” (Alberti 2022; Rindzevičiūtė 2022, 12). Yet in this process, there is an opportunity: the extended period of planning and labor offers the chance of a more considered approach towards heritage-making. An assessment of industry initiatives allows us to identify where progress is being made in managing its materialities. Likewise, distinguishing these from those instigated by heritage bodies or researchers enables us to recognize the different institutional rationales behind routes into nuclear cultural heritage-making. Although sparked by the same overarching topic of the nuclear, diverse agendas and perspectives will bear influence on methods and outputs.

As Rindzevičiūtė identifies, there is “a pressing need to consider the creation of cultural values as part of the decommissioning process” (2022, 13). Thus far this has proved the exception rather than the rule (DSRL 2010, 47), highlighting the significance of Rindzevičiūtė’s call to action. Where the exceptions do exist, the most advanced of these is that employed by Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) in the compiling and delivery of its Dounreay Heritage Strategy (DSRL 2010). Dounreay Experimental Research Establishment, in Caithness in the far north of Scotland, was the site of Britain’s first full-scale fast breeder reactor. Opened in 1958, the facility transformed the nearby town of Thurso as over 1000 houses were built to accommodate the incoming workers, known as the “atomics” (Ross 2021; 2023). It is now being decommissioned, and will reach its interim care and maintenance end state in the 2030s, at which point decommissioning will be considered complete, before reaching its “final end point” in 2333, when the location can be released for all uses (DSRL 2018).

With Dounreay, heritage occupies a place never-before-seen in the UK nuclear industry. Whilst Chinon in France, the never-commissioned unit 6 of the Greifswald plant in Germany, and sites of the Manhattan project have paved the way for both civil and military engagement with nuclear cultural heritage internationally, Dounreay represents the first instance of heritage-as-decommissioning in the United Kingdom. Based on evidential, historical, aesthetic and communal values, the strategy was implemented after the UK government’s 2000 decision to decommission the site raised heritage questions (Croft 2019, 104). A brief was developed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), DSRL and Historic Scotland (now Historic Environment Scotland (HES)), with the heritage body’s involvement from the outset signaling not only the integrity of the nuclear industry’s approach, but also the fundamental need to partner with heritage organizations.

Dounreay’s cultural legacy has received attention in the literature and nuclear industry reports and records, allowing us to gauge how the strategy’s implementation has progressed. Linda Ross frames the strategy as part of defined nuclear cultural heritage, linking the “nuclear narratives” of rural modernity, identity and heritage (2023). Ross outlines the development of the strategy, noting that it acknowledges that “beyond its fences, Dounreay is part of the dynamic growth of Thurso and almost every layer of the town’s social and economic existence” (DSRL 2010, 42). This embeddedness, she argues, is one of the reasons why the UK’s approach to nuclear cultural heritage was initiated at this site. Ross brings together the strategy with reflective pieces by its compilers. James Gunn (2012) outlines a series of seventeen “lessons learned” (186), including identifying objects with heritage significance “well in advance of plant strip out” and treating items from radiation-controlled areas with “extreme caution” (185). The former is an example of the opportunities afforded by the protracted decommissioning process; the latter is one of its distinctive challenges. Heritage consultant Andrew Croft recognizes that there is no single method for heritage in decommissioning. He advises the acceptance of loss, as “nuclear sites cannot be approached like normal heritage monuments and places” (2019, 108–109): bringing us back to the central tension running through this article. Looking at retention, he explains a key aim “was the creation of a safe, comprehensive and high quality collection of artefacts to commemorate and interpret Dounreay” as well as facilitate research, alongside the capturing of intangible aspects: with the site to be returned to a “radiological and industrial brown field” (iv), the retention of heritage material onsite was considered unfeasible. Partnerships were formed with National Museums Scotland (NMS) and Caithness Horizons (now the North Coast Visitor Centre). Between 2008 and 2023, 460 objects were collected (DSRL 2023), ranging from large, technical pieces such as the wall panels and operator desk from the Dounreay Materials Test Reactor (DMTR), which forms a centerpiece in the North Coast Visitor Centre, to smaller items of social history interest.

As Ross explains, the potentially dangerous decommissioning process means that standard heritage practices do not apply: the DFR sphere has not been given listed or protected status so will not enter the “official” heritage canon; nor will the site’s buildings be repurposed or alternatively fall into ruination (2023, 232). The Dounreay experience is being utilized NDA-wide, with the development of the NDA heritage initiative. This standard approach, which will see the production of guidelines covering object selection, intangible cultural heritage and building recording across its seventeen sites and beyond, will facilitate the creation of site heritage reports, the intention being a definitive national record. It takes its strategic directives from the NDA’s overarching Strategy (2021) and associated documents (2013; 2020). How it will operate in practice, within the constraints of budgetary and security regulations, remains to be seen. However these steps, alongside NDA funding for heritage-related research projects being made available for the first time in 2022/3, reveal a commitment to nuclear cultural heritage’s increasing prominence in the UK decommissioning arena.

Reflecting the fact that “the heritage of Dounreay cannot be considered in isolation,” the actions and activities rejected and implemented reflect the priority “to restore the environment in a safe manner which gives best value to the UK taxpayer – for the environment and human health, through the interrelated tasks of decontamination, waste management and decommissioning” (DSRL 2010, vii). Restoring the site safely ensuring value-for-money will remain the decommissioner’s priority – and indeed official policy – no matter the significance of the heritage asset. The strategy reinforces that, as funder, the NDA “determines the extent of heritage activities to be undertaken” (v). As a non-departmental public body funded by the UK government, any NDA-initiated heritage activities become part of the political discourse. It is fitting here to consider Rindzevičiūtė’s assertion that the narratives associated with decommissioning are not about the decline of the industry; rather “they are about the search for new technological, social and political pathways to safeguarding radioactive waste” (2022, 21). They also aim to “soften” the transition to a transformed nuclear economy, whilst encouraging community engagement in nuclear localities: NDA documentation emphasizes the provision of a positive legacy (2020). The opening of the NDA’s “Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archive,” the repository for the UK civil nuclear industry and the county of Caithness, speaks to both of these factors: providing employment while meeting the international commitment to create comprehensive archives for the future (DSRL 2010; NEA 2014; NEA 2019). The full transfer of records from sites to Nucleus is expected to take several years, and the practicalities of an archive with an operational and business focus as well as public interest are still to be played out.

This analysis shows how the UK nuclear industry’s initiative to co-operate has increased partnership opportunities. This process, with a heritage programe largely funded by a site or nuclear body, is not standard: researchers in Germany, for example, are concerned that “without critical self-reflection” planned deconstruction will mean the “loss of all structural evidence of nuclear energy production” in the country (Brandt and Dame 2019, 8). Storm relates how, even in a case where heritage matters were first mooted by heritage professionals in the late 1980s, such perspectives largely remained a “nonissue” for the owners of Sweden’s Barsebäck nuclear power plant and the municipality in which it sits (2014, 73). This is perhaps surprising for a place which “held a top position in Swedish and Danish consciousness” (69), situated twenty kilometers across the water from Copenhagen and standing as both a symbol of technological progress and a focus for Danish and Swedish anti-nuclear activism. As of 2023, however, regional co-operation between museums in the Skåne region and Barsebäck has seen the burgeoning of diverse forms of heritage engagement, with participation from former workers, members of the Mother Earth anti-nuclear collective, and school children: although a slow process, the heritage deficit highlighted by Storm in 2014 is being addressed. Significantly, this is bringing together heritage which connects a spectrum of views across nuclear communities, giving space to both pro- and anti-nuclear opinions. Movements against nuclear power are complex and diverse (Presas i Puig and Meyer 2021) and their influence is a constituent, albeit under studied, part of nuclear cultural heritage.

Elsewhere in Sweden, the Ågesta nuclear power plant presents a case where critical reflection has been undertaken by a small group of heritage professionals and researchers operating independently of the site owner, Vattenfall. Ågesta, situated fifteen kilometers south of Stockholm, was the first nuclear reactor to produce commercial power and heating in Sweden. It was operational between 1963 and 1974, and is currently being dismantled. Between 2005 and 2008 the group conducted a study of the plant with the ultimate aim of considering what would be “most worthwhile preserving” (Tafvelin Heldner 2019, 90), with the findings compiled in a 2008 report (Tafvelin Heldner, Dahlström-Rittsél, and Lundgren 2008). Magdalena Tafvelin Heldner summarizes these in her 2019 account, which also offers reflections on the intervening years. As with the UK example, Tafvelin Heldner acknowledges that a nuclear power station “is not a typical object for a cultural and historical evaluation,” with there being “limited experience with regard to evaluation, conservation and collections” (91). With near 500 commercial reactors worldwide (90), the importance of such studies as this becomes apparent.

To evaluate the Ågesta site, the researchers employed two methods: the Swedish National Heritage Board’s method for evaluating buildings, and their own method based upon “important narratives” which can be derived from the analysis of the site. The former’s evaluation categories determine Ågesta to be in a historical and technological “class of its own” (93), with the latter’s analysis “bringing to life … historical processes of vital importance to the creation of modern Sweden.” Both link materialities with potential narratives for the site, showing how the remaining material culture can influence and be influenced by narratives depending on what approach is taken: one based on objects; or one which is narrative-driven, where “focus shifts from the material object to the immaterial context in which the plant originated” (97). This resonates with the Dounreay heritage strategy stretching beyond materialities, with the site’s cultural values providing a creative spark for creating a cultural legacy within the bounds of an operational environment (Croft 2019, 106).

It is this operational environment, however, which will ensure that the outcome for both Dounreay and Ågesta will be the same: sites cleared of their nuclear materialities, even if the process is different. For all the work done on the latter’s heritage evaluation, the site is being dismantled as per legal requirement, ignoring calls from researchers who recognize its value as a historical and cultural venue (Högselius 2017; Klüppelberg 2022). There is a positive coda to this, with Stockholm’s Tekniska Museet opening an exhibition dedicated to Ågesta and the display of its control panel table alongside other objects and audiovisual material. Echoing the researchers, however, the museum expresses regret that the site will be demolished (Tekniska 2023). Despite – or perhaps because of – an industry-funded strategy being in place, the same argument can be made for Dounreay, where members of the public have spoken in favor of the retention of its “iconic” DFR sphere (Lillyman 2013; Fraser 2013). Its dismantling, Croft notes, may pose “the biggest test for the strategy,” with public and professional reaction destined to determine whether its legacy “reflects the historic and cultural significance of Dounreay and its sphere” (108). Neither Ågesta nor Dounreay will stand as an in-situ “material witness” to cultural heritage.

4. Communities: Heritage from the Bottom-up

Discussing Visaginas, the satellite town of the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, Leila Dawney observes that “the town, alongside the plant, has effectively been decommissioned” (2020a, 36). At the same time, the town is capitalizing on new nuclear prospects as the plant becomes a tourist draw following the partial filming of the HBO drama miniseries Chernobyl (2019) at the site. Through these processes, the area’s “narrative is being revised, reshaped, and renegotiated” (Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė 2022, 446), a common thread running through the communities of decommissioning. Visaginas and Ignalina are representative of the challenges and opportunities resulting from the closure of a nuclear site. They are also representative of the social complexity of a process which fundamentally changes lives. Nuclear cultural heritage is one way of making sense of this change: whilst this article has shown that this can be initiated from the institutional level, what will now become clear is the role of communities and their “nuclear roots” in defining and anchoring nuclear cultural heritage.

Since its inception, the nuclear industry has been a disruptor. The effects of this have been positive and negative, depending on which community is represented. Reflecting its reach, as Rindzevičiūtė notes, nuclear cultural heritage is not only tied to official sites; it is “situated in landscapes and communities outside the official boundaries of nuclear establishments” (2022, 12). This is something which has been explored with depth in regard to Visaginas, where researchers from different disciplines have not only documented the history of the town and its power plant, but have assessed creative responses to decommissioning and undertaken ethnographic fieldwork (Ackermann, Cope, and Liubimau 2016; Baločkaitė 2012; Dawney 2020a; 2020b; Dovydaitytė 2021; 2022a; 2022b; Liubimau and Cope 2021; Mažeikienė 2021; Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė 2022; Šliavaitė 2010). Indeed, this sustained level of interest means that it has been considered “one of those ‘overresearched places’” as “artists, academics, and flâneurs” seek to “experience the broken dreams of modernity at first hand” (Dawney 2020a, 39). There is, of course, greater depth to Dawney’s remark. When Visaginas’ history is considered – from “the materialisation of the Soviet nuclear dream” to the shifting sands of wider global political and economic processes (Dawney 2020b) – its value as a powerful indicator of the role of identity, memory and community in decommissioning becomes clear. Rather than "over-researched," this results in a richly-researched town where nuclear cultural heritage means different things to its different communities. Visaginas is distinct in this depth of research, providing a model which can be applied across contexts and across countries.

Founded as Sniečkus in 1977, and renamed after independence in 1992, Visaginas was built by the Soviet Union as the monoindustrial “atom town” for Ignalina. Ignalina’s workforce was drawn from across the USSR, resulting in a multi-ethnic settlement of whom the majority, in 1979, were Russian (Kavaliauskas 1999 cit. in Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė 2022, 438). The 2011 census recorded the longevity of this demographic trend, with the municipality’s 22,000 residents comprising approximately 18% Lithuanians and 52% Russians, combined with 40 nationalities from across the former Soviet bloc (Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė 2022, 438). This grouping sits outside the ethnic majority of Lithuania as part of a “transnational community” (Djelic and Quack 2010) which was granted citizenship rights after the fall of the Soviet Union. The plant’s RBMK reactors – the same type as those at Chernobyl – were closed in 2004 and 2009 as a condition of Lithuania’s accession to the EU. What this has left is a series of complex community entanglements with the nuclear past. These range from the national, where “nuclear energy is neither considered a valuable heritage nor a relevant topic in the public sphere” to the local, where creative practices give voice to those not represented in the official discourse (Dovydaitytė 2022a, 420; 426). In this mix are those who understand the nuclear industry as an “alien” and colonial Soviet heritage (Dovydaitytė, 2021), whereby the industrialization it brought about is forgotten rather than remembered (Baločkaitė 2012; Storm 2014). Alongside this sits work done by the former nuclear workforce community, which, as Linara Dovydaitytė elucidates, has been active in heritage making as a means of “maintaining its ethnic and professional identities” during a long period of change (2022b, 247). This has its origins at community – rather than nuclear industry-level. Coupled with this are the efforts of a cosmopolitan younger generation of residents, which proactively engages with external partners in creative projects and tourism development, mediating between stakeholders. This collaboration – between the local community, incoming artists and researchers, and different generations – is indicative of its essential role in stimulating creative forms of heritage preservation.

This accords with the town’s three generations: the seniors (aged 55-plus), being the original nuclear generation who arrived to build the town and operate the power station in the 1970s–1980s; the middle generation (aged 40–55), who are generally tied by occupation to either the nuclear plant or public and economic administration; and the youngest generation, who have forged their own cultural identity (Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė 2022, 449). Each experiences cultural heritage differently, particularly during a period of transition. In this, following Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack, we move towards an evolutionary model in which communities “are fluid, relational constructs, constantly on the move and in process” (2010, 7). Through this, the processes of “community formation, maintenance, decline, and even disintegration” are prioritized. Thus with nuclear communities, we are witness to their continual development: first as migrational “professional communities” (19), who share an occupational goal within a host “community of origin”; before this slowly shifts, so that the one-time migrational population becomes the “community of origin” themselves: in-keeping with the concept that communities are “time-bound” entities (7). As decommissioning takes over from operation, the role of heritage in helping such communities transition from one kind to another takes center stage (Storm and Kasperski 2017). In such circumstances – a community which is far from homogenous – there is no one form of nuclear cultural heritage or dominant narrative, and nor should there be. Heritage is, as Elizabeth Crooke states in her analysis of the politics of community heritage in Northern Ireland, “constructed and reconstructed according to time and place” (2010, 17). Where the connection comes, however, is from the myriad forms of heritage-making – whether inspired by memory work, creative practice, performance, participatory activities or object collection and interpretation – which both “strengthen local identity and community awareness” as well as facilitate “a potential approach to dealing with the contested Soviet past” (Dovydaitytė 2022b, 248). Thus heritage can have a transformative effect on Visaginas’ diverse communities.

5. Locations

Where there are nuclear materialities and nuclear communities, there are inevitably nuclear locations. For the study or practice of nuclear cultural heritage, Visaginas is a revelatory case study, showing how it can be produced by a community as commemoration or to affirm its identity, but also for an increasing number of visitors who are drawn to the locations of nuclear cultural heritage. These locations include what can be termed “sites of origin” and “sites of consumption.” The “touristification” of nuclear sites is reviewed by Mažeikienė and Gerulaitienė, who recognize it as a response to an increasing interest in cultural discourse alongside the agendas of the nuclear industry and governments (2022, 439). In Visaginas this takes many forms – from activities which promote the area as a recreational, non-industrial destination to those which focus directly on Ignalina as energy tourism. Indeed, an interdisciplinary group of researchers were commissioned to develop an educational virtual tourism route (https://atominisvisaginas.lt/lt/) with Ignalina as one of the stakeholders, following the lead of those nuclear sites which have presented themselves as visitor attractions, many from the outset of the industry (Ross 2023; Storm 2014).

Nuclear tourism is, however, a complex area, where PR-heavy energy sightseeing meets “dark tourism,” often focused on disaster (Hooper and Lennon 2017). This, as Anna Storm, Fredrik Krohn Andersson, and Eglė Rindzevičiūte (2019) state, can be considered the ambivalent blending of “both utopian and dystopian understandings of the nuclear past” (126). Their work on the heritagization of early urban reactors in Chicago, Moscow and Stockholm identifies an atomic heritage which combines a positive narrative of the past potential of atomic futures with the “underlying dread” of historic radioactive risk (126–127). What results is a form of nuclear thrill, arguably distinct within the heritage arena. What is invisible, however, is the nuclear waste associated with making these sites safe: “dis-localized actual dangers … moved elsewhere, out of sight” (127). In these cases, the dark tourism of reactor-sites-as-visitor attractions is rendered benign. Returning to Lithuania adds another layer: tourists flock to Ignalina and Vilnius for their connection to the Chernobyl miniseries. In visiting these filming locations, they combine popular culture with an experience akin to visiting the disaster site: perhaps the ultimate expression of perceived danger-made-safe.

Dark tourism reaches its apex with the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a name synonymous with disaster (Hundorova 2019) following reactor number four’s catastrophic explosion in April 1986. It is now a site of containment, remediation, and decommissioning, providing a focus for a body of scholarship dedicated to exploring a tourism which is both toxic and exotic (Bohn et al. 2015; Hannam and Yankovska 2018; Wendland 2020). Recent work by Veera Ojala (2022) combines dark tourism studies with those of visual and nuclear heritage, recruiting interviewees from commemorative Chernobyl social media platforms, representing a new methodology for assessing how “contested heritage is viewed and interpreted by visitors” (2022, 12). Magdalena Banaszkiewicz (2022) provides a critical reflection on this tourism and the relationship between tourists and tour guides. This is one of commodification as the area’s heritage moves from specialist and small scale to “a mass tourism attraction” regulated by the Ukrainian government and formalized via a proposed application to designate the area as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Importantly for this discussion, Banaszkiewicz notes the key role of tour guides in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse, creating a new post-Chernobyl identity (174). From a transactional relationship – where tourists pay guides for their services – emerges a valuable series of interactions, whereby guides develop an “enriched” perspective from visitors, something which informs their understanding of the meanings of the past (164). Through this, a certain pragmatism emerges from this example of dissonant nuclear cultural heritage. How this will be developed post-conflict, however, will be determined by social and personal circumstances.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is one of the most complex nuclear cultural heritage-related locations in the world: an authentic, contaminated space where nuclear narratives converge. This article has looked at nuclear cultural heritage in several locations: within the boundaries of sites which are being decommissioned; in the former Soviet atomgrad; and in an area inseparable from disaster. Running through all of these, where elements of nuclear heritage remain in situ, is a sense that nuclear cultural heritage can, in its role as critical device, enable us to assess the ambiguous legacies of nuclear infrastructures, politically, culturally and socially. Not all engagement is so direct or emotive. It is arguably most often experienced outside its original context by visitors to exhibitions or museums in their role as “sites of consumption.” These locations include state – and grassroots-initiated enterprises (Rindzevičiūte 2021) which are intently focused on the nuclear industry. On a different level are those local museums which have a partial nuclear energy emphasis on account of the industry being a part of the community, with UK examples in Whitehaven and Thurso relating to Sellafield and Dounreay respectively. These inherited the role of the former on-site visitor centers following their closure. Elsewhere are those museums in which nuclear cultural heritage is exhibited alongside other topics, such as in large national museums where science and technology is only one part of the experience; or where narratives of the anti-nuclear protest movement – such as at the National Museum of Denmark – take precedence (Storm 2014, 71). Arguably, these are passive nuclear-related locations, where heritage is experienced as part of a broad spectrum of disciplines and timescales. This exhibiting of nuclear content has a detailed history of its own (Forgan 2003). Museums “were most susceptible to official influence” (182) with, for example, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) sponsoring the Science Museum in London’s refurbishment of its nuclear power gallery in 1980, following decades of “influence.” Museums often relied on such bodies for collection items and information, with curatorial autonomy giving way to official secrecy. With museums continuing to acquire objects from industry – something which will pick up pace as decommissioning progresses internationally – an appraisal of collecting and display practices over time will prove a valuable direction for future research.

As Jaume Sastre-Juan and Jaume Valentines-Álvarez (2019) outline, nuclear technologies “have been publicly exhibited from very early on and for different political purposes” (7), appearing in locations such as conferences, corporate fairs or government – or industry-initiated initiatives. The UKAEA was considering developing an “atomic energy museum” as early as 1957, and Rindzevičiūte notes that nuclear power became part of the heritage process in the 1950s following an international debate on its museumification in 1955 (UKAEA 1957; 2021, 844). Alison Boyle (2019) explains how security was an ongoing concern in her object biography of the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment’s model of GLEEP, Britain's first atomic pile. From 1949 it was exhibited in different contexts before finding a permanent home at the Science Museum in the 1950s: as with many science and technology objects, what was once an example of contemporary collecting has become heritage as the artefact has aged (Alberti et al. 2018). Assessing the object anew, Boyle explains how comparing the model with GLEEP’s design drawings revealed “discrepancies and omissions” designed to promote the technology, originally to a trade audience, while obscuring its weapons-application potential (20–21). In-line with Samuel Alberti, Boyle shows how the status of such objects can shift from “manufacture and use” to part of a museum collection, where they become available for display or research (14–15; Alberti 2005).

The process of museum acquisition can result in a distinct politics of location in cases where an object is removed not only from its original context, but from its “home” region. Having been refused by Caithness Horizons, the control room from the Dounreay Fast Reactor was acquired by NMS and the Science Museum Group (SMG), London. A proposal for sole acquisition by SMG caused “public outcry from locals,” who wanted it to remain in Scotland (Harper 2022, 100). The 2014 joint agreement was superseded by the 2021 transfer of full ownership to NMS, following the decision that it would be better placed in Scotland. Here, the change of location affects not only function, but is bound up with the politics of identity as Caithnessians experienced “anguish” at its potential “loss” to an organization outwith Scotland (101). This aptly demonstrates that object values are “never stable” and are often accompanied by “a struggle for the control of meaning” (Alberti 2005, 569). Tying this neatly to nuclear cultural heritage, Rindzevičiūte expounds that “particular meanings … can differ in different institutional contexts as they are negotiated by scientists, engineers, artists, curators, and heritage professionals” (2021, 840): something which permeates not only its locations, but also its communities and materialities.

6. Conclusion

The relationship between materialities, communities and locations is one of continuous, shifting dialogue. It is difficult to consider any one aspect in isolation, so although this article has set them out independently, there is significant overlap which serves to highlight the collaborative, interdisciplinary approach required for nuclear cultural heritage’s practice and study. Running through all is the distinctive tension between inevitable loss and long-term presence. It is present in its materialities, where objects, buildings or reactors will cease to exist in situ as part of decommissioning. Whilst some components can be routinely disposed of, others will be securely stored in nuclear waste repositories for an indefinite, but necessarily long, period of time. Here we find a further tension, in that the nuclear materialities which will arguably be stored the longest are, due to radioactivity, the most dangerous. Loss and presence is also part of the myriad communities who make and have been made by nuclear cultural heritage, whether part of a positive narrative of economic development or one of exploitation and damage. Linked closely to communities are the locations of nuclear cultural heritage, which perhaps have the greatest bearing on how it is interpreted and experienced: meanings are negotiated and renegotiated according to place and time.

Looking to the future, in advancing our understanding of nuclear cultural heritage through its assessment of practical and theoretical examples, this study will help safeguard elements of tangible and intangible cultural heritage that may otherwise be lost. In assessing the state-of-the-field, this article has brought together scholarship and practice to show that there is no singular approach to nuclear cultural heritage: an important consideration for a field which will gain momentum as decommissioning continues. In this we find a current form of deindustrialization, with researchers, practitioners and industry representatives presented with a unique chance to develop the field while change is underway, not after the industry has gone.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Oksana Denisenko, Linara Dovydaitytė, Karin Edberg, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, and Anna Storm for their outstanding support, guidance and comments in the preparation of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose helpful comments will continue to influence future associated work.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

“Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES),” funded by the AHRC (project AH/W000253/1) as part of the JPI CH call “Cultural Heritage, Identities & Perspectives: Responding to Changing Societies (CHIP).”